A FRIGHTFUL DEMOCRACY by Stanley Kurtz 6 the Week the Egyptian Revolution’S Leaders Have an Illiberal Agenda

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March 7, 2011 49145 $3.95 STANLEY KURTZ: What Is the Egyptian Opposition?

Pawlenty’s Shot The former Minnesota governor is a strong 2012 contender RAMESH PONNURU

$3.95 10 PLUS: BING WEST: On Patrol in Afghanistan ROBERT VERBRUGGEN: Whither Justice Kennedy?

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MARCH 7, 2011 | VOLUME LXIII, NO. 4 | www.nationalreview.com

COVER STORY Page 33 Anthony Daniels on Multiculturalism Pawlenty to Like p. 18 Tim Pawlenty’s main problem is simple: Most BOOKS, ARTS Americans have never heard of him. & MANNERS And among those who have heard of 43 TRAVAILS, CHINESE him, a common observation is that he AND AMERICAN is not an electrifying speaker. Yet Kevin D. Williamson reviews How Pawlenty may just be the Republicans’ the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the strongest presidential candidate Stark Choices Ahead, by Dambisa Moyo. for 2012. Ramesh Ponnuru 45 WHAT IT WILL TAKE COVER: ROMAN GENN Mackubin Thomas Owens reviews The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, ARTICLES and the Way Out of Afghanistan, by Bing West. 18 THE BRUTE AND THE TERRORIST by Anthony Daniels In Britain, multiculturalism cannot escape blame for either. 47 ACCEPTING LIMITS Anthony Daniels reviews The 20 A PROGNOSIS FOR JUSTICE KENNEDY by Robert VerBruggen Conservative Foundations of How will this pivotal jurist look upon Obamacare? the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy against Its Modern 23 JAILBREAK CONSERVATIVES by Eli Lehrer Enemies and Immoderate Sometimes the answer is fewer prisons. Friends, by Daniel J. Mahoney.

26 TRANSPORTATION-POLICY CROSSROADS by Samuel R. Staley 49 BEGAVELED NEUROSES There is indeed a right way. Joseph Tartakovsky reviews Scorpions: The Battles and 29 REAGANITE IRAN STRATEGY by Colin Dueck & Ray Takeyh Triumphs of FDR’s Great A multi-front attack can overcome the ayatollahs just as it overcame the Soviets. Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman. 31 THE PEACE CORPS AT 50 by Jay Nordlinger A few observations (mainly conservative). 51 CITY DESK: USABLE PAST Richard Brookhiser browses the thrift shops. FEATURES

33 PAWLENTY TO LIKE by Ramesh Ponnuru SECTIONS The former Minnesota governor could be a strong presidential candidate. 4 Letters to the Editor 36 A FRIGHTFUL DEMOCRACY by Stanley Kurtz 6 The Week The Egyptian revolution’s leaders have an illiberal agenda. 41 The Bent Pin . . . . . Florence King 42 The Long View ...... Rob Long 38 WITH THE WARRIORS by Bing West 48 Poetry ...... Lawrence Dugan How our Marines go about the business of destroying the Taliban. 52 Athwart ...... James Lileks

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MONUMENTAL WASTE.

AN EXTRA ENGINE FOR THE JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER DOESN’T MAKE SENSE EITHER.

Voters elected a new Congress to fight against wasting taxpayer dollars. And this is a case where oonene is enough. The JSF’s current F135 engine won a marketplace competition in the mid-1990s and fully meets our military’s requirements. Taxpayers don’t want Congress to continue wasting $2.9 billion on an extra engine that Secretary of Defense Gates and military leaders don’t want or need, especially when it will cost hundreds of U.S. jobs. Tell your Congressional representatives to stop spending billions on this monumentally wasteful earmark at f135engine.com.

It’s in our power.™ letters--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 2/16/2011 1:57 PM Page 4 Letters

MARCH 7 ISSUE; PRINTED FEBRUARY 17 Against the Seventeenth Amendment EDITOR Richard Lowry In an otherwise excellent article about the U.S. Senate (“The Sense of the Senior Editors Senate,” February 21), William Voegeli errs in saying that “the Lincoln–Douglas Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones debates were the first step on the road to the Seventeenth Amendment,” which Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts provided for the election of senators by the people of each state, and that “the Literary Editor Michael Potemra Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy Seventeenth Amendment had the unintended consequence of reaffirming the National Correspondent John J. Miller distinct role of the states, as such, in discharging governmental responsibilities Political Reporter Robert Costa Art Director Luba Kolomytseva and engaging the people in self-government.” His reasoning is that during the Deputy Managing Editors Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson debates, Lincoln and Douglas, as candidates for the federal Senate, had to Associate Editors encourage citizens to vote for state legislators who shared their views on federal Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen Research Director Katherine Connell issues—and this turned the state’s “legislative elections into proxy fights over Research Manager Dorothy McCartney national policy on slavery and the western territories.” Executive Secretary Frances Bronson Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos It is a stretch to assign a cause-and-effect relationship to the Lincoln–Douglas Contributing Editors contest and the amendment, two events separated by 55 years, since the former Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum occurred during the gathering slavery crisis and was thus anomalous, and the Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg latter was a product of a “progressive” intellectual movement (see Thomas Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi Sowell) that would have seemed alien to both Lincoln and Douglas. Further, that Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne the Lincoln–Douglas debates forced candidates for the Illinois legislature to David B. Rivkin Jr. declare themselves on federal issues was a good thing. NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez The people who elect senators should be the very ones who have to concern Managing Editor Edward John Craig themselves with “discharging governmental responsibilities and engaging the Deputy Managing Editor Duncan Currie News Editor Daniel Foster people in self-government” at the state level—that is, state legislatures. If that Editorial Associates were the procedure today, perhaps we would not face a real threat of national- Brian Stewart / Katrina Trinko Web Developer Nathan Goulding ized medicine. Instead of being a check on democracy run amok, the Senate is Applications Developer Gareth du Plooy Technical Services Russell Jenkins a body of 100 squabbling, self-interested politicians with campaign chests stuffed by public-employee unions, lawyers, etc. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Voegeli also cites the difficulty of stalemated senatorial elections—in which Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan Contributors the houses of a state’s legislature are run by different parties and cannot agree Hadley Arkes / Baloo / Tom Bethell on a senator—but this problem could have been resolved more moderately in James Bowman / Priscilla L. Buckley Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier 1913 simply by excluding the lower houses of state legislatures from the Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans process. Or maybe it isn’t a difficulty at all, since the stalemated state is the Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter one that’s forgoing representation as the fight drags on, and it has the power to George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart remedy the situation. Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak Alan Reynolds / William A. Rusher Robert D. Francis Tracy Lee Simmons / Terry Teachout Westminster, Calif. Taki Theodoracopulos / Vin Weber Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman WILLIAm VOegeLI repLIeS: I am sympathetic to the conservative argument, ably Accountant Zofia Baraniak presented by mr. Francis, that the Seventeenth Amendment is one more lamen- Treasurer Rose Flynn DeMaio Business Services table progressive idea we should unwind if we could. The authors of the Con - Alex Batey / Amy Tyler Circulation Director Erik Zenhausern stitution were wise; however, they were not clairvoyant. They did not anticipate Circulation Manager Jason Ng that the ethic of deference that gave them so much latitude in philadelphia in WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 1787 would yield to enthusiastic and widespread engagement in self-governance. SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 The Illinois contest in 1858, in which politicians urged citizens to vote for state WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 legislators solely on the basis of their partisan commitment to sending either Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Abraham Lincoln or Stephen Douglas to the U.S. Senate, reflected this political Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet transformation. The logic of the Lincoln–Douglas race lent itself to electing sen- ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett ators directly. It was the first clear sign that Americans wanted to close the con- PUBLISHER stitutional space created by the indirect election of senators, and the Seventeenth Jack Fowler Amendment was the culminating manifestation of that desire. CHAIRMANEMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes

FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr. Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].

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n People do have a lot of false ideas about Obama. Some of them think he’s a moderate.

n The guiding theme of President Obama’s new budget is See page 10. “more.” Compared with today’s levels, there would be more taxes, even more spending, thus more debt. He proposes to spend $3.73 trillion next year, which amounts to 23.6 percent of GDP. Tax rates would rise from 2013 onward. Judging from his rhetoric, Obama’s main worries are that deep cuts in the budget will endanger the economic recovery and shortchange “investments” in education and clean energy. The evidence that these “investments” have yielded positive returns in the past or will do so in the future is nonexistent; ditto the evidence that rising spending has stimulated the economy, unless models that assume this effect are counted as evidence. We are moving on autopilot toward European levels of governmental bloat, and this president seems determined to keep it that way.

n Because the Democratic Congress never passed a budget last year, House Republicans are having to work on a budget for the seven months remaining in this fiscal year and a budget for next year at the same time. For the casual consumer of news, it can get confusing. In last fall’s “Pledge to America,” they said they would cut discretionary spending by $100 billion. Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan produced a spending limit for the remainder of the year that would achieve that goal, but only on a prorated basis. Many Republicans, especially freshmen, revolted at the adjustment, partly because sexual activity, but chided conservatives for dwelling on it they thought it would be hard to explain, and demanded the full so much more than on other sinful behavior, from failures of $100 billion. Congressman Ryan and the other Republican charity to premarital sex among heterosexuals. We wrongly leaders seem happy to oblige—they have produced a budget show gays “a little extra animosity.” Coulter is surely correct that cuts $100 billion from the president’s request for the rest to encourage heterosexual conservatives to take the beams out of this year, and plan to offer a budget for the next decade that of their own eyes. Neither philosophy nor theology provides cuts entitlements—and even happier to have reinforcements in any basis for regarding homosexual sin as categorically worse the battle for fiscal restraint. than other kinds, and conservatives have not always kept their perspective. But this is not the end of the matter. There is n A D.C. event that brings together George Will (introducing a strong tendency in our culture to declare that homosexual Indiana governor Mitch Daniels) and Jimmy “The Rent Is Too conduct is not sinful at all, that so regarding it is a form of Damn High” McMillan (doing his own inimitable thing) is a discrimination that must be policed by the state, and that mar- splendid circus. But the very circus atmosphere also renders the riage must be redefined in the name of this new moral ortho- event, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), doxy. The courts are increasingly inclined to impose this ridiculous. For the second year in a row, the presidential straw orthodoxy over a resistant public. Under these circumstances, poll was topped by Ron Paul. To boost its gate, CPAC throws the question of homosexuality will necessarily take up more its doors open to truthers, Birchers, and crackpot libertarians attention from conservatives than other vices and social ills. We (not Glenn Reynolds or Nick Gillespie libertarians, but the- did not choose this fight, and our only choice is to conduct it as South-was-right libertarians). CPAC has gone from being a effectively and charitably as we can. rally and a candidate forum to being a freak show with a fever swamp annexed. As Bessie Smith said, you’ve been a good old n The Democratic Leadership Council was formed after Presi - wagon, Daddy, but you done broke down. dent Reagan shellacked Walter Mondale in 1984. The thinking was that the Democratic party needed to move away from n Ann Coulter, in remarks at CPAC, declared herself “a friend McGovern-Mondale liberalism: toward respect for entrepre-

ROMAN GENN of the gays.” She did not deny the sinfulness of same-sex neurship, free trade, policing, welfare reform, and so on. The

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The American Civil War Taught by Professor Gary W. Gallagher TIM ED E O 1. Prelude to War IT FF E 2. The Election of 1860 IM R 3. The Lower South Secedes L 4. The Crisis at Fort Sumter 5. The Opposing Sides, I 70% 6. The Opposing Sides, II 7. The Common Soldier 8. First Manassas or Bull Run off 9. Contending for the Border States O 6 R Y 10. Early Union Triumphs in the West DER MA 11. Shiloh and Corinth BY 12. The Peninsula Campaign 13. The Seven Days’ Battles 14. The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 15. Antietam 16. The Background to Emancipation 17. Emancipation Completed 18. Filling the Ranks 19. Sinews of War—Finance and Supply 20. The War in the West, Winter 1862–63 21. The War in Virginia, Winter and Spring 1862–63 22. Gettysburg 23. Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Tullahoma 24. A Season of Uncertainty, Summer and Fall 1863 25. Grant at Chattanooga 26. The Diplomatic Front 27. African Americans in Wartime, I 28. African Americans in Wartime, II 29. Wartime Reconstruction 30. The Naval War 31. The River War and Confederate Commerce Raiders 32. Women at War, I 33. Women at War, II 34. Stalemate in 1864 35. Sherman versus Johnston in Georgia 36. The Wilderness to Spotsylvania 37. Cold Harbor to Petersburg 38. The Confederate Home Front, I 39. The Confederate Home Front, II 40. The Northern Home Front, I 41. The Northern Home Front, II 42. Prisoners of War Explore Our 43. Mobile Bay and Atlanta 44. Petersburg, the Crater, and the Valley 45. The Final Campaigns 46. Petersburg to Appomattox Nation’s Most 47. Closing Scenes and Reckonings 48. Remembering the War

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THE WEEK DLC is now suspending operations. Its actual purpose turned out herring.” “Ninety-five percent of all the content on [the site] to be to make the country safe for unbridled liberalism. Let’s is about entertainment, lifestyle, and information. Not about hope the Democrats have declared its success prematurely. politics,” she argued. Yes, but that pesky 5 percent is what gives the site its distinctive flavor. And Huffington showed her n Speaker John Boehner, asked by NBC’s David Gregory to true colors when she asked, “What is left-wing about caring for denounce birther/Muslim fairy tales about Barack Obama, the middle class, about caring about the fact there are 26 mil- answered, “The state of Hawaii has said that he was born lion people unemployed?” Right. there. That’s good enough for me. The president says he’s a Christian. I accept him at his word.” Democrats did not have to say any more when their wilder brethren were accusing George W. Bush of colluding or somehow acquiescing in 9/11. Indeed they did not have to say anything at all, because nobody at NBC badgered Democrats to comment on such stuff. The obligation to be purer than Caesar’s wife falls disproportion- ately on conservative Republican officeholders. Granted all that, Boehner could be both more agreeable and more combat- ive. “Barack Obama is a Christian American gentleman—but that isn’t enough to make you a good president, as his terrible record shows. That’s why Republicans will fight him in the House, and replace him next year.” n Less than a day after Keith Olbermann unexpectedly announced that he had anchored his final episode of n Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, is nearing the end of his Countdown, Al Gore called the sportscaster–cum–political third term in the Senate. Before being elected to that body, he paranoiac up and invited him to join Current TV—the media served four terms in the House. He has now announced his company the former vice president co-founded a few years retirement. For all these years, he has been one of the most after losing to W. in 2000. One could be forgiven for igno- solid politicians in the country: a principled Reagan conserva - rance of Current TV’s existence—it enjoys small popularity tive, and NATIONAL ReVIeW conservative. He is a versatile with the square-glasses crowd, but is otherwise little known, thinker, an all-purpose senator, knowledgeable about eco- and less profitable. And that’s just why Olbermann will be nomics, the judiciary, foreign policy, and so on. Such birds are there—the non-compete clause of his severance contract rare. Kyl would have made, and would make, a good presi- with NBC would have excluded almost every other media dent. Bill Bennett once remarked that he and Kyl agreed on outlet. Olbermann told reporters that his new show will be almost everything: and when they did not, he (Bennett) fig- “an improved, amplified, and stronger version of the show ured he was wrong. Announcing his retirement, Kyl said, “I that I just did at my previous network.” It’s not clear how one think it is time for me to have an opportunity to do something could amplify the tone of Countdown, or how long else, an opportunity to give others a chance.” Some politi- Olbermann will last at Current TV. He’s been fired from cians, you wish would go, at long last. Others, you wish you almost every job he’s had; in each case, the cause of the could keep longer. separation was that Olbermann is, to borrow a phrase from employment law, an heroic jackass, congenitally boorish n Sen. James Webb (D., Va.) announced he will not run for even by the standards of his liberal employers. But let’s hope reelection in 2012. Webb cast himself as a latter-day Jack- against experience that this marriage lasts: Olbermann and sonian, a defender of the Democratic white working class Gore deserve each other. (both Webb and Old Hickory are Scots-Irish). There are problems with Webb’s template: Jackson was a great fighter, but a n Taking a cue from guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe, tempestuous and problematic politician. It is also tangential to who made ACORN a household name, the anti-abortion Webb’s political career. Webb rode into office on the anti-Bush group Live Action sent a documentarian into ten Planned tsunami of 2006. He was an anti-war Republican (formerly Parenthood facilities. Posing as a pimp, the filmmaker NEWSCOM / secretary of the Navy under Reagan), hence prized as a defec- declared himself to be in need of Planned Parenthood’s COM . tor. Obama carried his state two years later. So far from show- flagship service, in order to keep the underage girls in his ing independence, Webb toed the Reid-Pelosi line on major employ producing revenue rather than offspring. Planned ACEPIXS / issues (stimulus, health care). Now that the Iraq War is off the Parenthood’s staffers were disturbingly eager to facilitate front page, Obama is a normal political mortal, and Virginia is the sexual exploitation of children forced into prostitution. returning to the GOP, Webb saw that his political future was “Okay, she’s a minor—yeah, so?” the staffer says. “She’s KRISTIN CALLAHAN

: zero. Goodbye, and good riddance. still entitled to care without Mom knowing what the hell is going on.” The experiment was repeated in other Planned n America Online has bought The Huffington Post for $315 Parenthood facilities, with similar results. Planned Parent- million and put its co-founder, Arianna Huffington, in charge hood offered the usual protests—selective film editing, words of all AOL news content. Accordingly, some advertisers are taken out of context—but Live Action has made its unedited NEWSCOM OLBERMANN / squirming as they contemplate the Internet giant’s direction footage available to the public, and it does not seem to have WENN

: under a left-wing activist. But on HBO’s Real Time with been distorted. Planned Parenthood avers that it has done

GORE Bill Maher, Huffington pooh-poohed this concern as a “red nothing wrong, but conceded the falsity of that claim by

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THE WEEK announcing a retraining program for employees dealing with ties no longer believed they could ensure safety. The agita- minors. The most relevant context, meanwhile, is the contem- tors were led by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a cabal poraneous trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, of American lawyers started by William Kunstler in the who, along with members of his staff, is facing murder Sixties. CCR’s mission since 9/11 has been the defense of charges for scissoring newborn infants to death after botched terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay—a crusade in which abortions—a crime that is about six inches removed from it joined forces with several attorneys now working in the what legally transpires in Planned Parenthood facilities every Obama administration. These included now–Attorney day. General Eric Holder, who, as an Obama campaign adviser in 2008, promised the Left a “reckoning” against the officials n House Republicans are promoting legislation to prevent the who designed and implemented Bush counterterrorism poli- federal government from funding abortion through spending cies (most of which, of course, are now Obama counterter- or tax credits. Nancy Pelosi calls the bill, which is partly a rorism policies). The CCR claims the real reason for the response to Obamacare, “extreme.” One line of argument cancellation is its ongoing efforts to get European prosecu- holds that the legislation, by allowing funding only in cases of tors to bring about this reckoning by indicting Bush for “forcible rape,” is “redefining rape.” In truth this legislative “torture” and “war crimes.” By these perverted lights, language merely aimed to codify the pre-Obamacare under- Obama himself is a war criminal. You would think that self- standing that taxpayers would not pay for all underage girls’ preservation would move him to show some leadership, abortions; Republicans say they will drop the language to even if decency does not. avoid false attacks. Another criticism is that the bill is a type of government intrusion in the marketplace. Most Americans n The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s name may have access, through their employers, to insurance that covers make it sound harmless, but it deserves a significant portion abortion. Women who start getting insurance through the of the blame for the financial crisis. The FASB promulgated exchanges that Obamacare establishes would lose that cover- the “mark to market” or “fair value” accounting standards age. Intruding into the marketplace to discourage the killing that required financial institutions to write down the value of of unborn children strikes us as an easy call. But if liberals mortgage-based securities they owned when the housing want to avoid this scenario, they are welcome to join with us market went bust. In itself, that would have been fine. But the in working to repeal Obamacare. write-downs put the institutions’ capital reserves below their legally required levels, forcing them to sell in the middle of a n Commenting on this bill panic. The fire sale forced the value of the securities down and another piece of legisla- even further. This downward spiral amounted to a subsidy tion that would strip Planned to short sellers. Along with Brian Wesbury of First Trust Parenthood of federal fund- Advisors, we suspect that it is not an accident that the stock- ing, Pelosi said that her oppo- market recovery began in spring 2009, when FASB eased the nents on these issues “are at a rules. So it is a relief that FASB seems finally to have thrown different philosophical place, in the towel on this issue, giving up on applying mark-to- [that] all engagement has to market to loans. This decision is a big, if unheralded, win for result in a child.” The view she the economy. is snidely caricaturing is not the position of the Republican n Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that most political disputes party, which has no moral ob - boil down to a contest between the party of hope and the party jection to contraception, but of memory. With their $53 billion appropriation for high- rather the historical teaching speed rail, the Democrats, led by Vice President Biden, are of Christianity and the contin- trying to be both. The hope is that Americans will abandon ued teaching of the Catholic Church, to which Pelosi claims to their carbon-belching gas guzzlers and embrace clean, care- belong. Pelosi’s conceit, shared with many other supporters free mass transit; the memory is of steam whistles and of abortion, is that she is an “ardent, practicing Catholic.” We Pullman cars and The Palm Beach Story. As usual, the hope is

are to believe that careful reflection has led her to a pained illusory and the memory is false. Even setting aside its huge AP / disagreement with her church. But this remark, like previous cost, limited capacity, and manifold technical problems, high- comments she has made trying to recruit St. Augustine as a pro- speed rail can never be more than a niche market in a nation choicer, show that she either is consciously misrepresenting as vast and suburbanized as ours. And even in railroading’s SPENCER GREEN . M

Catholic teaching or has never bothered to inform herself of it. golden age, passenger service was a money-losing nuisance : The bishops who have let liberal Catholics get away with this act for its operators, who preferred to concentrate on freight, prof- EMANUEL

for so many years have failed their flock, including its errant itable then as it is now (though high-speed passenger service : members. would undermine this business by hogging the rails). For more than a century, starting in Emerson’s day, railroads were UPI OPPOSITE n Score one for the radical Left. Its shock troops induced virtually the only way to travel long distances, but they were / the cancellation of George W. Bush’s scheduled trip to expensive and inconvenient, and Americans fled them as soon Switzerland, where the former president was to speak to a as there were decent alternatives. A rail-based America won’t KEVIN DEITSCH pro-Israeli group about anti-terrorism and freedom. The plug come back simply because visionaries and sentimentalists :

was pulled on the event when sponsors and Geneva authori- spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars to summon its ghost. PELOSI

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n Often, a politician will matter of hours, with only a feeble attempt to avoid his fate. find himself supporting John Boehner, then minority leader, had reportedly given Lee a position that he knows a warning last year when the freshman was partying with to be wrong. Such are the comely lobbyists. Either Boehner, now speaker, told him he expediencies of the busi- had used up his chances, or Lee knew that he would be so told. ness. But sometimes an ex - It is sad that pols succumb to folly, good that it be gotten off pedient politician can go the table briskly. too far, offending moral reason and losing his credi- n Wisconsin has long been a citadel of organized labor, and is bility. Which brings us to paying the price with a wobbly state economy and a projected Rahm Emanuel. The for- $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years. Repub - mer congressman, and for- licans won control of the legislature and the governorship in mer Obama chief of staff, is running for mayor of Chicago. In November’s elections, so the problem belongs to the new gov- a debate, he embraced reparations to today’s black Americans ernor, Scott Walker, and the new Republican majority in the for the enslavement of blacks before the 1860s. He had a legislature. Republicans have brought forward a sensible pro- caveat, though: Chicago, like most of America, labors under a posal that would see government workers contributing more budget deficit, and there may be other budgetary priorities at toward their own health-care and retirement costs—which is the moment. Reparations, as Emanuel and others conceive to say, it would treat government workers more like workers them, are morally indefensible: Those who were wronged can- and less like entitled gentry collecting lifelong revenue from not be paid back; all that remains is hustling, to be resisted. the peasantry. To get a feel for Governor Walker’s radicalism, Maybe someone should ask President Obama what he thinks note that his proposal calls for government workers to pay of his former chief of staff’s position. a grand total of 12.6 percent of their own insurance premi - ums. In exchange, he promises no furloughs or layoffs. n Chris Lee had represented the 26th congressional district of Republicans have also proposed curtailing the collective- New York for one term plus change when he sent a photo of bargaining power of government unions other than those rep- himself, en déshabille, to a woman he had met on Craigs - resenting law enforcement and firefighters, limiting their list, describing himself as a divorced lobbyist. The woman bargaining authority to the issue of base pay and excluding the checked his name online, found that he was in fact a married corollary issues of benefits and pensions, which threaten to Republican congressman, and forwarded their exchange to bankrupt states across the fruited plain. Led by the AFL-CIO, the website Gawker. The news here is that Lee resigned in a the same unions protesting that their members cannot afford Put your card to work for you.

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THE WEEK to contribute one penny more toward their own retirements Rammell entered into correspondence with his Libyan opposite are rallying to raise millions of dollars to fight these changes number, advising him of the right procedure for obtaining in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds. In other words, a British official conspired with foreigners to thwart British jus- n New York City is a place where people visit their old neigh- tice. David Cameron, Brown’s successor as prime minister, told borhood and complain that it has improved. Laments of this the House of Commons that the fixing of Megrahi’s release was type over today’s “sterile” Times Square ring false for anyone “profoundly wrong.” Far from dying, since his release Megrahi who actually experienced the old, endlessly fermenting one; has lived happily in a villa in Libya for a year and a half. The yet if you expunge every bit of raffishness from an urban envi- publication in the near future of more official documents ronment, the result is Singapore. New York’s municipal busy- promises to reveal the extraordinary extent of connivance and bodies have taken another step toward this goal by banning cover-up at the top of Britain. smoking in city-owned parks, beaches, and plazas—including Times Square. (A similar measure has been proposed in Boston, n Since 2004, Afghanistan has had a constitution guaranteeing which, ever since it stopped banning racy books and plays, freedom to exercise religious faith, and much blood and treasure needs new ways to feed its addiction to Comstockery.) None of has been expended in the effort to make a reality of such rights. the usual arguments for smoking bans apply here; any amount But the country also practices sharia—traditional Islamic law— a passer-by inhales will be trivial, and if someone is smoking which dictates the death penalty for any Muslim who converts near you, it’s easy to walk away. So let the tourists and hustlers to another religion. This contradiction has caught the unfortu- light up! New York is a happy city when the biggest prob- nate Sayed Mussa, born a Shiite Muslim. He’s 46. At the time lem in Times Square is smoking, but an unhappy one when the of the Soviet invasion, he lost a leg, and for the last 16 years government decides it must solve it. he’s worked for the Red Cross fitting prosthetics on amputee children. Inspired by the example of some selfless foreign n Is Europe’s governing class tired of multi- Christians, he adopted Christianity. For this he has been impris- culturalism? Germany’s chancellor, Angela oned, abused, and humiliated; and officials and the Taliban alike Merkel, called it a “total failure,” and France’s are calling to have him hanged for his Christian faith. In a prece- president, Nicolas Sarkozy, told an interviewer dent five years ago, Abdul Rahman, another Afghan who faced that immigrants should “melt into a single death for converting to Christianity, was allowed to leave for community.” The most elaborate critique was Italy. A Canadian bishop, the secretary general of NATO, two de livered by Britain’s prime minister, David Republican members of Congress, and a few scattered Christian Cameron, in a speech in Munich, in which he organizations are at last bringing pressure to bear to save Sayed traced the problem of homegrown Islamist Mussa. His horrific story is a reminder that even success in the alienation and terrorism to “a question of iden- Afghan War will not mean the vanquishing of barbarism. tity.” “A passively tolerant society,” Cameron said, “stands neutral between different values.” n Authorities in Britain want state schools to teach kids about But “a genuinely liberal country . . . says to its homosexuality in math, geography, language, and science citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to lessons. This new homo-friendly curriculum will begin at age belong here is to believe in these things.” The four. Suggestions include “teaching statistics through census things Cameron went on to cite were freedom findings about the number of homosexuals in the population,” of speech and worship, democracy, the rule of and “studying animal species where the male takes a leading law, and equal rights. What Cameron will do to role in raising young, such as emperor penguins and sea hors- uphold them remains to be seen, but his contrast es,” and “using gay characters in role play scenarios, and of passive tolerance and what he called teaching ‘LGBT vocabulary.’” Look for our president to take AP

“muscular liberalism” recalls Abraham Lin - up this theme in next year’s State of the Union speech. Sputnik / coln’s critique of Stephen Douglas for not car- Moment—out; Stonewall Moment—in. ing whether slavery was “voted up or down.” Could Europe be catching up intellectually with n Repeal the ban on gays in the military, elite universities LEFTERIS PITARAKIS Lincoln c. 1858? And: Will the other Illinois demanded, and we will recognize the Reserve Officers’ Train- : president make a similar discovery? ing Corps. Of course, repeal passed in December, and the ivied dons have yet to crown our cadets with laurels. That’s because AP CAMERON n Documents made available by the British government deepen some liberals have discovered a new moral outrage against / and darken the scandal surrounding the release of Abdelbaset al- ROTC: the military’s ban on transgender individuals. The Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber sentenced to life imprisonment Stanford Students for Queer Liberation is circulating a peti- CHRISTOPHE ENA

in Scotland. Moammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, let it be tion—which has garnered over 120 signatures so far—to keep : known that if his agent Megrahi died in prison, severe commer- the group off campus, and the Harvard Trans Task Force is wag- cial and political reprisals would follow. The British governing a similar campaign. True, Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, AP SARKOZY ment, then led by Gordon Brown, panicked. An attempt to return has pledged to recognize ROTC, but Stanford remains non- / Megrahi under an agreement about the transfer of prisoners committal, having appointed a committee to consider recog - between the countries proved unworkable. Conveniently diag- nition. We will make the committee’s job easier: Any further GERO BRELOER nosed with cancer, Megrahi was given three months to live. opposition to ROTC would show our elite universities’ true :

Whereupon a Foreign Office official by the name of Bill motive: hatred of the military. MERKEL

1 2 | www.nationalreview.com MARCH 7 , 2 0 1 1 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 2/14/2011 3:38 PM Page 1

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THE WEEK n The bizarre comments of Gen. George Casey following spirits of the air never seem far away. It is not surprising that the 2009 Fort Hood shootings (“as horrific as this tragedy the nation has a large population of witches—large enough to was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse”) form a political lobby. That lobby has been roused to action were the first inkling most Americans had that of all the insti- recently. The Romanian government, like many another, is tutions of our society, hardly any is busier in promoting the strapped for cash. Earlier this year witches became liable to the ethnic/gender preferences and cultural masochism of the same flat-rate tax on their income as other citizens. Now, by “diversity” cult than the U.S. armed forces. An even more the pricking of their thumbs, something regulatory their way astonishing instance of this multiculturalist toadying has just comes: The government is attempting to make soothsaying emerged from the virginia Military Institute, one of our oldest witches responsible for the accuracy of their predictions, with military academies. vMI announced a conference this March fines for false prophecy. Queen Witch Bratara Buzea, who pre- under the title “711–2011: East Meets West,” in which: “We viously threatened to strike down Romania’s rulers with a spell celebrate the 1300th anniversary of Tariq ibn Ziyad’s crossing involving cat excrement and a dead dog, quite reasonably sug- of the Straits of Gibraltar, setting into motion the fusion gests that in stead of penalizing witches for faulty predictions, between two worlds.” The Internet, and presumably vMI’s “they should condemn the cards” instead. mailbox, were soon aflame with protests. vMI has now revised the event’s webpage to remove the word “celebrate.” It has n Swedish actress Lena Nyman died, age 66, after a long career also issued an aggrieved, whiny response to the protests, but in her home country. Her mark on this country was made in the conference will apparently proceed anyway. Comments 1968 when the U.S. Customs Service seized I Am Curious blogger Patrick Poole: “No word if vMI’s World War II com- (Yellow), a low-budget mockumentary in which she inter- memoration will be entitled ‘Germany meets Poland, Czecho- viewed fellow Swedes and had sex with her boyfriend. A fed- slovakia, Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, The Netherlands eral appeals court ruled that Ms. Nyman was covered by the and Russia.’” First Amendment, if by little else, and her vehicle made $5 million once it was released. The movie was dull and arid—left- n The Society for Personality and Social Psychology held its wing polemic with a dash of copulation, a formula that had annual conference in San Antonio. Attendee Jonathan Haidt, a already swept college campuses. Copulation has had a great 40 social psychologist at the University of virginia, began a pre- years (item: Lindsay Lohan, before her recent legal troubles, sentation optimistically titled “The Bright Future of Post- was trying to revive her career by playing Linda Lovelace, the Partisan Social Psychology” by asking how many of the 1,000 late porn star). R.I.P. present in the auditorium considered themselves politically liberal. About 80 percent raised their hands. Centrists and lib- n Joshua Goldberg was related to NATIoNAL REvIEW: the broth- ertarians? Fewer than three dozen hands went up. Conserva - er of Jonah, the son of Lucianne and her late husband Sidney. tives? Just three. As Haidt pointed out, this was somewhat at Josh has died after a fall, at the age of 43. Two years ago, he ran odds with the commitment to diversity advertised on the soci- for city council on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—in the ety’s website. He proposed an affirmative-action goal: a mem- neighborhood where he and Jonah grew up. He didn’t win. The bership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. He also Upper West Side is not friendly territory to conservative Repub - suggested that members broaden their outlooks by subscribing licans. But he gave it a spirited try. NATIoNAL REvIEW in gener- to NATIoNAL REvIEW and reading Thomas Sowell’s book al feels some fraction of the Goldbergs’ agony. R.I.P. A Conflict of Visions. We have alerted our staff to brace themselves for a flood of new subscriptions. n In George Shearing’s later years, avant-garde jazz buffs viewed him as the type of pianist that wealthy bankers liked to n one aspect of American exceptionalism in which conserva- hear in the background while chatting over cocktails. But in tives take pride is our insistence on retaining traditional units On the Road, Neal Cassady announced Shearing’s late-1940s of measure—pounds, gallons, yards—when all other signifi- drop-in at a Chicago club with “God has arrived,” and here’s cant nations have fallen to the loathsome metric system. how Jack Kerouac described the ensuing impromptu perfor- However, this pride rests on an illusion, as pride too often does. mance: “He blew innumerable our customary units have in fact been defined in terms of met- choruses replete with amazing ric units since the second Grover Cleveland administration. chords that mounted higher and The official definition of our treasured pound, for example, higher till the sweat splashed all is 0.45359237 kg. What is a kilogram, though? It is the mass of over the piano and everybody a platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault in Sèvres, France. listened in awe and fright. They Now we hear that this standard kilogram seems to be losing led him off the stand after an mass. Physicists are struggling to come up with a new standard hour.” In the 1980s his career by counting atoms. Good luck to them, so long as we can be enjoyed a renaissance due to a left with our pride, however illusory, and with our familiar series of collaborations with Mel pounds and ounces, grains and scruples, pennyweights and Tormé; their version of “Smoke hundredweights, and tons both short and long. oh, and keep Gets in Your Eyes” is a masterly your hands off our bushels and acres, too. melding of Shearing’s controlled but sparkling explorations and n From the endless reedy marshes of the Danube delta to the Tormé’s scat-inflected bravado.

AP haunted forests of Transylvania, Romania is a place where the Dead at 91. R.I.P.

1 4 | www.nationalreview.com MARCH 7 , 2 0 1 1 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 2/15/2011 4:07 PM Page 1

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EGYPT Cautious Pessimism

GyPT had as close to a Velvet Revolution as could be imagined in a major Middle Eastern country. The E protesters who thronged the streets seeking Hosni Mubarak’s ouster were largely peaceful, and even self-policing. The only instance of sustained violence was when Mubarak’s rent-a-thugs attacked the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, some wielding sticks from atop camels, incredibly enough. After the protesters prevailed and Mubarak left office, they returned to the square to tidy it up, in a heartening gesture of civic- mindedness. The uprising validates George W. Bush’s insistence that there isn’t an Arab exception to people’s desire to have their voices heard and to be treated with respect. The Egyptian revolt put paid to the idea—a staple of establishment foreign-policy thinking for decades—that the Israeli–Palestinian dispute fuels Arab discontents. In Egypt, people weren’t protesting Israeli settlements, but the high-handedness, corruption, and incompe- tence of their own government. It is a measure of Bush’s vindi- cation that the Obama administration has now adopted the rhetoric of democratization it initially eschewed because it was so associated with its predecessor. One is tempted to say, “We’re all advocates of the Freedom Agenda now.” yet the lessons of the failures of the Bush years still apply. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections and took over Islamism (albeit brutally). But you can rule by decree, steal Gaza; in Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution was hijacked by anoth- from your country, and torture your opponents for only so long. er armed political party, Hezbollah; in Iraq, elections may yet By the end, Mubarak was a destabilizing force, making it more create a sustainable pluralistic politics, but they were no sub - likely the protests would turn violent and the army split in the stitute for the imposition of order by our military after ethnic face of them. hatreds spun out of control. The creation of a democracy worth The protests have now spread throughout the Middle East, having depends on much more than mere voting. It requires including Iran. Vice President Biden directly challenged the order, a culture of compromise, the rule of law, the protection of regime in Tehran to allow its people to march in the streets, minority rights, and genuinely democratic political parties, just lending the moral support to the Green Movement that the for starters. It depends, in short, on what age-old conservative administration shamefully withheld in 2009. The Iranian gov- wisdom tells us are so crucial to the fate of nations—habits and ernment will be more determined and vicious in response to customs on one hand, and institutions on the other. the unrest than Egypt’s was, and more difficult to unseat. The In Egypt, the foremost institution of the state is the military, danger to the United States is that only its allies will be suscep- which carefully husbanded its public support by striking a neu- tible to revolution, and the wave of protests will eventually tral role between the protesters and Mubarak before finally issue in regimes less liberal and less friendly to the United shoving him out of office. The hope now is that it can hold States than those currently on offer. things together during a careful, deliberate transition to a demo- The protest leaders in Cairo were tech-savvy, young, and— cratic government worthy of the name. During this process, the judging by their rhetoric—secular. But they sit upon a sea of interest of the United States is in preventing the worst case, backwardness, hinted at by the horrific assault on CBS News which is either chaos or a takeover of Egypt by the Muslim correspondent Lara Logan. A Pew survey last year found atti- Brotherhood. Preventing the latter requires the creation of a tudes prevalent in Egypt that one would expect of Afghanistan: system with the strongest possible safeguards against the depre- widespread support for the execution of apostates, the stoning dations of a determined minority, and the allotment of enough of adulterers, and the like. This is why, for all the hope of the time prior to elections for parties besides the Brotherhood to last two weeks, we’re still cautious pessimists. organize. Even if the Egyptians aren’t going to exclude the If Egypt had slowly built up a democratic culture, it would be Brotherhood from elections, that doesn’t mean we have to—as better suited for the transition it’s about to undertake all at once. the Obama administration has done—welcome it or tell our- The policy of the United States going forward should be to sup- selves bedtime stories about its “largely secular” nature. port the growth of civil society and the development of opposi- The administration muddled its way through the crisis and tion groups in authoritarian societies. This is what the Bush AP ended up where any U.S. government probably would have: administration intended to do, but it got distracted by other, more / On the side of the protesters, demanding that Mubarak must pressing concerns. Then the Obama administration abandoned go. The Egyptian dictator had served his purpose for 30 years, the effort altogether. This would be a democracy-promotion

maintaining a cold peace with Israel and keeping a lid on policy focused on the preconditions of true democracy. YOMIURI SHIMBUN

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ority complex, has left a population de - moralized and without any belief in its own nation. George Orwell saw this hap- pening a long time ago; it has created a vacuum for the english Defence league to fill. Multiculturalism is the other side of the english Defence league coin. Whether Mr. Cameron’s characterization of the problem is wholly accurate is another question. For example, many of our homebred terrorists are not the cultur- ally isolated and alienated figures whom Mr. Cameron imagines, cut off from mainstream British life by ghettos and the multicultural nonsense that leaves then unable to speak english. Nor do they derive their suicidal-utopian fantasies from an unalloyed Islamic tradition. Their utopianism is at least as much secular as it is religious, though unfortunately their religion is one that lends itself particularly well to political violence. They are not, in short, the pathetic types that Mr. Cameron depicts, quite the reverse. Many of them are educated, if attendance at a modern British university counts as an education; they also have jobs and The Brute and the Terrorist prospects. No, they have seen British values and In Britain, multiculturalism cannot escape blame for either culture close up, or at least what British values and culture have become, and they BY ANTHONY DANIELS don’t like them. They are quite right not to do so; the fact that their response is grotesquely disproportionate and even ell hath no fury like an in - belonging to the other parties. Fat may more stupid than the culture that they tellectual whose orthodoxy is or may not be a feminist issue, but (in despise does not alter the correctness of challenged, especially when Britain) multiculturalism is definitely a their apprehension. Better a live slut than H the orthodoxy rests—as it usu- party-political issue. a dead pedestrian, say I; that does not ally does—on unexamined and perhaps Mr. Cameron spoke on the day on make me pro-slut. It means only that I unexaminable premises. So when Prime which 3,000 members of the english detest terrorism and its works as among Minister David Cameron said, by no Defence league, the soccer-hooligan the worst of all evils. But in reacting as means stridently, that multiculturalism wing of British politics, marched through terrorists, the young Muslims are follow- had not served Western countries, and the town shouting anti-Islamic slogans. ing Bakunin and the Baader-Meinhof particularly Britain, very well, it was only Mr. Cameron’s speech had been sched- gang as much as the Koran. It is not for to be expected that he should have pro- uled long in advance, but the temporal nothing that they go to Western universi- voked what newspapers described as juxtaposition was a fortunate one for ties. “fury,” though perhaps petulance would those who didn’t like what he said. He But just because multiculturalism is not have been a better word. was accused of giving succor to some of a major direct contributor to home-grown It is true that the place and timing of the most unattractive members of our terrorism does not make it right. On the his speech exacerbated its irritant effect. unattractive society. contrary: It is a sentimental and harmful luton is an unlovely town in Bedford - Of course, a large part of the problem doctrine that turns the mind to mush, is shire, regarded as a bad joke in england is that patriotism in Britain has been left evidence of an underlying indifference to (as Belgium is in France). Thoroughly to the brutes: the kind of ignorant savages the real lives of people, and is a provider despised by natives, it has long been who tattoo a bulldog on their biceps and of pseudo-work for lots of people such as a magnet for immigrants. Nine of its “Made in england” round their nipples, community organizers. 25 labour town councilors are Mus - and who in equal measure revolt and Multiculturalists are seldom really lims; there is only one Muslim councilor terrorize the cheaper resorts of the Medi - interested in the culture of others. Very terranean. The intellectual’s equation of few of them read books in foreign lan- Mr. Daniels is the author of Utopias Elsewhere patriotism with xenophobia, and pride in guages, for example, let alone immerse

and other books. past achievement with an arrogant superi- themselves in the Pali scriptures or the ROMAN GENN

1 8 | www.nationalreview.com MARCH 7 , 2 0 1 1 joseph ratzinger pope benedict xvi

the second volume of JESUS of nazareth H oly Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to The Resurrection

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writings of the Sufi. I don’t blame them British Muslim, or indeed anyone else, for this: It is the work of a lifetime to be that he or she should not blow himself or able to do so, and we each have only one herself up in a public place. A Prognosis lifetime, to say nothing of limitations of The question that would surely strike ability and inclination. But let us at least anyone whose brain had not been addled For Justice not pretend that our interest in other cul- by doctrinal sentimentalism is “Why did tures extends much beyond their cuisine. it take Shalina Parveen”—who now has Multiculturalists generally rejoice at two young children—“ten years to decide Kennedy mass, and indiscriminate, immigration, to learn English?” If she can do so now, not because they are admirers of, say, presumably she could have done so then. How will this pivotal jurist look Somali political philosophy, but because human circumstances being so various, it upon Obamacare? they want the culture of their own country is possible, though not very likely, that to be diluted as much as possible: for only there is an excellent explanation; but sure- BY ROBERT VERBRUGGEN by rejecting what they have inherited do ly anyone with minimal alertness would they think they can show their indepen- at least ask the question. The multicul - hEn the Supreme Court in - dence of mind and generosity of spirit. tural mindset—or emotion-set—seems to evitably hears a challenge Let the heavens fall, so long as I am destroy the critical faculties, if not the to Obamacare’s constitu- thought (by my peers) to be a free-thinker. brain itself. W tionality, the outcome will The extreme sentimentality of the mul- Then we learn that Shalina Parveen, be far from a sure thing. And the most ticulturalist mindset was well illustrated who is in receipt of state benefits, and important question is what Anthony by an article in The Observer, the Sunday who is not looking for work, will no Kennedy thinks. newspaper of the British intelligentsia longer qualify for her free English The primary issue boils down to what (including me), the week after Mr. Cam - lessons: from which she concludes that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and eron’s speech. In the correspondence col- she will not be able to learn English and necessary and Proper Clause mean. The umn there were the usual, and expected, integrate by, for example, going to the Constitution gives the government the snide and adolescent remarks that pass in doctor—this is her example. right to “regulate commerce . . . among certain circles for thought, for example I hope I shall not be thought a neo-nazi the several states,” as well as to do everything that’s “necessary and proper” to achieve that regulation. Through the early Multiculturalists generally rejoice at 20th century, the Supreme Court enforced strict limits on these abilities, but since mass immigration because they want then, those limits have all but disap- the culture of their own country to be peared. The turning point was 1942’s Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Court diluted as much as possible. held that the government can regulate how much wheat a farmer grows—even that Mr. Cameron, having gone to Eton when I ask why a woman who did not the wheat he plans to use on the farm and Oxford, was himself a member of a speak English, was not fleeing from instead of selling—on the grounds that tiny (and much hated) cultural minority. political persecution, and had no skills such activity has a “substantial economic But there was also a long feature article that made her easily employable was effect” on interstate commerce. Most re - about a woman of Bangladeshi origin allowed to immigrate into England. I cently, in 2005’s Gonzales v. Raich, the who, supposedly thanks to Mr. Cam- wish her no harm; but from the stand- court held that the federal government eron’s retrenchment of public services point of national interest, what has she could forbid California residents to grow and rejection of multiculturalism, would brought to the country, other than self- and consume their own medical mari - now not be able to integrate herself into imposed obligations? (This is another juana, which was legal under state law, on British society. question not raised by The Observer.) But the grounds that some of the marijuana The woman was called Shalina Par - almost by definition, multiculturalists are created this way might enter the illegal veen: “Shalina Parveen is a model Mus- not interested in the national interest: The interstate market. lim in David Cameron’s Britain. She left world is their oyster, and they demand In the Obamacare case, the question Bangladesh a decade ago, settled in that we all swallow it. is whether the Commerce Clause Rochdale, and is now learning English 16 It is, of course, possible that her chil- allows Congress to force people to buy hours a week at college.” dren will turn out to be great assets to the insurance—that is, to regulate inacti - The incuriosity of the writer—and, pre- nation. So might the child of Shalina’s vity, or a person’s failure to engage in sumably, of the editor—is startling. It friend, Parveen Akhtar, who—according commerce. “It’s extremely powerful illustrates what the author thinks is to the article—will now also not be able to rhetorically to say that Congress has required to be a model Muslim, namely learn English because of Mr. Cameron. never done this before,” notes nicholas not to be a terrorist, for no one could “Parveen Akhtar [is] a single mother who Quinn Rosen kranz, an associate professor possibly imagine the pleasant-looking came to the country from Pakistan.” of law at Georgetown who clerked for woman as such. But it is surely a very now that is what I call cultural integra- Justice Kennedy, when asked what he reduced requirement of being a good tion. Who needs language? thinks the justices will make of the

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distinction. “Nobody has been able to state travel, and inhibits learning (which women’s ability to participate in com- drum up an example.” in turn affects students’ ability to parti - merce.) Kennedy joined in Rehnquist’s In theory, the Court could rule any of cipate in commerce); in the view of the majority opinion, which invalidated the three ways. One, it could uphold the indi- majority, these arguments were insuffi- provision. vidual mandate. Two, it could strike the cient to tie the government’s actions to the In Raich, however, Kennedy joined the mandate down on the grounds that it goes interstate-commerce power. liberal justices (plus Scalia) in John Paul beyond even the Court’s broad interpreta- Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion, Stevens’s majority opinion (which, again, tion of the Commerce Clause. And three, which today is the most detailed record of held that the federal government can reg- it could interpret the Commerce Clause his views on the Commerce Clause. He ulate marijuana that’s grown for private according to its original meaning, striking wrote that in light of the expanded view consumption). down Obamacare and paving the way for of the clause the Court had taken since Where does that put Kennedy on the an avalanche of lawsuits against other Wickard, the majority opinion in which Obamacare case? It’s hard to say; he government programs. he’d joined “gives me some pause.” He seems cautious more than anything, and The first option is the best bet, the made it absolutely clear that he has no neither option here—striking down a second is a distinct possibility, and the intention of rolling the clause all the way presidential administration’s flagship third is all but impossible. Here’s why. back to its original meaning: “The Court accomplishment, or giving Congress the The four liberal justices are almost cer- as an institution and the legal system as a right to force people to buy the products tain to support the individual mandate, whole have an immense stake in the sta- of private businesses—fits that mold. “In meaning that they need only one more bility of our Commerce Clause jurispru- a way, I see him as a small-C, Burkean vote for a majority. On the conservative dence as it has evolved to this point.” He conservative,” Dorf says. “Which leads side, they probably won’t find a friend in went on to stress the importance of feder- me to think, although without over- Clarence Thomas, who has tried repeated- alism, and argued that the Commerce whelming evidence, that whoever is able ly to return the Court to its old under- Clause is not a license for the federal gov- to frame this case as resistant to radical standing of the Commerce Clause. ernment to interfere in the traditional state change will win it.” However, the two newest conserva- concern of criminal justice. “Absent a It’s also worth bearing in mind what tives, John Roberts and Samuel stronger connection or iden - Dorf calls the “wild card” of the case: the Alito, have not left a con- tification with commercial argument that the individual mandate is sistent paper trail on the concerns that are central to a tax, and that therefore the government issue, and so their votes the Commerce Clause, that can implement it under its taxing powers are hard to predict. In interference contradicts the rather than the Commerce Clause. This their confirmation tes - federal balance the Framers is a difficult argument for the Obama timony, both recognized designed and that this Court administration to make; during the that the Supreme Court has is obliged to enforce,” he Obama care debate, when conservatives abandoned the original mean- concluded. claimed the individual mandate violated ing of the Commerce Clause, “I read [the Lopez concur- the president’s pledge not to raise taxes but neither said what should rence] as Justice Kennedy for anyone making less than $200,000, be done about it. And Antonin trying to send two sets of sig- Obama insisted it wasn’t a tax. However, Scalia sided with the majority nals,” says Michael C. Dorf, Dorf notes that Kennedy has expressed in Raich (the marijuana case), a professor at Cornell Law dislike for a “jurisprudence of labels”— which makes a pro-Obamacare School and a former Kennedy that is, court decisions that hinge on what vote a definite possibility for him. clerk. “He wants to join the something has been called, rather than Even assuming none of the late chief justice [William what it is. It’s anybody’s guess what conservatives sides with the Obama Rehnquist] in saying there’s Kennedy (and the other judges, for that administration, there’s the question a limit to what Congress can matter) will make of the argument that the of Anthony Kennedy, the Court’s do, but he also wants to reassure ability to tax entails the ability to force swing vote. His existing jurisprudence Congress and the interested public that people to purchase whatever the govern- makes him a toss-up. he has no interest in substantially rolling ment wants them to, because there’s not The Supreme Court has decided three back federal powers. He’s just affirming much precedent for it. major Commerce Clause cases since that there’s a line somewhere out there, With Kennedy as a coin flip, added to Kennedy joined in 1988: U.S. v. Lopez, and that Congress had crossed it in this the possibility that any or all of Justices U.S. v. Morrison, and Raich. case.” Scalia, Roberts, and Alito might side with Lopez, decided in 1995, was the first Kennedy came to a similar conclusion the Court’s liberals, the most likely out- case since Wickard to limit the gov - in 2000’s U.S. v. Morrison. At issue was come is for Obamacare to be upheld. ernment’s power under the Commerce a provision of the Violence Against Thanks to more than a half century of rul- Clause. The court’s majority opinion, in Women Act that allowed victims of ings that treat the Commerce Clause as a which Kennedy joined, invalidated a fed- sexual violence to file suit in federal license for the federal government to pass eral law against bringing a firearm within court, even in cases where state law- any law it wants, it will be difficult for the 1,000 feet of a school. The government enforcement agencies had not filed individual mandate’s opponents to con- had argued that gun violence in schools criminal charges. (Sexual violence, the vince the court that forcing people to

DARREN GYGI harms the economy, discourages inter- government’s argument went, affected buy insurance is a bridge too far.

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servative Republicans around the country. wasting taxpayers’ money and destroying As recently as 15 years ago, conserva- lives. While some of these new policies Jailbreak tives almost uniformly called for building may seem relatively “soft on crime,” a more prisons, increasing criminal penal- look at the results, and at the circum- Conservatives ties, extending the length of prison sen- stances that gave rise to them, reveals an tences, and eliminating programs that embrace of conservative principles, not Sometimes the answer is allowed offenders to remain outside of an abandonment of them. fewer prisons penitentiaries. Now that’s changed, and There’s no doubt that the nation’s leaders with sterling right-of-center cre- corrections systems have changed in the BY ELI LEHRER dentials have embraced new thinking past several decades, and changed most about crime and prisons that picks up on dras tically under conservative leaders. o hear state representative Jerry many concerns once more closely associ- According to the Pew Center on the Madden describe it, his effort ated with the Left. The new approach, States, in 2009, for the first time since to shrink Texas’s sprawling, organized around a loose coalition called 1972, America’s state-prison-inmate T 170,000-inmate prison system Right on Crime, emphasizes stricter population (about 1.4 million) declined was pretty simple. “I figured we could parole and probation in return for shorter slightly. Reform efforts have taken place either speed people coming out, or slow sentences, the reform of sentencing prac- in every part of the country, mostly with them down going in,” says the hulking, tices, diverting low-level offenders away leadership from Republicans popular always-smiling engineer-turned-legislator. from prison, involving victims in offend- with the party’s conservative base. “We chose to slow them down going ers’ lives, in-prison drug-treatment and Beyond Texas’s $2 billion reduction in its in, and that’s saved $2 billion for tax- literacy programs, faith-based rehabilita- corrections budget, South Carolina under payers.” Madden’s formula for reforming tion, a reduction in the overall number of former governor Mark Sanford trimmed America’s second-largest state-prison criminal laws, and a slower pace of prison about $241 million from the state correc- system has had a great influence on con- construction. tions budget, while conservative gover- Conservatives, in short, have come to nors including Indiana’s Mitch Daniels Mr. Lehrer is vice president for Washington, D.C., realize that ever-increasing prison pop - and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal have an - operations at the Heartland Institute. ulations and ever-harsher penalties are nounced sweeping initiatives to change

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sentencing laws, reform probation, and Policy Foundation. “Punishment should stem the growth of prison systems. Even matter, and certain people need to be in California, where harsh sentencing locked up. We don’t deny that there was a laws and powerful corrections unions cre- point when states needed more prisons— ated the nation’s biggest prison system, it’s just that the point has passed.” the total inmate count declined 2.5 Different states have accomplished percent between 2008 and 2009 as total similar goals in different ways. South prison spending fell. During the same Carolina achieved its reforms with period, only one of the ten largest states, sweeping legislative packages that elimi- Pennsylvania, saw its jail and prison pop- nated sentencing disparities between peo- ulation grow faster than its overall popu- ple charged with possession of crack and lation. powder cocaine, changed community- Newly elected governors including supervision requirements, and worked to Kansas’s Sam Brownback and Florida’s reduce recidivism among released con- Rick Scott have ambitious plans to victs. Other states, such as Texas, have move their states in the same direction. taken incremental approaches involv - And conservative heavyweights such as ing dozens of different actions through Americans for Tax Reform president the legislative and executive branches. Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and Indiana governor Mitch Daniels’s pro- former drug czar Bill Bennett have posed reforms to sentencing policies— signed on to a Right on Crime statement which would vastly increase judges’ of principles endorsing the new direc- discretion in imposing sentences, cut tion in criminal justice. some penalties outright, and give new Conservative reformers today are not falling prey to the canard that criminals are victims of society.

By and large, conservatives calling for incentives to localities to divert low-level corrections reform have made a convin - offenders—may be the most sweeping cing case that the project comports with serious proposal on the table. But not all efforts to shrink government while con- reforms have been limited to big legisla- tinuing to carry out its core functions. tive moves: Mississippi’s Haley Barbour “Prisons are just another government has concentrated on improving correc- spending program; we should treat them tions systems through budget measures, like that,” says Pat Nolan of Charles executive orders, administrative reforms, Itonly Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry. and symbolic actions such as commuting Nolan, a former minority leader of the the sentences of two sisters given life in California assembly who spent 25 months prison for an armed robbery that netted takes a in federal prison after a bribery sting oper- $11. (The sisters had become a cause ation, has not always taken this view. célèbre for the NAACP and dozens of moment. “When I was a legislator, I was tough on other groups, and were released on the bureaucracy, whether it was CalTrans or condition that one donate a kidney to save Make a difference CalEPA. But when it came to the prison the other’s life.) in the lives of the men and women system, I handed them a blank check,” he If conservatism is truly what Russell who protect our freedom. says. Kirk described as the “negation of ideolo- VOLUNTEER. DONATE. REMEMBER. Conservative reformers today are not gy,” then it ought to evolve with the facts USO.ORG falling prey to the canard that criminals on the ground and should not pursue are victims of society. Rather, a crime rate unchanging policies under changing cir- that has fallen every year but one since cumstances. For all the good that it has 1994 has made it possible for them to done in reducing crime, America’s ever- retreat from the reflexive “lock ’em up” growing prison industry is an instrument mentality that once helped win elections. of the state that deserves real suspicion. “The focus is on the victims, not the Efforts to stop squandering money and offenders,” says Marc Levin, who coor - human potential on less-effective ap - dinates the Right on Crime Coalition proaches to criminal justice deserve the through the Austin-based Texas Public Right’s support.

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larsandoutliningpotentialsolutions.The Federal Highway Administration pro- Transportation- videdoneofthemoreusefulanalyses in2008.state,local,andfederalcapital Policy spendingonroads,bridges,andstreets amountedto$78.7billionin2006. Justto Crossroads maintaincurrentroads,thenationneeds tobespending$105.6billion.Toimprove There is indeed a right way them—tobegintomakeheadwayagainst congestionandupgradebridgesand BY SAMUEL R. STALEY streets—wewouldneedtospend$137.4 to$174.6billioneachyear,dependingon s U.s.transportationpolicybeyond howweprioritizeprojects. salvation?Aquickglanceatthelast Complicatingthepictureisouraban- twoyearssuggestsredemptionis donmentofasoundprincipleofpublic I unlikely.Butanuancedreadingof finance:Thosewhobenefitfromapublic thecurrentpoliticalenvironmentreveals investmentshould,totheextentfeasible, The Catholic thatapathforwardexists,particularlyif payforit.Thatwastheprincipleonwhich Shakespeare? thenewCongresstakesabalancedand thefederalgovernment’sforayintona- realisticapproachtotheissue. tionaltransportationpolicyrestedwhen June 10-12, 2011 Thisisnosmalltask.Federaltrans- PresidentEisenhowershepherdedlegisla- portationpolicyisindisarray.Apoliti- tionthroughCongresscreatingtheinter- Portsmouth Abbey School, RI callysensitiveWhiteHouseisfixatedon statehighwaysin1956.Thenetwork’s short-termjobcreation,notthelong-term constructionandmaintenancedepended Speakers will include: investmentsneededtoensurethatthena- onafederalgastax,whoseproceedswent Dr. Glenn Arbery: The Problem of tion’stransportationbackboneishealthy intotheHighwayTrustFund. Catholic Piety in the Henry VI Plays enough to support productivity and Butweturnedawayfromtheuser-pays investment.Oneofthetopprioritiesofthe principlesoonthereafter,asmycolleagues Clare, Viscountess Asquith: As Obamaadministrationisanexpensivebut attheReasonFoundationdocumentin You Like It and the Elizabethan inconsequentialhigh-speed-railinitiative, arecentreport,“RestoringTrustinthe Catholic Dilemma atatimewhenthesteadyerosionofour HighwayTrustFund.”In1970,Congress Dom Aidan Bellenger, Abbot of nation’sprimarysourceoffederaltrans- allowedtrust-fundmoniestobedivertedto portationfunding—theper-gallongastax, buslanesandpark-and-ridelots.Amass- Downside: The Blasted Heath: The whoserevenueisdwindlingasvehicles transitaccountwascreatedinthesurface Death of Catholic England becomemorefuel-efficient—isaboutto TransportationAssistanceAct of 1982, Rev. David Beauregard: Shakespeare throwtheHighwayTrustFundintoin- divertingone-ninthofgas-anddiesel-tax and Religion: the Catholic, the solvency.Compoundingthesechallenges revenuestopublic-transitoperationsand Protestant and Secular Dimensions istheleadershipattheU.s.Department projects.In1991,theIntermodalsurface ofTransportation(DOT),whichincludes TransportationEfficiencyActaddedbike Dr. John Cox: Are Shakespeare’s acabinet-levelsecretary,RayLaHood, paths,sidewalks,recreationaltrails,and Prayers Catholic? knownmoreforlegislativedealmaking historicpreservationtothegrowinglistof Dr. Gerard Kilroy: “Changing Eyes:” thanforanunderstandingofthenation’s projectsthatcouldbefundedbygastaxes. Faith and Fluctuation in Romeo transportationneedsandchallenges.Fi- By2009,27percentofspendingoutof and Juliet nally,theU.s.DOT istryingtomakeup theHighwayTrustFundwasdedicatedto fordecadesofpolicyabdicationbystate non-highwayexpenditures. Rev. Peter Milward: departments of transportation—even Inshort,thefundstartedoutasafed- The Catholic King Lear thoughitlackstheresourcesandcon- eralcommitmenttolinkingthenation stitutionalmandatetobuyanddeliver togetherwithaseriesofEuropean-style Mr. Kevin O’Brien and everythingonthesmorgasbordoftrans- autobahns,buttodaypaysforjustabout Mr. Joseph Pearce in a Theater of the portationimprovementsthatanalystsand anythingthatcanbecalledtransporta- Word production of Hamlet’s Agony politicossayweneed. tion. ... and more to come. Nearlyhalfadozennationalcommis- AndtheHighwayTrustFundisnot sionsandtransportation-policyorganiza- theonlyelementoffederaltransporta- For information or registration: tionshavepublishedreportscalculating tionpolicythathaslostdirection.The www.portsmouthinstitute.org shortfallsofhundredsofbillionsofdol- extentoftheproblemwasapparentin or contact Cindy Waterman theObamaadministration’s2009stim- at (401) 643-1244 Mr. Staley is the Robert W. Galvin Fellow at the ulus,whichpumped$48billioninto or [email protected]. Reason Foundation and co-author of Mobility transportation-infrastructure projects First: A New Vision for Transportation in a rangingfromrepavinglocalstreetsto Globally Competitive Twenty-First Century. fundingintercitypassengerrail.

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DOT’s second-quarter 2010 progress ed Atlanta streetcar line that would pro- landing fees and various aviation user report revealed that only 57 percent of vide a downtown link to an outer regional taxes). Most operating costs for transit the total discretionary transportation rail line will do little to alleviate the con- agencies are also funded by user fees and spending through the stimulus program gestion that slows interstate commerce local and state governments. Thus, with was allocated to the Federal Highway and travel through the corridor. These are the exception of rural states with large Administration for road and street im - luxury projects for a federal government sections of interstate highways, most provements. Nineteen percent went to the facing a budget crisis and a national trans- states already control the spending on Federal Railroad Administration, mostly portation network facing severe capacity their transportation networks. for high-speed-rail projects. Another 17 challenges at major transshipment points Second, states own most of the assets percent went to the Federal Transit in places such as Southern California, that make up the transportation network. Administration for various transit-capital Chicago, and Houston. Interstate highways make up just 2.5 per- improvements, including streetcars and This approach to federal transportation cent of the 8.5 million lane-miles of bike paths. funding no longer fits fiscal reality, or, roadway in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds What’s notable about this distribution judging by the rise of the Tea Party move- comprises small local roads. Even the is how out of sync it is with the way ment, the political sensibilities of the interstate highways are state-owned and the American public gets around. The American public. -controlled, though the states receive 2009 National Household Transportation We should go back to basics. Federal federal funds to manage and maintain Survey revealed that 84 percent of all trips policy should be defined by constitution- them. and 88 percent of all distance traveled al principles and the concept that was the Third, the federal government simply is by personal vehicle. Amtrak, intercity cornerstone of the justification for federal doesn’t have the money to fund projects trains, and commuter trains account for funding of the Interstate Highway Sys- much beyond upgrading, filling in, and 0.5 percent of all travel. Walking makes tem: interstate commerce. maintaining the 213,588 existing lane- up about 10 percent of trips but less than Congress should narrow the scope of miles of interstate highway, including key 1 percent of miles traveled. The rest is federal transportation-policy priorities to bridges and tunnels, especially given the made up largely of various forms of pub- four core principles: declining revenues of the gas tax. The lic transit, including bus and subway. l Fund only projects that have true integrity of the Highway Trust Fund Performance criteria and cost-benefit interstate-commerce ramifications; needs to be maintained, and that means analyses are unlikely to align funding l Fund only projects that have a signif- limiting the scope of federal involvement priorities with actual travel. Within the icant impact on the national transportation to projects we can actually fund. In the Recovery Act was a DOT discretionary- network; aforementioned report, Robert Poole and grant program called Transportation l Enable state and private-sector finan - Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation Invest ment Generating Economic Recov - cing for transportation projects to lever- coined the term “Interstate 2.0” to de - ery, or TIGER. The program has obligat- age and, in some cases, substitute for scribe this goal. ed over $2 billion in federal spending on a national taxpayer funding; and Fourth, private investors are willing to variety of projects, from bike paths to l Fund research into safety and tech- step up and fill funding gaps if govern- major investments in critical national nology that is beyond the scope and ments let them. As open-road tolling freight corridors. capability of state departments of trans- (electronic tolling at highway speeds) Initially, TIGER was widely lauded by portation. becomes more popular, incremental en - analysts (including me) for its rigorous These principles should not be too hard hancements to the road network through evaluative criteria. Projects were subject- to implement. innovations like High Occupancy Toll ed to cost-benefit analysis and profession- First, even though state governments (HOT) lanes will provide sustainable rev- al peer review, and were scored on their have ceded much of their authority over enue streams that can leverage private ability to meet public-policy objectives. transportation policy to the federal gov- capital. HOT lanes already exist in seven Projects with significant local-funding ernment, they still control the vast major- states, and six additional states are either matches and private investment were ity of the road network. The federal building them or seriously studying given priority. Projects of national sig - government funds a little more than a them. nificance were also given preference. quarter of all spending on the nation’s While U.S. transportation policy is Almost 100 physical-infrastructure pro- roads, highways, and bridges. Aviation is facing serious challenges, its problems jects received funding during two phases largely self-sufficient (funded through are not insurmountable. Many of them of the TIGER program. are, in fact, political. By simply narrow- Yet a detailed look at the projects ing the scope of federal transportation awarded would leave more than a few policy to clearly defined national inter- advocates of federal transportation pro- ests, encouraging states to become more jects scratching their heads. Local fund- creative and innovative in managing their ing matches are common, but user fees networks, and enabling greater private- are hard to find, and many projects are too sector involvement in financing these pro- small or frivolous to warrant federal atten- jects as well as managing them, the U.S. tion. While innovative, the Indianapolis transportation network can remain the regional bike path hardly rises to the level envy of the world and a foundation of our of national significance. A widely herald- “Because I can’t follow my dreams, dummy!” global competitiveness.

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the United States cannot be overcome with neither peaceful coexistence nor indefi- diplomatic mediation? Giv en our ongoing nite struggle, but instead the ultimate Reaganite entanglements in the Middle East, neither forcing of a worthwhile arms-control the Obama administration nor the Amer- agreement on terms favorable to the U.S. Iran Strategy ican public seems eager for another mili- He did not believe that the Soviet system tary confrontation, and even without those could handle sustained economic, mili- A multi-front attack can overcome the entanglements, war would be a terrifying tary, and technological competition with ayatollahs just as it overcame the Soviets pros pect. Yet it is possible to disarm an the United States, and he thought that adversary, pressure it into abandoning its exerting such pressure on the USSR and BY COLIN DUECK ideological underpinnings, and even pave its proxies could force a capitulation. As & RAY TAKEYH the way for its peaceful demise, all without he told his friend Richard Allen in 1977 firing a shot. To understand how this can when asked for his long-term ambition in fTER years of fruitless outreach happen to the Islamic Re public, one only relation to the Soviet Union: “We win and to the Islamic Republic of Iran, needs to recall Ronald Reagan’s dealings they lose.” a troublesome question is now with another ideological relic—the Soviet Upon entering the White House in A being discussed in Washington: Union. 1981, Reagan developed and implement- What if the differences between Iran and Reagan developed his ideas on how to ed a comprehensive strategy for achieving confront the Soviet Union over a period this goal. The most obvious point of vul- Mr. Dueck is a professor of public and international of many years. Like other foreign-policy nerability for the USSR was its economic affairs at George Mason University and the author of hawks in the 1970s, he wanted to rebuild feebleness. Reagan was determined that Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. America’s military and reverse a long the United States should stop subsidizing Foreign Policy Since World War II (Princeton period of Soviet and Com mun ist expan- the Soviet economy. He looked to deny University Press, 2010). Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow sion. Also like them, he viewed the Soviet Western currency, trade, and technology to for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign regime as hostile, aggressive, and revolu- the Soviet bloc. And although such efforts Relations and the author of Guardians of the tionary in intent. Yet at the same time, he met with only partial success among Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of held a number of beliefs that were unusu- America’s European allies, Reagan’s poli- the Ayatollahs (Oxford University Press, 2009). al among his fellow hawks. His aim was cies of anti-Communist economic warfare O JAY, CAN YOU SEE? And does he ever see in his acclaimed collection — you will, too!

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had painful cumulative effects on the might undermine domestic support for his clutches of clerical despotism. Rea gan’s Soviet economic system. overall approach. rhetoric was often mocked as naïve, yet Reagan also understood that after years Soviet leaders were shaken and alarmed we now know that his persistent denunci- of neglect, American power had to be revi- by that approach. By 1987 Mi khail Gor - ations of Soviet rule as a moral affront did talized. Under his persistent prodding, the bachev had come to the conclusion that the much to sustain dissidents locked behind United States undertook a major buildup USSR could not continue the Cold War the seemingly impenetrable Iron Curtain. in its armed forces, designed to reassure competition in the traditional way, so he The popular uprisings in Egypt and allies, deter Soviet aggression, and restore agreed to an intermediate-range nuclear- Tunisia affirm Reagan’s judgment that U.S. diplomatic leverage. This included a arms accord—the INF Treaty—that democratic yearnings can penetrate even national missile-defense program and the essen tially granted the concessions Rea- the most hardened dictatorships. As deployment of multiple new weapons gan had sought since the early 1980s. By change spreads across the Mid dle East, systems. the time Reagan left the White House, in Tehran’s theocracy may yet feel the con - At the same time, Reagan began an 1989, he had achieved his main strategic tagion effect. Iran is in some ways even ideological assault. To the horror of the goal. The collapse of the Evil Empire more vulnerable to popular uprising than West’s intellectual class, he openly de - followed almost immediately. was the House of Mu bar ak, since it has a scribed the Soviet Communist system as The case of Iran today is certainly differ- well-educated population that has rejected immoral, dysfunctional, illegitimate, and ent from that of the Soviet Union, although the radical legacy of its revolution and doomed. He extolled free markets and not so different as to render Reagan’s is ready to respond to calls for genuine increased funding for practical methods of example irrelevant. The two most striking change. democracy promotion, such as the Voice differences are probably, first, that Iran is It is common to suggest that Iran’s anti- of America and the National Endowment smaller and—especially because it does government Green Movement is all but for Democracy. In this way he looked to not yet possess nuclear weapons—less dead, an unfortunate casualty of the delegitimize Communist rule in Eastern heavily armed than the Soviet Union was, Islamic Republic’s efficient and ruthless Europe, throw Soviet leaders on the de - and second, that Soviet decision-making apparatus of suppression. But the Green fensive psychologically, inspire anti- turned out to be fairly cautious when it Movement’s successes are noteworthy Communist dissidents, and fight back in came to the possibility of a nuclear ex- and continuing: It has not just fractured the the Cold War’s propaganda struggles. change. We don’t know whether Iran’s cur- state, with many of the regime’s staunch Such measures were not limited to rent rulers would be similarly cautious. So loyalists defecting to the opposition, but rhetoric, as the Reagan administration pro- if anything, the arguments for an Amer i can also captured the imagination of Iran’s vided military and financial aid, weapons, strategy of comprehensive pressure against youth and its burdened middle class. training, and logistical support to anti- Tehran are even stronger than they were Popular agitation goes on, albeit on a Communist insurgents in Nicaragua, against the Soviet Union, while the risks smaller scale, as Iran remains a land of Afghan istan, and sub-Saharan Africa. It associated with a direct U.S.–Iranian work stoppages and rebellious universi- further provided covert aid to Poland’s military confrontation—while very seri- ties. As was true with Solidarity in Poland, Solidarity movement, in concert with the ous—are less than they would have been Iran’s Greens are worthy of receiving Vatican and U.S. labor unions. with the USSR. material and moral support, which will Finally, Reagan knew he needed to The Obama administration has taken have the twin advantages of paving the offer positive alternatives to Soviet arms- some steps toward a strategy of pressure way for a democratic transition in the long control proposals, in order to undercut against Iran. Most of them have focused run and providing Washington with a lever international and domestic criticism of his on segregating the Islamic Re pub lic from to temper Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the hard-line approach. How ever, instead of global financial markets in order to in - short term. As was true with the So vi et seeking to placate the “nuclear freeze” crease the stress on its already misman- Union, we will never make prog ress on movement, he made proposals, such as the aged economy. This has been effective to arms-control issues with the Is lamic “zero option” (withdrawal of all American a degree, but since, as was true in the Republic until its grip on power seriously and Soviet intermediate-range missiles USSR, the cruel men who rule the country starts to erode. from Eu rope), that were highly favorable have little concern for the welfare of their Another feature of the pressure policy to U.S. national-security interests, and he population, more pressure is needed. The must be encirclement of Iran by American refused to settle for anything that was not. only way to extract concessions from the bases and allies. Efforts to turn the Arab All these forms of pressure—economic, Islamic Republic is to imperil its exis- Gulf states into an anti-Iranian alliance military, diplomatic, covert, and ideologi- tence. should be augmented with further de - cal—were meant to work together, by Since its fraudulent June 2009 presiden- ployment of American naval and mili - exploiting Moscow’s vulnerabilities and tial election, the Islamic Republic has tary forces on Iran’s periphery. Instead of imposing costs on the Soviet empire in faced an acute crisis of legitimacy. An responding to Iran’s proxy war against every way possible. Yet Reagan’s strategy American president known, like Reagan, U.S. forces in Af ghan i stan with pleas for also involved certain self-imposed and for his inspirational use of language cooperation, the administration should sensible limitations. For instance, he should follow Reagan’s model and stake exclude Teh ran from all conclaves and avoided any large-scale, protracted, or out a moral position. By insisting that the meetings plotting the future of that coun- direct U.S. military interventions against theocratic regime is bound to take its place try. Com mun ist countries, such as Cuba and in history’s junkyard, Obama can inspire a We are in proxy wars with Iran not just Nicaragua, because he knew that they nation seeking to liberate itself from the in Afghanistan, but in many critical parts

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of the Middle East. The likeliest source of Since 1993, we have had volunteers in renewed tension is Lebanon. Attempts China, and they teach English. They’re there to restrain Iran’s terrorist protégé, The Peace known as “U.S.-China Friendship Vol - Hezbollah, will require assisting our un teers.” Why not “Peace Corps volun- democratic allies and supporting the spe- Corps at 50 teers”? Because, to the Communist cial tribunal that will issue indictments of gov ernment, the word “corps” has unac- Hezbollah personnel for the assassina - A few observations ceptable military connotations. We know tion of Rafik Ha ri ri, who had been the (mainly conservative) that the Chinese Communists are the Lebanese prime minister. Washington most devotedly pacifist of people. should insist to both the Lebanese govern- BY JAY NORDLINGER The Peace Corps has “three simple ment and key regional actors such Egypt goals,” to use the words of the organiza- and Saudi Arabia that it will not allow the OWARD the end of the 1960 tion itself. They are 1) to help people in indictments to lapse. presidential campaign, Sen. “interested countries”; 2) to promote a In Iraq, our task is to press the Bagh dad John F. Kennedy made a stop better understanding of Americans by government into recognizing that it must T at the University of Michigan. those peoples; and 3) to promote a better choose between alliance with America He got there just before 2 A.M. Obviously, understanding by us Americans of those and flirtation with Iran. To make this Bill Clinton did not invent late-night peoples. The second and third of those demand credible, the United States will campaigning. Some 5,000 adoring stu- goals are fairly easily met. The first is have to remain engaged in Iraq, providing dents were gathered to see Kennedy. On much more problematic. There is a great military training, financial assistance, and the steps of the student union, he gave debate about whether, or to what extent, a commitment to the state’s rehabilitation. them a speech full of his usual charm. “I the Peace Corps has rendered genuine Despite rhe tor i cal posturing, most Iraqi come here tonight,” he said, “to go to bed! help. Suffice it to say that former volun- factions—whether Kurdish, Sunni, or But I also come here tonight to ask you teers—or “returned volunteers,” in the even Shiite—prefer American patronage to join in the effort.” What effort? He was parlance of the Peace Corps—are far to Iranian mischief. We may not be able to talking about the Peace Corps, which he more likely to say what the experience completely expunge Iran’s influence, but had proposed earlier in his remarks. did for them than what they themselves by aggressively competing with it, we He established that corps in the very were able to do for others. can further stress Iran’s resources and limit first weeks of his presidency: on March 1, One of the best-known returnees in the its reach. 1961. The first director was his brother- conservative-libertarian world is Charles As was true with Reagan, it is neither in-law Sargent Shriver, who died in Jan - Murray, the political scientist, author of prudent nor judicious for the United States uary of this year at age 95. His death Losing Ground, among other important to eschew negotiations completely while occurred just a month and a half before books. He served in Thailand in the pursuing these avenues. But the terms of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. mid-1960s. He left for the Peace Corps diplomacy should move away from seek- They will celebrate this anniversary in the day after he graduated from college. ing a compromise and toward demanding high style, with Chris Matthews, Bill “I wanted to see the world and do inter- submission. And the pressure should not Moyers, Harris Wofford, and other lumi- esting stuff,” he says, “and the Peace cease until the Islamic Republic shutters naries—liberal luminaries, by and large. Corps seemed like a good way to do its nuclear apparatus, abandons terrorism, The Peace Corps has been, in many that.” He adds something with his typi - and desists from abusing its citizens. respects, a liberal project, for good or ill. cal humor: “I wasn’t against doing good. Hovering over all this is Iran’s nuclear But conservatives have been involved, In fact, I was perfectly happy to do good. program, whose progress has been some- and we will meet a few. But that’s not the reason I signed up. And what slowed by a combination of sanc- Since 1961, about 200,000 Americans I suspect it was the same way with most tions and covert operations. Efforts at have volunteered in the Peace Corps, of the other guys who went in at that sabotage and economic pressure should serving in approximately 140 countries. time.” continue and intensify as a means of Elaine Chao was director of the organi- Murray says that he could not con- delaying Iranian nuclear outbreak. As Iran zation in 1991 and 1992, under the first tribute much to the Thais: He was a is aggressively squeezed, it may return to President Bush. The “republics” of the newly minted undergraduate, what did negotiations in a more tractable mood. Soviet Union were newly free. Chao sent he know? (Never mind that he went to The Islamic Republic is a second-rate volunteers there. She says there was Harvard, like President Kennedy.) But autocracy, disdained by its people and dis- resistance from what you might call the he learned a lot about government, so - trusted by its neighbors. Ronald Reagan Peace Corps establishment: former vol- ciety, and people. He found that the cen- understood that a dysfunctional tyranny, unteers, present staff. The Peace Corps tral government had one set of priorities however well armed, cannot sustain vigor- had traditionally concentrated on Africa, for villages in remote areas, and the ous competition with a strong, confident, and maybe a couple of other regions. villagers themselves another set of pri- democratic power. President Obama, who Chao thought that needs could be met in orities. And the villagers—the people has spoken positively of Reagan’s legacy the former Soviet Union. She was partic- them selves, right on the scene—knew a and has reportedly studied his presidency, ularly interested in small-business train- lot better. They were also better at solving would be wise to apply these Reaganite ing: the inculcation of entrepreneurship, their own problems. les sons to our greatest Middle East chal- which these lands sorely needed (and You know what they wanted help with? lenge. which everyone needs, it’s true). Water-buffalo thieves. They figured the

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government should stop them (quite dreamier, flakier volunteers opted to “But bear in mind that I would say the rightly). leave their service early. They saw that same thing about most of our govern- Joseph Pickett is an entrepreneur they could not make a quick, decisive ment agencies.” work ing and living in Virginia. He volun- impact. What was in the offing was Elaine Chao believes that the partici- teered in Russia, from 1996 to 1999. He “hard, incremental work,” as Fulton puts pation of conservatives can make just says, “I went in right of center and came it. Still another group of dreamers, or about any agency or organization better. out strongly conservative-libertarian.” ex-dreamers, did not leave early but If those entities are going to be there any- The reason? “Because I saw up close “effectively gave up.” way—which they are—why leave them the physical and moral wreckage that Some volunteers there were very high to liberals, alone? Thinking of the Peace a Communist system brings.” He says on organic farming. The Senegalese Corps in particular, she says, “We are he enjoyed his time in Russia “a great themselves, less so. “All they cared for individual freedom, and national deal,” but it made him “much, much about was whether they could feed their freedom, and all of these countries that more appreciative” of the United children tomorrow.” Fulton lived for a volunteers go to yearn for freedom in States. while with a family who had lost two one way or another.” Chao says that He tells a story that he says illustrates children to malnutrition. And many of Americans can set a positive example the mentality he found in Russia. A the subsistence farmers in the area would just by being themselves. “American teacher he knew was awarded a visa have given their right arms to land a women walk with confidence. They to come to America. “Naturally, I was factory job: anything that would have swing their arms and take long strides. happy for him, and told a few people. provided a steady income. That’s unusual in many parts of the He approached me on the bus one day Fulton emphasizes that volunteers world.” By the way, Chao is the daughter and said, ‘Joe, please don’t tell anyone with particular experience and skills of a Chinese couple who fled to Taiwan. else.’” The Peace Corps volunteer asked can truly help a population in need. He She came to this country when she was why. “Because they are jealous and will remembers, for example, the son of a eight years old, in 1961, the year the try to sabotage me.” Wisconsin dairy farmer, who had a Peace Corps was founded. Pickett says that most everyone he degree in animal husbandry or nutrition (It is necessary to mention a seri - knew in the Peace Corps was on the left, and worked like a Trojan. He came up ous problem of the Peace Corps: rape, believing in the power of big govern- with a rabbit feed, made of local ingredi- among other crimes committed against ment, and ever bigger government, to ents. “Someone like that brings a heck of volunteers. An ABC News study found solve problems. Pickett, as we have a lot of value,” says Fulton. that more than 1,000 of our female vol- heard, went the other way. Earl Aagaard and his wife Gail had a unteers have been raped or sexually Thames Fulton is a business con - very good experience in Venezuela. That assaulted since 2000. Former volunteers sultant in Chicago. He served in Senegal was in the mid-1970s. Aagaard is a I have talked to say that, while they in the mid-1990s. He and his wife, retired professor of biology living in would be happy to have their sons follow Mary, met there, as fellow volunteers. California. He and Gail stood out from in their footsteps, they would be wary They were somewhat conservative—and their fellow volunteers in that they were about seeing their daughters in the Peace would become much more so. Thames conservative and religious (members of Corps.) says, “We appreciated more than ever the the Seventh-day Adventist Church). But A retired Foreign Service officer value of free markets, the abundance of the Aagaards did their thing, and the remembers being in Mali in the 1960s. opportunities we have, our Constitution, others did theirs. Earl says that his time The people would marvel at the Peace our Bill of Rights,” and so on. He recalls in the Peace Corps increased his Corps volunteers: They were working that many of the distaste for government. How was for nothing, which was stupid. Stupid that? “Because of all the waste and extraordinary, of course. Chao says, I saw.” There were some fine “Volunteerism and charitableness are people in Peace Corps admin - parts of our national character, our istration, but it was “seriously national identity.” She goes on to note overstaffed.” There was the that, in other countries, “people help one usual sitting around and pay- another because they are connected by check collecting. “My dad had blood or marriage.” But Americans are been in the service, and what I different. saw confirmed the things he There is a lot of puffery about the told me about the way the Peace Corps, and they still draw on government works.” Kennedy-era glamour and cachet. There People such as Aagaard, is at least as much idealism in another Fulton, and Pickett say that corps, the Marine Corps, and that latter the Peace Corps is worth- corps has done infinitely more good. while, for all its flaws. Same with the other branches of the Charles Murray has his armed services, of course—the War doubts. If it went away, Corps, you might call them. But the chances are nobody would Peace Corps plays its role, and is certain- be worse off, he says. ly entitled to a happy anniversary.

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Pawlenty to Like The former Minnesota governor could be a strong presidential candidate

BY RAMESH PONNURU

EVIN KRAWCzyK is disappointed. A manager at the had to work in the produce department of a local grocery store to Family Christian Store chain, he is hosting a book- make ends meet and pay tuition at the University of Minnesota. signing for Tim Pawlenty in Lombard, Ill. “We were He was the first kid in his family to get a college degree. K expecting more,” he says. The shelves are lined with Pawlenty doesn’t peddle resentment of the rich. But he does want many untouched copies of Courage to Stand: An American Story. voters to know that he has seen hard times and struggled to Under the author’s name, the book cover identifies him: “Former succeed. Governor of Minnesota.” Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Mitt In high school, Pawlenty started to get interested in public Romney don’t need such lines on their book covers. affairs: reading U.S. News and World Report, arguing with his dad As Pawlenty prepares to run for the Republican nomination for about Social Security. At college he handed out brochures for president, his main problem is simple: Most Americans have never Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, which he says led to people heard of him. Republicans tend to prefer known commodities: shouting at and, in one case, spitting on him. Still in college in Every winner of the Republican nomination in the last 70 years 1982, he worked on Republican senator David Durenberger’s had a national reputation a year before the primaries. The Courage reelection campaign. Then it was on to law school, where he to Stand is not selling well. yet Pawlenty may just be the met his wife, Mary. By all accounts she is responsible for turning Republicans’ strongest presidential candidate for 2012. Compared him from a dutiful but somewhat shallow Catholicism to a deeper with his competitors, he is either more conservative, more elec- evangelicalism. She became a judge, while he plunged headlong table, or both. into politics. Pawlenty, 50, has made no formal announcement, but his sched- He got in succession a top job in Durenberger’s 1988 campaign, ule—including the book tour, a second speech in two years at a spot on the Eagan, Minn., city council, an advisory position with CPAC, and plenty of stops in Iowa—means he is running for pres- a gubernatorial candidate, and a seat in the state house of represen- ident. His campaign will probably emphasize two colors: blue and tatives. When Republicans took the majority in 1998—the same purple, describing respectively the collar of his family background year Jesse Ventura won the governorship—he became the major - and the political alignment of his state. ity leader. Four years later, he sought to run for statewide office but The book, which is pretty good by the dismal standards of the found the road blocked. State party leaders favored a wealthy can- genre, describes the South St. Paul of his childhood as a meat- didate who could fund his own bid for governor. The Bush White packing town where the milkman (and the beer man) still went House wanted former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman to have a free NEWSCOM

door to door. He has fond memories, but it was not an idyll. ride in the Senate primary. Pawlenty decided to seek the executive /

Ovarian cancer killed his mother when he was 16. His father lost position, and narrowly prevailed in the primary even after a late ZUMA / 42

his job with a trucking company soon afterward, and Pawlenty start. M

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S that thumbnail sketch suggests—U.S. News, not the Social Security benefits formula so that high earners get nATIOnAl REvIEW; Senator Durenberger—Pawlenty is less; and—here he gets vague, which also makes him like most A not a movement conservative. But he was conserva- Republicans—reform Medicare’s payment system. Fannie and tive, if not a conservative, to apply William F. Buckley Jr.’s dis- Freddie should be privatized. Obamacare should be repealed. tinction. He ran on liberalizing gun laws, tightening abortion The Fed should rethink quantitative easing, a “preposterous” laws, and opposing tax increases, and won a three-way race. idea that is “already starting” to create “massive inflationary Governor Pawlenty dealt with a Democratic senate for his pressures.” TARP should at the very least have been tougher on entire two terms and a Democratic house for his second one. But its beneficiaries and should not be repeated. “dealt with” may not be the best choice of words. Pawlenty set He is more concerned than other Republicans about the cost a record for vetoes, partly shutting down the government during of college as an impediment to upward mobility. Higher edu- a budget battle in 2005. During another budget fight, this one in cation, he says, has a “personnel, tenure, and salary structure 2009, Pawlenty withstood pressure from the two previous that isn’t as efficient and productive as it should be.” Too many Republican governors of Minnesota—both well to his left—to colleges “try to be everything to everyone” instead of picking agree to raise taxes. He took on the transit workers’ union, which “areas of strategic significance.” He says he is excited about believed that the state should have to provide its members with the possibility that technological change will allow more col- health insurance for life after 15 years on the job. It went on legiate learning to take place in living rooms—thus cutting strike, and lost. costs and increasing access—and encouraged such a shift in Pawlenty guided Minnesota’s political culture firmly and Minnesota. sharply to the right. From 1960 to 2003, when Pawlenty took Pawlenty sees the family as a force for social stability and eco- over, the state budget grew, on average, by 21 percent every two nomic mobility. So he also breaks with contemporary Repub - years. Under Pawlenty that average fell to 4 percent. Some fees licans by suggesting that tax relief should strengthen families as rose, and so did cigarette taxes, but Pawlenty managed to resist well as promote growth. “The child tax credit could be doubled all income-tax increases. He is one of four governors to get an A or tripled,” he says, and we should do what we can “to lighten the on the Cato Institute’s most recent “fiscal-policy report card.” load for families more broadly.” Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana is widely lauded in Republican He does not agree with Governor Daniels of Indiana that we circles as a budget-cutter. But in each year they were both gover- should call a “truce” on all issues other than fiscal ones—some- nor, Cato ranked Pawlenty ahead of Daniels. thing most people have interpreted as a call for silence on social larry Jacobs, who studies politics at the University of Minne- issues. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell sota’s Humphrey School, comments, “In Minnesota, Pawlenty research that destroys human embryos. On that last issue, he was always seen as the state’s most charismatic and politically again hopes that science will come to the rescue, by making it talented politician. Here’s a guy who was a conservative fending even clearer that other types of stem-cell research hold at least as off often large Democratic majorities and [he] consistently had much promise of generating cures. His candidacy may provide over 50 percent approval and dominated public debate. He had an interesting test case of whether the combination of evangeli- a remarkable knack for appealing to people on non-political calism and conservatism plays differently with the public when it grounds. . . . Mostly it was the way he talked about public poli- comes from a midwesterner and not, as it typically has in the cy and politics. People who fundamentally disagreed with him Republican party, from a southerner. on public policy found him appealing.” For most conservatives, the biggest blot on Pawlenty’s record is his past support for cap-and-trade. He does not try to finesse the n an interview, Pawlenty volunteers that it is a mistake to issue. “It’s fair to say I’ve had a change of position and change multiply the categories of conservative. “People say, ‘I’m a of view, and the reason is it’s a dumb idea,” he tells nR. “It was I tea-party conservative,’ ‘I’m a religious conservative,’ ‘I’m a mistake.” All public officials have a few “clunkers” in their a compassionate conservative.’ But there [aren’t] 16 varieties of record, he says, expressing the hope that voters will appreciate a conservatism; there are some basic tenets of conservatism.” straightforward acknowledgment of error. He adds, “I think my Those tenets, he believes, are “time-tested principles reflected in clunkers are fewer than others’.” This particular clunker is wide- our founding documents. . . . The real challenge is to apply it to ly shared. Gingrich, Palin, Romney, and Mike Huckabee all once the challenges of our time.” supported cap-and-trade—although not all of them are as candid On paper, Pawlenty is a great candidate. He was a successful as Pawlenty about their switch. governor of a deep blue state—Minnesota last voted for a The theme of Pawlenty’s presidential campaign so far is that Republican presidential candidate in 1972—for two terms. And Americans, especially those of middle income, are losing faith he’s from an electorally important region of the country, maybe in the country’s future. Rising debt, the disappearance of the the key swing region for Republicans. “strong back” jobs his father and his father’s friends once relied Compared with their potential popular support, Republicans on, the suspicion that free markets are giving way to “crony have badly underperformed in the six states from Montana in capitalism”: All have eroded Americans’ confidence in their the west to Michigan in the east. George W. Bush tried and system. failed to win Minnesota and Wisconsin in both his runs. Even Pawlenty’s answers to these concerns do not, for the most in 2004, when Republicans had their best presidential-election part, set him apart from other Republicans. He thinks that enti- performance of the last 22 years, Democrats won more than tlement spending—he calls it “autopilot spending”—needs to four-fifths of the region’s electoral votes. At their mid-decade be reformed. Specifically, he wants to cap Medicaid spending peak, Republicans held only three of the region’s twelve Senate and divvy it up among the states to spend as they see fit; alter seats. After the 2008 elections, they were down to one.

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uT Republicans may be about to make their long- of the pack is Pawlenty’s challenge. The slowness of the current awaited breakthrough in the upper Midwest. After the presidential race works in his favor. It’s slower than the 2008 race B 2010 elections, they now have three of the region’s for two reasons. Pawlenty is one of the few candidates without a Senate seats again. They also have both houses of the legislature Fox News contract. Most of the other candidates are waiting in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. They captured the gov- to declare themselves officially in the race because when they do ernorships in Michigan and Wisconsin and came close to holding they will lose the ability to reach a lot of Iowa and New Hampshire the one in Minnesota. They picked up congressional seats in these voters while getting paid for it. And the primary rules have been states, too. Nominating Pawlenty would increase the Repub - altered to encourage states to hold their contests later. These two licans’ chances of winning either Wisconsin or Minnesota. If they factors could make Pawlenty a tortoise in a field of hares. do that, they would still need to win back several of the states Pawlenty is confident that he can raise the $30 million he needs Bush won in 2004 but McCain lost in 2008. But they wouldn’t to compete in the early primaries and to capitalize on a good have to win Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, or Iowa. The path showing there. Because Iowa is right next door to Minnesota, the to victory would get appreciably easier. national press is going to expect him to do well in its caucuses. Pawlenty is more electable than Palin, who is on the wrong end What might help him more than proximity is that he has experi- of a two-to-one split in public opinion; or Huckabee, who has ence with caucuses, since Minnesota has them too. Iowa has an never demonstrated any ability to win votes from non-evangelical easily gamed “straw poll” in August, which is a sort of virtue: voters; or Gingrich, who has enough baggage to open a louis Success there is a good measure of organization. Pawlenty will Vuitton store; or Haley Barbour, who, as a former lobbyist for have to place in the top three to stay in the race. tobacco companies and the governor of Mississippi, combines several Republican stereotypes to damaging effect. electability would probably hand Pawlenty the nomination in a one-on-one AWleNTy’S speeches are plainspoken. They rarely include race against any of these contenders. memorable lines. Some Republican insiders wonder if he He would probably beat Romney in a head-to-head race, too. P is too “Minnesota nice” to excite primary voters. In person, like Romney, Pawlenty was elected governor of a blue state in though, he comes across as warm, intelligent, and committed. He 2002. But there are at least five big differences between them that shows the kind of interest in people that is hard to fake, lingering primary voters may find tell in the Minnesotan’s favor. First, at campaign events to the consternation of his schedulers. He Tim Pawlenty is more electable than Sarah Palin, who is on the wrong end of a two-to-one split in public opinion.

Pawlenty was elected as a conservative whereas Romney ran as didn’t succeed as Minnesota’s first and only conservative gover- a moderate. Second, Pawlenty pursued a more confrontational nor in modern times by being dull. strategy: He didn’t cut any grand bipartisan deal, as Romney did A bigger problem may be, however, that he is overcompensat- with Ted Kennedy on health care. Third, and as a result, Paw - ing in response to this conventional critique of him. At CPAC in lenty’s record does not include anything as likely to offend con- 2010, he went on a tear against brie-eating elites that made him servative voters as Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law, sound like someone trying hard to impress conservative activists which made the purchase of health insurance compulsory. without really understanding them. This year’s speech got better Fourth, Pawlenty won reelection in his blue state, even in 2006, reviews, but it too seemed designed to fend off charges that he is which was a slaughterhouse of a year for Republicans. Romney, by too “Minnesota nice” to deliver a slashing partisan speech. contrast, left the governorship after one term: He was unable to Pawlenty let Daniels corner the market in attendees looking for position himself as a conservative for a presidential run while stay- thoughtfulness. If he does not find a truer pitch, Pawlenty could ing popular in his home state. Fifth, Pawlenty has an ability to con- find himself developing a reputation for being inauthentic far nect to blue-collar voters that Romney has never demonstrated. more damaging than one for being boring. He is likable and intel- That leaves two other possible contenders, both of whom are ligent—as smart as Romney, says one political operative who also unknown to most Republican primary voters nationally: knows both men well, but “coffeeshop-style smart” rather than Daniels and South Dakota senator John Thune. (I’m excluding “boardroom-style smart.” Maybe he should campaign that way. from consideration a few candidates running to promote a cause On the other hand, as one adviser puts it, “you can learn to give a or themselves but with no shot at the nomination.) either of them better speech. you can’t get rid of an individual mandate.” could be competitive with Pawlenty in a side-by-side comparison. One of the more engaging passages in Courage to Stand con- But Pawlenty is a more impressive political figure than the other cerns hockey fights. Pawlenty summarizes it for a luncheon two, both of whom come from red states that will almost cer tainly audience in Chicago: “There are rules. There is a code of ethics vote for any Republican nominee in 2012. Pawlenty has been an under the seeming thuggery.” you don’t take unfair advantages executive, unlike Thune. And he has better relations with social or pick on smaller players. you usually issue a warning before conservatives than Daniels does. taking the first shot. Pawlenty surely understands that none of If Pawlenty loses, then, it is likely to be because the primary never these rules apply in the fight he’s getting squared away for. He becomes a Pawlenty-Palin or Pawlenty-Romney race. Breaking out may yet come out with the fewest bruises.

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characterization of Kefaya as a group founded by leaders “fed up with the stagnant state of political life in Egypt.” A Frightful Actually, Kefaya’s founders were fed up with Mubarak’s cooperation with America, his support for the peace treaty with Israel, and his attempts to liberalize Egypt’s economy by shrinking its stagnating public sector. It’s no accident that the Kefaya alliance DEMOCRACY crystallized, in part, around opposition to Mubarak’s plan to hand off the presidency to his son Gamal. That was an undemocratic The Egyptian revolution’s leaders have move by Mubarak to create a hereditary dynasty, and Kefaya has an illiberal agenda been smart enough to play up the democracy angle to the Western press. Yet Gamal Mubarak was also the force behind Egypt’s eco- BY STANLEY KURTZ nomic liberalization, and that was Kefaya’s real objection to his rule. Gamal’s corrupt crony capitalism is no shining model, although the growth it sparked helped create the modernized hAT if the fundamental terms of our debate over middle class now leading the protests. Yet Kefaya’s alliance of Egypt’s revolution are wrong? Supposedly, the Communists, Nasserists, and Islamists is far from the liberal and revolt that toppled Egyptian president hosni Mu - pro-Western force it’s often made out to be. W barak presented American policymakers with an agonizing choice: Do we side with a dictator against pro-Western demonstrators who share our democratic values, or do we cast hE leaders of Kefaya, veterans of Egypt’s “1970s gener - aside a leader who has been an important strategic ally, knowing ation,” came to political consciousness when the rule of that the Muslim Brotherhood may someday seize the revolution T Nasser was at its height. Nasser’s vision of aggressive from the secular democrats who inspired it? Arab nationalism abroad and socialism at home stayed with them, In fact, the movement now eager to inherit power from Cairo’s inspiring their bitter opposition as student leaders to the openings military rulers is considerably less secular, pro-Western, and to Israel and America sponsored by Nasser’s successor, Anwar democratic than advertised. While many of the students demon- el Sadat. Egypt’s anti-Sadat student leaders of the 1970s were strating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are non-ideological supporters of divided into warring camps of Marxism, left-Nasserism, and Western-style democracy, the leadership of the revolution is dom- Islamism, yet all three factions united on foreign policy. Anti- inated by an anti-American coalition of hard-leftists and Islamists Sadat student radicals were unalterably opposed to the Camp called Kefaya (sometimes spelled Kifaya). Even if a successful David accords, and to Sadat’s efforts to decentralize the economy revolution were to avoid an Iran-style seizure by the Muslim by opening it up to Western investment. In the face of Sadat’s turn Brotherhood, another danger looms. An alliance between the to the West, the leaders of a besieged and divided student opposi- Muslim Brotherhood and the spectrum of parties represented by tion movement cultivated the virtues of cooperation. So although Kefaya would pull Egypt out of the Western orbit, in both eco- Kefaya was formally founded in 2004, it is the fruit of decades nomic and foreign policy. Not only would that damage America’s during which the anti-Sadat student radicals of the 1970s learned strategic interests, it would undercut the liberalizing economic to put aside their ideological differences and work cooperatively forces a transition to authentic democracy requires. within an anti-regime alliance. The demonstrators in Tahrir Square were informally led by a Press reports to the contrary, Kefaya has never been entirely ten-member steering committee. That committee, in turn, repre- secular. Islamists have always had a central role in the coalition. sents a “shadow legislature” that effectively serves as the protest- That includes the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been cautious ers’ government-in-waiting. The steering committee is dominated and intermittent in its work with Kefaya, since the Brotherhood is by Kefaya. In Arabic, Kefaya means “Enough!”—the protesters’ more at risk of government repression if it openly participates in favorite chant. Some steering-committee members are openly demonstrations. But another Islamist group, the al-Wasat party, a listed as representatives of Kefaya, while others represent parties bit more moderate than the Muslim Brotherhood, has also been a at the core of the Kefaya coalition. In effect, then, the Kefaya longtime member of Kefaya. alliance is the most important power behind the demonstrations. So when media accounts present Kefaya as a wide-ranging Kefaya is a coalition of Communists, socialists, Islamists, and alliance of secular parties from across the political spectrum, that nationalists in the tradition of Egypt’s second president, Gamal is highly misleading. Not only has Kefaya always had an Islamist Abdel Nasser, who advocated an “Arab socialism.” There is also component, but on both economic and foreign policy it has a pro- a smaller and more liberal component to the Kefaya coalition, but nounced anti-American and hard-left tilt. Kefaya was formed in even this leans leftist on economic policy. 2004 to “protect the Arab existence against the Zionist-American Only very rarely do press accounts make any of this clear. Back projects.” Treating Kefaya as a bastion of Western-style demo - in 2009, the New York Times more or less accurately described cratic aspirations is a bit like celebrating an international anti- Kefaya as “a loose coalition of socialist, leftist, and Islamist American confederation led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad groups.” More recently, the Times simply called it “a secular oppo- and Venezuela’s hugo Chávez as proof that the world’s Islamists sition movement.” Typical of the thin and innocuous-sounding and Marxists have turned into Jeffersonian liberals. descriptions in recent press accounts was the Washington Post’s It’s true that Kefaya advertises itself to the Western press as a bastion of democratic reform. The coalition’s formal program Mr. Kurtz is a contributing editor of NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE and a stresses rule of law, constitutional reform, and separation of pow- senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. ers. Yet this is chiefly a tactic designed to garner Western support,

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thereby undercutting Egypt’s authoritarian regime. Look closely Brotherhood control of a new regime. The Muslim Brotherhood at Kefaya’s aspirations and it’s evident that these democratic is highly sensitive to concerns in the Egyptian army and the West reforms are considered merely a “transitional” phase in a more that it may quickly stage an Iran-style takeover. So a worst-case radical program of changes. What comes next for this coalition of scenario may be avoided, at least in the short term. The Brother - Communists, socialists, Nasserists, and Islamists not only will hood will want to work with and through others for a time. disappoint Westerners, but will divide the coalition against itself. But what then? An obvious outcome of democratic elections And none of the plausible long-term aspirations fit the template of would be a majority coalition in parliament made up of the Western democratic liberalism. Muslim Brotherhood and the spectrum of leftist, Islamist, and left- So Kefaya keeps its illiberal ideologies and anti-Western ten- Nasserist parties that run Kefaya. This alliance might be filled out dencies under wraps. In effect, Kefaya has reversed the Mubarak by legislators running under the banner of Mohamed ElBaradei, regime’s favored pattern of duplicity. Whereas Mubarak disguised who works closely with Kefaya. Such a coalition would be deeply objectively pro-American policies with anti-American and anti- anti-American and anti-Israel in foreign policy, and would unite to Zionist rhetoric, Kefaya has learned to downplay its illiberal and block privatization and re-socialize the economy, Nasser-style. anti-American ideologies, tactically emphasizing its short-term Perhaps worse, the savvy and cosmopolitan politicians leading “democratic” intentions for purposes of winning over world opin- Kefaya’s political parties would know how to gradually sever ion and defusing American opposition. Egypt’s relationship with the West, without provoking a U.S.- Unsophisticated domestic critics of Kefaya have long called on supported counter-coup by the army. The treaty with Israel would it to sponsor more openly anti-American demonstrations. To this, be temporarily affirmed, and the Suez Canal would remain open. one of Kefaya’s leaders replies: “The burning of [a] thousand Slowly but surely, however, American interests would be under- American . . . flags will not change what a real nationalist regime cut, as Egypt sought realignment with other international partners. in Egypt can change.” In other words, Kefaya’s leaders under- With economic privatization halted and reversed, the forces dri- stand that soft-pedaling anti-Americanism for the purposes of suc- ving Egypt closer to authentic liberal democracy would decline. cessfully replacing the Mubarak regime is the best way to defeat In the long run, depending on the appeal over time of a newly American interests in the end. It would be a mistake, then, to take legitimized Muslim Brotherhood, we would confront either a the absence of overt anti-Americanism among the demonstrators move toward full-scale Islamism or a renewal of left-Nasserist in Tahrir Square as proof of a pro-Western attitude. anti-American nationalism. So the choice we face in a new Egypt Kefaya knows we are watching. Pamphlets distributed by the is not between pro-Western democracy and the risks of an Islamist Kefaya-steered leadership in Tahrir Square warn the protesters takeover, but between different forms of anti-Americanism. that the eyes of the world are upon them. Kefaya head George Isaac (often spelled Ishak) recently told CNN: “you cannot call us Kefaya or Muslim Brotherhood or leftists or anything. We talk INy and weak liberal and pro-capitalist parties do exist in today as Egyptians.” Isaac protests too much. yet so far he and Egypt, but they are the smallest part of the mix. Perhaps, his colleagues have succeeded in steering the attention of the T with American help, these liberal elements could ally with American press away from the shadow-alliance of leftists and remnants of the regime’s National Democratic party to hold off a Islamists that stood behind the demonstrators in Tahrir Square. left-Islamist anti-American coalition. This would be particularly Kefaya’s leaders are perfectly aware that America’s “neocon- true if the new president were not, like Mohamed ElBaradei, a servatives” see democratization as a way to move Egypt toward a cat’s paw of the Kefaya coalition. But a nationalist president, such stable pro-Western posture, at least over the long term. Kefaya has as Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa, would likely work contempt for these plans. Kefaya’s leaders were using the aspira- closely with Kefaya and the Brotherhood to pull Egypt away from tions of Western democratizers to put pressure on Mubarak, in the the U.S. service of a regime change designed to undercut American inter- Without a president anchored in the military and willing to ests. Manar Shorbagy’s revealing 2007 account of Kefaya in the work with America on the model of Mubarak, it’s hard to imagine journal Public Culture reports that Kefaya’s leaders rejected an how even a coalition of tiny liberal parties and the old regime’s invitation from the U.S. embassy to join the audience at Secretary National Democratic party could afford to openly side with the of State Condoleezza Rice’s 2005 address on democracy at United States. After all, the Mubarak regime was distinguished by Cairo’s American University. Shorbagy considers the very fact of its use of anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric to cover its work the invitation evidence of “willful, neoconservative ignorance of with the U.S. Any electoral coalition openly carrying forward political life in Egypt today.” In Shorbagy’s view, Kefaya leaders Egypt’s current foreign policy would likely be doomed to failure. have long made a practice of successfully exploiting the mis- This is something Americans might want to keep in mind when placed hopes of American conservatives to foster their decidedly contemplating the emergence of an elected parliament. Such a anti-Western plans. legislature could swiftly fall under the sway of illiberal parties Many of Kefaya’s leaders fear the Muslim Brotherhood, even whose devotion to democracy is decidedly tactical and temporary. as they work with it in coalition. Shorbagy judged in 2007 that The important thing is to open our eyes to the realities of Kefaya was far too weak to stand up to the Brotherhood in free Egyptian politics. Press reports are idealizing and white-washing elections. Obviously, Kefaya’s prominent role in the coalition that extremist and anti-American elements in the leadership of a sup- provided informal leadership to the demonstrations in Tahrir posedly pro-Western movement. The people directing the revolu- Square has given the movement new momentum. The Muslim tion understand these Western hopes and are well placed to exploit Brotherhood is once again actively cooperating with Kefaya. The them. The best antidote to dangerously wishful thinking is careful Brotherhood agreed to take only a 15 percent share of seats in attention to the background and ideology of the political forces the shadow legislature, and that has dampened worries about actually driving the Egyptian revolution.

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his fist to halt the platoon, then knelt down and scratched at the dirt. He took out wire cutters, snipped a few wires, and held up WITH THE two small boards wrapped in tape. Glued to the underside of each board was a sliver of metal. When a foot pressed down on the boards, the metal plates came together, completing an electrical Warriors circuit connecting a flashlight battery to a plastic jug filled with explosives. Yaz attached a small charge to the IED (improvised explosive device) and blew it up, and the patrol continued. How our Marines go about the business In 100 days of patrolling four kilometers north of the Sangin of destroying the Taliban district center, Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment had found 115 IEDs. Another 14 had exploded. Of the BY BING WEST 136 Marines in Kilo, nine had been killed and 35 severely wounded. Of four platoon commanders, one had been killed and another had lost a leg to a mine. (The unit designations relevant Patrol Base Fires, Sangin District, to this article are, from largest to smallest, regiment, battalion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan company, platoon, and squad. Lieu ten ant Garcia’s platoon con- HE view from this platoon outpost in southern Af ghan - tained 50 Marines, who were divided into three squads.) i stan is unobstructed, both visually and strategically. After discovering the first IED, we walked north at a steady, On all sides stretch flat, bare, winter farmlands dotted careful pace. Not one farmer was out tilling the lands sown with T with walled compounds. The strategy is aggressive mines. Yaz again clenched his fist, knelt down, disarmed and patrolling to kill and drive out the Taliban, who have acted as the blew up an IED. The patrol continued for a while, then halted rural government here for 15 years. suspiciously at the edge of a large field. On the far side were Beginning in 2006, British forces held on to a few square kilo- two long compound walls, dotted with “murder holes”—small meters that constituted the district center. Their strategy was to peepholes for the Taliban rifle barrels. fight defensively while trying to win over the population. The Marines peered at the wall through the telescopic sights on According to British brigadier general Edward Butler, “the cen- their rifles. Suddenly, the squad leader, Sgt. Philip McCulloch, tral theme of the counterinsurgency, winning the hearts and fired a single shot. minds, was still core to our plans.” In accord with that plan, the “Scratch one stinky,” he said. British Provincial Reconstruction Team poured millions of (A few months earlier, in Sangin, a rocket had slammed into pounds into development projects. As a result, the economy Mac’s vehicle, knocking him out. The doctors wanted to send flourished. But the Pashtun farmers remained at best stolidly him back to the States, but he kicked up such a fracas that he neutral and at worst sullenly hostile. Outside the district center, remained hospitalized in Afghanistan until he talked his way the Taliban remained entrenched in the farmlands, called the back to Kilo Company. A few days before I arrived, his squad had Green Zone. The farmers supported them, or at least obeyed pursued a Taliban gang for two kilometers. Af ter a bullet creased their rules. the inside of Mac’s thigh, he had avoided treatment at the aid In the fall of 2010, the British forces left, having suffered 106 station, fearing he might be pulled to the rear.) killed in four years. U.S. Marines took over and changed the Mac’s squad spread out along the edge of the field, which strategy from trying to win the cooperation of the farmers into a marked their northern patrol boundary, and waited for a fight. straight-up assault to drive the Taliban from the 40-kilometer- The rear security stopped a man driving past on a motorcycle. long valley. The British lost an average of 26 men per year on the He wore clean clothes and his hands bore no calluses. He said defensive; the Marines lost 26 men in 100 days on the offensive, he was an out-of-work mullah. while driving the Taliban north. Lieutenant Garcia sensed that the man was a “dicker,” part of The patrol base, named Fires because of the intensity of the the Taliban’s unarmed warning network. But, lacking any evi- daily fighting, was at the northern edge of the Marine advance. dence, he told him to leave. On his third combat tour, Garcia When I arrived in mid-January, Lt. Vic Garcia, the seasoned was the sole officer at Patrol Base Fires. He accompanied most platoon commander, handed me two tourniquets. patrols, while letting the squad leaders run the show. Garcia was “If someone goes down near you on patrol,” he said, “wrap the second officer to command the platoon at Fires. His prede- him real tight and watch where you step.” cessor had been shot and killed. The unquestioned leader, he kept Garcia explained that the Taliban roam in small gangs among a short leash on McCulloch’s attack instincts. the farm compounds, sow mines, and attack from the flanks. After waiting a while at the field, Garcia signaled to When we set out on a combat patrol, the 15 Marines walked in McCulloch to head back south. single file across brown, furrowed farmlands suggestive of New “The stinkies aren’t playing,” Garcia said. “The game’s not England in early spring. Lance Cpl. Colby Yazzie, a full-blooded in their favor.” Navajo Indian, swept a narrow path with his metal detector, while Like football teams, fighting units at the tactical level display his Irish-American partner, Lance Cpl. Kyle Doyle, watched out distinct styles. The Taliban style reminded me of the rice paddies for snipers. south of Da Nang in 1966, where the Viet Cong used the same Near a footbridge across an irrigation canal, Yaz clenched tactics and the Marines countered with small, aggressive patrols. The tactics are simple and effective. The Taliban’s warning net Mr. West’s latest book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out allows small teams to slip into tree lines in front of the Marine of Afghanistan, is reviewed in this issue. patrols. When the patrol file crosses an open field, the Taliban

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open fire, hoping for a hit or a rash rush by the Marines across a minefield. The Marines’ counter is equally simple. One element peels off to flank the enemy, while another keeps aimed fire on the enemy position. If the Taliban remains too long in a fixed location, indirect fire (fire without a line of sight to the target, as from artillery) is called in. Every Marine has a telescopic rifle, and most of the fleeting targets are about 400 meters distant. Yaz was leading the patrol back by a different route across a furrowed field when he stopped a third time. Again he uncovered a pressure-plate IED. “That’s crazy,” McCulloch said. “An IED in the middle of nowhere.” That IED was sure to blow the legs off a passing farmer—or a Marine. Yaz pointed to three small rocks several feet away, a tipoff for a passing Taliban gang that there was a mine in the vicinity. A few minutes later, we walked past a crumbled wall, startling two dark brown coyotes. Again Yaz stopped, knelt, and disarmed a pressure plate. Four mines in the path of one patrol, and he had found them all.

HEn Kilo arrived in early October, 1st Sgt. Chris Patrolling in Sangin Melendez said to the troops, “I’m telling you W now—some of you will go home missing arms or legs. time to flee the area. Mac found a pile of spent cartridges behind I know that sounds hard, but God won’t give you any burden you a wall and retraced his steps back to Garcia. can’t handle. So go out there, kill the enemy, and don’t flinch.” The tone of a combat outfit is set from the top. The regimental The worst incident occurred in mid-October, just after the commander, Col. Paul Kennedy, insisted upon discipline and Marines moved into Patrol Base Fires. When a squad patrol aggressiveness. That ethos permeated the regiment. The Marines slipped into a canal to avoid machine-gun fire, one Marine shaved every morning in the field and left no plastic food wrap- stepped on a pressure plate. Rushing to staunch his bleeding, pings in the farm fields. On-call mortars tracked every patrol another Marine ran forward and detonated another mine. The movement. “Close to zero” was the watchword, meaning that squad leader went down next, hit by the machine gun. A corps- every engagement should end with Marines standing on the man running to help the injured triggered the third mine, losing enemy positions. both legs. In this case, having closed to zero only to find the enemy had As the dead and wounded were evacuated by helicopter, the fled, Mac’s squad returned to Patrol Base Fires shortly before Taliban pressed forward. They had diverted a nearby canal to dark. The Taliban don’t move at night in areas where the Amer - flood the fields around the patrol base. Capt. nick Johnson, the ican thermal sights can detect them; and the Ma rines don’t patrol Kilo Company commander, and every available Marine at the in the dark, when they can’t detect the mines. nearby company base waded through the fields in chest-high At Fires, there were no showers, no lights, and no Internet. mud to carry ammunition to the patrol base. Johnson then Evening talk centered on how to stay alive and kill. Snail mail gathered the exhausted Marines inside Fires. took three to four weeks. Bountiful packages from the States “In 1950,” he said, “this battalion walked out of the Chosin included delicious cookies, warm socks, fleece linings for the Reservoir in north Korea, beating off thousands of Chinese sleeping bags, touching notes from third-graders, and piles of soldiers. now it’s your turn. Come morning, we’re taking the leftover Halloween candies. The men slept warmly in their bags fight to them.” inside small cave-like indentations in the side of a thick com- After that, every day that the platoon went out, they killed pound wall. more and learned more. In the morning, the patrol went out again, pushing north two Back at the crumbled wall, Garcia decided to leave the mines kilometers to a cluster of compounds flying the white flag of that lurked among the ruins to the coyotes and return to base. As the Taliban. Through the centuries, armies have held aloft their they were walking by the field where Yaz had found the third battle streamers to signify group solidarity and power. It is a way IED, the crack! from a high-powered sniper rifle sent everyone of saying, “Here we are, all ye foolish enough to give challenge.” to the prone. They flopped down just as a PKM machine gun (a In response, the platoon had rigged a flagpole at the patrol base long-range, reliable weapon) opened up with short bursts. Garcia and proudly flew the Stars and Stripes, with the maroon-and-gold sent McCulloch around to the left to outflank the machine gun. Marine flag beneath. Mac saw one man sprinting away, leaving behind a jug of explo- The Taliban bluffed as though they would defend their flags. sives, and he heard the bolt of a sniper rifle open and close, a sure Their opening machine-gun burst kicked up a dust line just two sign the sniper was nearby. But it took Yaz a while to sweep for feet to the right of Yaz and McCulloch. The Marines lost no time hidden mines. This gave the sniper and the machine-gun crew in falling prone and establishing return fire.

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The Taliban were split into three firing positions. The nearest the British are our closest allies and comrades; they will attack was a tree line along a ditch 300 meters to the Marines’ front. side-by-side with us. At the top level, though, there is a political Tiny figures were darting back and forth, popping off a few shots divergence between us and them about risk-taking and casual- from behind one tree trunk and then another. When the Marine ties. snipers hit one and a first sergeant visiting from regimental head- Our grunts in Sangin view the Pashtun farmers as bystanders, quarters hit a second one, the Taliban fire slackened. often aligned with the Taliban. Generally the farmers are seen Garcia directed Mac to flank the compound from the west. He fleeing or closing the compound gates when a patrol approaches. then told another sergeant to call in mortars. An F-18 radioed to The people know the Taliban shoot anytime from anywhere. Garcia that from 8,000 feet their camera pod had zoomed in on Whether the passivity and self-sacrifice of the farmers is due to two men with rifles on the roof of Compound 38. Garcia con- intimidation or to religious or tribal solidarity is of no interest to firmed that a prior patrol had reported 38 as abandoned. He the passing Marines, who know the fight is between them and the radioed to battalion, where the air officer cleared the F-18 to Taliban. Although they recognize the sheer hard work and misery make a gun-strafing run. Unfortunately, it was low on fuel and of the farmers and say time and again that “the kids back in had to return to base. So Garcia authorized a mortar strike on the the States don’t know how good they have it,” there’s no talk of tree line in front of the compound. liberating the people. Garcia’s coordinated moves took about ten minutes to execute Down to the squad level, most leaders are on their second or and ten decades to develop. No infantry unit in the world can third combat tour. When they are hit, they hit back twice as hard. match the intelligence, the teamwork, and the coordination of an They are sympathetic to the people, but they’re not persuaded American squad working with mortars, artillery, and air. they can win over the tribes enough to make them go against the Usually Taliban in the open pull back rapidly once under in - Taliban, including members of their own families. direct fire. Sure enough, the Taliban fire stopped. Mac’s squad The Americans at Sangin see themselves first and foremost as moved forward, blew a breach in the compound wall, searched warriors, reflecting the sentiments of the regimental commander, inside, and found only blankets and cooking utensils. The Colonel Kennedy. I first met him in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004, when Marines pulled down one Taliban flag, ignored a few others, and he was a battalion commander fighting up and down the streets returned to base. as the battle exploded in nearby Fallujah. Kennedy’s battalion of When we got in from the patrol, Sgt. John Browning, the 800 Marines had 35 killed in action. During that battle, he wrote leader of the snipers in the platoon, walked over to a wall with to the families back in the States, “Previous to yesterday the ter- stick figures carved into the baked mud. Taking out his knife, he rorists thought that we were soft enough to challenge. . . . By the carved in two more figures. The Marines at Fires loathe the end of the evening, the local hospital was full of their dead. . . . It Taliban. They call them “stinkies” after the repellent smell of will be a cold day in Hell before we are taken for granted again.” feces. They scorn their tactic, when under fire, of running to a In Sangin, an assassin almost killed Kennedy during a meeting group of women and children, knowing the Marines will not with tribal elders to discuss the withdrawal of the Taliban. The shoot. The Pashtun farmers tolerate or cooperate with the next day, Lieutenant Garcia responded by pushing his patrol base Taliban, who walk in their midst and are not pointed out. The Tal - one kilometer farther north into Taliban territory. The Taliban had i ban grab children to shield them on their motorcycles, and the read the situation correctly: Ken ne dy was their enemy, implaca- parents let it happen. The people will point out mines on the roads bly moving forward. The Tal i ban throughout Helmand Province they use, but they won’t reveal who put the mines there. were not accustomed to the warrior ethos of the Marines. Marja The platoon at Outpost Fires has killed 121 of the enemy. We and Garm sir, the enemy hubs at the southern end of the province, applaud pilots who shoot down five enemy aircraft by calling collapsed in 2010. At the northern end, the campaign in Sangin them “aces”; grunts win no such public praise, but they do keep is likely to force the Taliban out of the valley by the end of this score. At Patrol Base Fires, Garcia’s 50 Marines engaged in the summer. heaviest sustained combat in Afghanistan. In just three months, After that, it’s an open question whether the Marine battalions two Marines were killed, two others had limbs amputated, and will stay to manage economic projects and mentor officials eight more were evacuated with other severe wounds. In re - appointed by Pres. Hamid Karzai, or will pull back, placing sponse to this 20 percent loss rate, Garcia’s platoon has asked for Afghan soldiers with Marine advisers in the lead. a larger battle space to pursue the Taliban. Sangin is not a microcosm of the war. It is not possible to extrapolate from Sangin to all of Afghanistan. Across the east and south of Afghanistan, the scale of the fighting and the perfor- N Sangin, the British had spent tens of millions of pounds on mance of coalition units are too varied to single out any one dis- “non-kinetic” (non-shooting) counterinsurgency, trying to trict as typical. At the tip of the spear in the south, the morale of I win support by building clinics and schools. They opened up the grunts in Kilo Company is high. They don’t reflect on past the main market, expanding trade and production. They focused policy errors or the future of Afghanistan. Strategy is the business on the people, but the people did not respond. When the British of generals and elected officials. The grunts understand that left Sangin, the Taliban still held the countryside and the roads American or Afghan politics may create a good, bad, or murky leading to the market. ending to Amer i ca’s involvement. Instead of becoming entangled The U.S. Marines focused on clearing the enemy, with no in academic theories about winning hearts and minds, Sergeant expectation that the people would shift allegiances until the McCulloch, Lieutenant Garcia, and Colonel Kennedy measure Taliban were soundly beaten. This approach has a price, because themselves by whe ther they dominate on the battlefield. you can’t clear heavily mined farmlands without losses; but you That spirit—that warrior ethos—will always be critical to our can’t win a war by staying on the defensive. On the battlefields, nation’s security.

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The Bent Pin BY FLORENCE KING The Middling Class

HEn American Anglophiles need a fix our the Countess will slip on it and have a miscarriage. Which is drug of choice is Masterpiece Theatre, but exactly what happens. And of course the fetus was male. the days of savoring Edwardian class hier- That long arm of coincidence and the parodic inclusion of W archies may be over. Our all-time favorite, soap in a soap opera are surprising coming from screenwriter Upstairs, Downstairs, needed Alistair Cooke to explain such Julian Fellowes, who wrote Gosford Park, but more disap- delphic mysteries as titles of nobility and servants’ liveries, pointing are the casual borrowings. The Titanic, though cen- but the latest export gets right down to the staples of sex, tral to Upstairs, Downstairs, at least is an actual historical greed, and murder in what the U.K.’s Telegraph called “a event, but the same cannot be said for the rose contest in Mrs. soap opera in starched collars.” Miniver. There the ranking chatelaine of the village wins the Welcome to Downton Abbey, which opens with the sink- prize every year simply because she’s the ranking chatelaine, ing of the Titanic. The cousin and heir of Robert Crawley, while the humble grower with a better rose obsequiously Earl of Grantham, is drowned along with the heir’s son, thus congratulates her. Fellowes uses the identical scene to illus- threatening the earldom with extinction. Robert has three trate aristocratic privilege and, when democratic objections daughters but they cannot inherit the title, nor the vast wealth finally triumph, the inevitability of change. To Fellowes’s that goes with it, because the property is “entailed,” i.e., it credit, his ranking chatelaine is also his ranking scene- must pass in its entirety to the closest male relative. The plan stealer: Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess, whose had been for Robert’s eldest daughter, Lady Mary, to marry opinions and standards make Stonehenge seem fragile. (“An the heir’s son, become the next countess, and keep the title Englishman would never die in someone else’s house, espe- in the family, but now they need another bachelor Crawley. cially someone he didn’t know.”) Enter a distant cousin, a young and idealistic Manchester Viewers who love to hate the English class system will lawyer named Matthew Crawley. The good news is that he is learn something about our own. My favorite scene is the psy- not married. The bad news is that it is the end of the world as chodrama between middle-class Matthew and the valet the aristocratic Crawleys know it, for Matthew is middle- assigned to him. Used to dressing himself, he tells the earl, class. Lady Mary is urged to charm him but they clash, and “I feel like a doll!” while the valet comes close to tears as Mary rubs it in by flirting with a houseguest, a dashing young he tells the butler, “I just stand there watching a man get Turkish diplomat, Pamuk. dressed!” Matthew must be the one to yield and he does, first Mind you, there have been only four episodes, but here is with cufflinks, then with coats, and finally with a compli- just some of what happens next: ment for the expert removal of a stain that leaves the valet Thomas, a gay footman, makes a pass at Pamuk, who suffused with pride. Matthew learns that to make fun of a threatens to report him unless he takes the Turk to Lady person’s work is to make fun of the person, but ostensibly Mary’s bedroom late that night. (Downton Abbey is much liberal Americans still chortle about “flipping hamburgers too big for him to find it by himself.) Pamuk makes love to at McDonald’s.” Lady Mary and then inconsiderately dies in her bed. She, her Period miniseries like this one also hold out another les- lady’s maid, and her mother, Countess Cora, carry him back son: A ruling class lifts all boats. When the Downton cook to his own room, but they are seen by a scullery maid who finally admits that she is almost blind, the earl calls her into subsequently plunges into depression. Meanwhile, the butler the library. She thinks he’s going to give her her notice but is being blackmailed over his past as a music-hall performer; instead he tells her that he is sending her to London for a the cook is going blind; the chauffeur is a Socialist who cataract operation which he will pay for, and that she will secretly escorts the liberal Lady Sybil to suffragette meet- recuperate in his townhouse and be looked after there by her ings; Lady Sybil turns up at dinner corsetless and wearing best friend among the maids, whom he is sending with her. bloomers; Lady Edith, who hates Lady Mary, pries the story The cook staggers back, steadies herself on a table, and of the corpse-moving out of the haunted scullery maid and gasps, “I’m afraid I have to sit down in your Lordship’s pres- writes an anonymous letter to the Turkish ambassador expos- ence.” ing her sister. Advised to marry soon to quash gossip, Lady He motions her to a chair. His words bespoke noblesse Mary tries to make up with Matthew but just as he seems to oblige, but hers had a gracefulness, an elegance even, that come around, her mother, the 40ish Countess Cora, finds that seemed to belie her station but actually sprang from it. She she is pregnant. If it’s a boy, they won’t need middle-class learned to talk that way by working all her life for the ruling Matthew anymore, so Lady Mary drops him. class. For some two centuries domestic service was about the But wait . . . Countess Cora’s lady’s maid, normally an only job for ordinary people other than farm or factory work, expert eavesdropper, for once gets a story wrong and thinks and millions entered it. They saw and heard aristocrats up that Countess Cora intends to discharge her. To get even, she close and copied them, passing on what they learned until the places a bar of soap—soap!—on the wet bathroom floor so whole world came to associate “good manners” with the English. Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404. Equality has given us English soccer fans.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

for the fuel of the future. Adorned with see someone else wearing—and the use a tiny, jeweled sad-face symbol, the rib- of greenscreen technology will allow bon acknowledges that the celebrity- them to make those adjustments. Ad - wearer has utilized a private jet in the ditionally, national brands such as What Do All of Those previous 72 hours. Doritos, Geico Insurance, and pain reliever Celebrex will “sponsor” cer- Ribbons Mean? SPOTTED: Please have your pets tain celebrity-wearers by purchasing An Oscar™ Watcher’s Guide spayed or neutered! time on their ribbons.

EVERyONE LOVES MOVIES! And SCIMITAR-SHAPED: Solidarity with the DIRTY YELLOW: We <3 Tunisia! Also, everyone loves movie stars! And every- people of Bahrain! (Keep your eyes the desert-sand hue connotes solidarity one especially loves movie stars with a peeled! We don’t expect many of with the uprisings in the entire Middle message! these.) East, and where appropriate, with the So while you’re watching your fa - governments attempting to retain con- vorite stars walk along the red carpet, STARS AND STRIPES: I support the trol. you might wonder about those ribbons troops! Especially since November they’re all wearing. So many colors and 2008, these have become very popu- PURPLE: Let’s cure colon cancer! Icky. textures and shapes and designs! What lar. When a tiny, jeweled “*” symbol is Don’t expect many of these. In general, do they all mean? attached, it connotes that the celebrity- celebrities don’t like mentioning the Feel free to snip out this guide and wearer supports the troops, but on a colon. keep it with you as you enjoy the case-by-case, troop-by-troop basis. Oscar™ telecast. RED: Let’s cure AIDS! Probably won’t BROWN: I compost! This signifies that see many of these, either. AIDS as a PINK: This is an easy one! Pink ribbons the celebrity-wearer gardens and lives cause has slipped in prestige, below celebrate breast-cancer research and in an organically sustainable way, and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, but advocate for a cure! Isn’t it great that that his or her personal residence(s) remains one level above celiac disease world-famous celebrities work so hard are low-impact. With a small “*” sym- and toenail fungus. to eliminate breast cancer by going to bol attached, connotes that the celebri- the trouble to attach—or get a stylist to ty-wearer may not in fact live in an BLACK: This is to remind all viewers of attach—a ribbon to their glamorous organically sustainable way all the the tragedy in Tucson, and to express outfits? time. wishes for a full recovery to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. When adorned with DOLLAR-BILL GREEN: I support the STRIPED RED AND WHITE: Health care a small pin in the shape of a broken Democratic party. for all! The wearer of this ribbon is radio microphone, condemns the advocating a national health-insurance far-right talk-radio personalities who PYRAMID-SHAPED: This shows soli - system roughly equivalent to the encouraged and celebrated the Tucson darity with the people of Egypt as they health care provided to qualified mem- shooting. utilize powerful social media like Face- bers of the Screen Actors Guild, which book and Twitter to construct an entire- includes no-co-pay prescription anti- DROOPING, ANY COLOR: Any ribbon ly new government! (If the ribbon is anxiety medications, breast implants, that’s either poorly pinned or drooping pinned using a gun- or tank-shaped lip filling, and other “med-spa” ser- connotes the personal involvement of object, then the pin acknowledges the vices. the celebrity-wearer in the fight against powerful role of the Egyptian military Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. CFS is in the future of that troubled region.) BARBED WIRE: Close Guantanamo! an often-misunderstood disease that Very popular in past years, but totally afflicts thousands of people, but is A SWASTIKA WITH A LINE THROUGH IT: absent since 2009. especially severe among those who The celebrity-wearer is taking a coura- have insufficient or poorly trained geous stand against the horrors of the ELECTRIC GREENSCREEN: Some cele - domestic help. Nazi regime and the Holocaust. brities have elected to wear an “electric greenscreen” ribbon, which allows BEIGE: Let’s bring civility back to the GREEN: Celebrate the earth! Movie Oscar™ telecast producers to digitally discourse! When accompanied by a stars love the earth! The attachment of superimpose any color or design onto small Republican elephant pin, con- a shape-specific pin or charm to the rib- the ribbon from the control room. notes: Especially you, Republicans! bon—a tiny windmill, for instance, or Certain celebrities may elect to rotate a bright-yellow button—signifies that their causes throughout the night—or ROLLED-UP $100 BILL: Free Charlie particular celebrity’s personal choice perhaps will choose to adopt one they Sheen!

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latest book, How the West Was Lost, Bailouts documents an undeniable link Ms. Moyo proceeds along two distinct between the concentration of Western Travails, lines of argument: Austrian and then financial interests in countries abroad Malthusian. Offering a short history of and the size and conditionality of IMF Chinese and the U.S. housing bubble and the subse- loans offered to them), then it would be quent financial crisis, she composes no surprise to discover a similar element variations on a theme from the Austrian of economic self-interest in Lend-Lease. American school of economics, identifying a mas- But even if we grant that political ras- sive misallocation of capital caused by cality shaped Lend-Lease, it does not KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON malinvestment in housing as the fun - follow that “America peaked economi- damental problem. From that jumping- cally after the war, in the 1950s, as a off point, she launches into a curiously result” of the initiative, as Ms. Moyo zero-sum account of the modern global claims. For one thing, it is simply not economy, a Malthusian meditation on true that the U.S. peaked economically depleted resources and feral competition in the 1950s. For another, Lend-Lease for them. Unhappily, we get less of amounted to about $50 billion, which Moyo the economic realist and more of was paid back over the course of 50 Moyo the Goldman Sachs dealmaker, years. the Marshall Plan, combined with one who sees the past, present, and fu- the immediate post-war aid that preced- ture as a grand global corporate-strategy ed it, saw a voluntary transfer of wealth exercise—the Great Game meets Let’s from the U.S. to Europe of some $25 bil- How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Make a Deal. She deploys this method lion, or about half of what the U.S. was Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead, of analysis in the service of the most due in repayment under Lend-Lease. the by Dambisa Moyo (Farrar, Straus, voguish of contemporary phobias: the $25 billion balance was a lot of money in 240 pp., $25) purported decline of the U.S. vis-à-vis 1948, but not the stuff of a national pat- China. Relying, it seems, more on her rimony: It was equivalent only to about t does not diminish the force and MBA than on her economics doctorate, $220 billion in today’s dollars—or about elegance of Dead Aid, the 2009 she analyzes the relationship between the size of the deficit that the U.S. will polemic against Western foreign- the West and “the Rest” as though it were run between New Year’s and Valentine’s I aid practices, to acknowledge that thoroughly a matter of balance sheets Day this year. Not an unappreciable sum the book’s influence was less a product and personnel-development programs, of money, to be sure, and not one without of what was between its covers than of China Inc.’s good investments and economic consequence. But in the con- of who was on its cover: the author, America Inc.’s underperforming ones. text of the immediate post-war order— Dambisa Moyo, is a Zambian, a woman, this approach leads her into error, one that found practically all of the an economist trained at Oxford and most often in the form of gross and inde- world’s major industrial powers save the Harvard, and a veteran of Goldman fensible overstatement. to take her first U.S. bombed to cinders—it can hardly Sachs. Her argument in Dead Aid—that important example, she views the World be said to have been the most significant government-to-government aid from the War II–era Lend-Lease initiative more factor. It is difficult to believe that an West to Africa does more harm than as a shrewd business arrangement on the economist of Ms. Moyo’s sophistication good, by providing vast opportunity for part of the U.S. than as part of a pre - believes the thing she has written. corruption and blunting the edge of emptive American campaign against the It is the failure to appreciate the unique- reform—is elementary public-choice Nazis. Such a view is of course very ness of the U.S.’s position in 1945 that economics, but the world of politics and much of a piece with her foreign-aid underlies so much of the thoughtlessly policy is strangely sentimental, and the criticism: If that foreign aid is really less alarmist narrative of American post-war fact that this familiar observation was about furthering the interests of the decline, and Ms. Moyo is by no means being made by an African woman lent it world’s poor and more about sustaining unique in falling victim to this defect. In a moral authority that the policy solons a mutually beneficial relationship be - truth, the most meaning ful measure of find difficult to discover in, say, a Milton tween self-interested Western financial U.S. economic performance—the growth Friedman or a Gordon tullock. In the institutions and corrupt third World in real GDP per capita—is astonishingly marketplace of ideas, marketing matters, elites (and if you do not buy Ms. Moyo’s regular, clicking along at about 2 percent and it is a lucky thing for the world that narrative, have a gander at the clear, a year as far back as the data go. there’s such a clear-eyed view of foreign aid is empirical analysis of the subject offered a little dip in the Great Depression, a being advanced by such a potent advo- by Prof. Mark Copelovitch of the Uni - little bump for World War II, a little dip cate. versity of Wisconsin, whose study The after the war (when Moyo thinks the turning her attention to the Western International Monetary Fund in the economy was peaking), and a little dip world’s own economic unease in her Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and for the Great Recession.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS During that same period, China has about the number of Chinese it has in been through something very like going employment (a volume proposition) and SEARCH to hell and back: scourging by Japan, less about the profit earned.” In layman’s scourging by civil war, scourging by terms, China is propping up marginal or Mao, Communism, famine, and 20-odd unprofitable enterprises for the purpose OUR years’ worth of reform efforts. China’s of preventing the mass unemployment story, Ms. Moyo fails to appreciate, is to which its politicized, centrally ARCHIVES not a new one. A very poor and largely planned economy is naturally inclined. agricultural society can be radically Oc casionally, the authorities in Beijing transformed through forced, rapid indus- will acknowledge as much, announcing HERE trialization—a project for which a brutal plans to reduce overcapacity in this in - police state is uniquely well suited. The dustrial sector or the other. (Practitioners most ready point of comparison is Russia of Obamanomics will be distressed to AND OTHER LEADING under Lenin and Stalin: Just as the Tom learn that “green energy” work, especial- Friedmans of the time mistook the Soviet ly on wind power, is to come under the JOURNALS OF industrialization project as evidence that scalpel.) OPINION ON THE a new model of centrally planned, scien- American consumer overconsumption tifically administered economic devel- is deeply and complexly linked with PROGRESSIVE AND opment had been discovered, so too Chinese consumer-goods overproduc- do eastward-turning analysts in our tion, and also with Beijing’s once- CONSERVATIVE SIDES; own time—be they Sinophiles or Sino - ravenous appetite, now abating, for phobes—mistake this easily understood dollar-denominated assets. The relation- 1,000,000 PAGES phenomenon for the emergence of a ship obviously is unsustainable, but a OF HISTORY AND “Beijing consensus,” a new economic radical disruption in that relationship model that marries the forms and dy- means, for the U.S., a bit of consumer- CULTURE. namism of private enterprise to the price inflation, and probably higher strong hand of state intervention. interest rates for both public and private Ms. Moyo adds a new twist to this, debt. For China, though, it means the HARPERS placing her “the West vs. the Rest” com- possibility of mass unemployment, the petition in the context of acute resource exposure of a corrupt and crony-ridden THE NATION scarcity of the neo-Malthusian variety. banking system that makes Lehman “The bottom line is this,” she writes: Brothers look like a bar of solid gold, THE NEW REPUBLIC “Given where forecasts for resources are and the risk of scenes unfolding in (energy, land, water) there is no way that Beijing rather like the ones that have COMMONWEAL one billion Chinese can live like 300 unfolded lately in Cairo, Amman, Tunis, million Americans. Ceteris paribus, this etc. The political tension that has accom- COMMENTARY is not possible; but it is exactly Western panied the recent uptick in consumer- standards of living that the Chinese price inflation in China, a relatively mild NATIONAL REVIEW (never mind the hundreds of millions of phenomenon, suggests the outline of people from other emerging states) are what troubles are in store. Remember, NACLA striving for.” Ms. Moyo, as though she this is transpiring in a country that is were auditioning for a role in the Obama about half as wealthy as Botswana and THE NEW YORK administration, writes admiringly of significantly poorer than Jamaica. As REVIEW OF BOOKS Chi nese “investments” in access to raw investment managers go, I’ll still take ma terials, natural resources, and energy. Warren Buffett. THE AMERICAN The model again is corporate competi- As many a chagrined futures investor tion: The U.S. invested in residential real can attest, energy investments are a SPECTATOR estate, which was a poor investment; touchy thing: Timing matters, and con - China invests in airports and nifty trains, ditions change in unpredictable ways. which she believes are good invest- Ms. Moyo writes as though she expects HTTP://METASEARCH. ments. China and the U.S. to come to blows, But how clever are these Chinese state fighting tooth and talon over the last OPINIONARCHIVES.COM investment managers? The evidence from piece of coal and the last puddle of oil on Ms. Moyo’s own book suggests: not God’s green earth. I predict that there especially. “China has become a volume- will be massive investments in energy maximizer with near absolute advantage, efficiency at just about the time that as opposed to profit-maximizers using energy prices make such investments comparative advantage, favored by attractive. The neo-Malthusian resource- classical Ricardian theory. What this in scarcity story does not seem much im- effect means is that China cares more pressed by the fact that demand curves

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slope downward—i.e., that there is less demand for a product as prices rise. Alternative sources of energy are abun- What It dant and ready to be developed; they simply are not yet economically viable. Will Take At some future date, it is very likely that they will be—but it matters what that MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS date is, whether ten years hence or one I M P O R T A N T hundred. Neither the clever Americans who channeled the nation’s savings into N O T I C E an overripe housing market nor the clever Chinese who are keeping creaky to all National Review state-run enterprises lubricated with great gushers of wasted money seem subscribers! very likely to be the party that outsmarts the market when it comes to the very complex question of energy. I suspect that many of those writing about the “Beijing consensus” today, and China’s We are moving our pending dominance of natural resources, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the will regret much of what they have pre- Way Out of Afghanistan, by Bing West subscription-fulfillment dicted. (Random House, 336 pp., $28) office from Which is not to say that the West is not in trouble. The U.S. and europe have the here is no more intrepid war Mount Morris, Ill. worst kind of problems: ones that are correspondent today than Bing to Palm Coast, Fla. easy to understand but difficult to solve. West. The author of two books Please continue Our worst problem is that democratic T on the Iraq War (and co-author governments lack the kind of robust fis- of a third), West brings to the table a to be vigilant: cal controls that prevent the political unique set of qualifications. On one hand, There are fraudulent class from pillaging the productive econ- as an infantry veteran of Vietnam he pos- omy to feather the nests of its own sesses a rare empathy for those who bear agencies soliciting members and their clients. (China has the brunt of the fighting in our ongoing your National Review relatively strong fiscal limitations: a wars and an understanding of what they police state and poverty.) The West is in face on a daily basis. his affection and subscription ! renewal trouble not because Beijing is lending us admiration for the “grunts” whose misery without our authorization. money, but because of why we are bor- he has shared is clear. Please reply only to rowing it: At every level—federal, state, On the other hand, as a former assistant local, county, school district, sewage- secretary of defense during the reagan National Review treatment authority—we have disfigured administration, he is equally at home renewal notices or our institutions such that they function with the policymakers who establish the principally as wealth-transfer mecha- goals for our wars and the high-ranking bills—make sure the nisms for the benefit of the political officers who develop the military doc- return address is class. The word for this is “corruption,” trine and strategy necessary to achieve and it is at least as much a moral problem those goals. he is also a strategist of note Palm Coast, Fla. as an economic one. We are our own himself: he participated in a Marine Ignore all requests for disease. Corps operation in Vietnam that is con- renewal that are not It is natural that Americans would sidered to have been a counterinsurgency directly payable have mixed feelings about the rise of success—the Combined Action Program China. People of good will everywhere (CAP), in which Marine rifle squads to National Review. must celebrate that so many Chinese were combined with Vietnamese “pop - have been lifted out of poverty and ular forces” militias to deny sanctuary to If you receive any mail or lament that they continue to labor under the Viet Cong. his 1972 book The Village telephone offer that makes the whip of the Communist party. you suspicious contact People of good sense in the U.S. must Mr. Owens is professor of national-security affairs at acknowledge that Beijing means us no the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and editor [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. good, that its interests are narrow and of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Your cooperation parochial. China’s interest is in the Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is also the Chinese economy and Chinese jobs— author of the newly published book U.S. Civil- is greatly appreciated. and that, I suspect, is what so many in Military Relations after 9/11: the West envy. Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS is a classic to be found in the library Americans, to drive the aliens from their ond part to attempts to pacify Helmand of anyone who takes counterinsurgency midst. Province in the south. For those seeking seriously. As a professor at the Naval War In Afghanistan, our enemy, the Tali - strategic insights, West’s lens seems to be College in the late 1970s, he was instru- ban, are Pashtuns—which is to say, mem- relentlessly tactical. But the strategic mental in developing the concepts that bers of the country’s largest ethnic group, issues come into focus as West describes evolved into the U.S. Navy’s Maritime dominating the eastern region from the failure of the U.S. approach. As he Strategy of the 1980s. Kabul to Kandahar and across the border remarks regarding operations in the This is West’s first book on Afghan- with Pakistan. As West once observed, Korengal Valley of northeast Afghan - istan, and the message he delivers is not for the Americans and the Kabul govern- istan, the American abandonment of out- optimistic: The U.S. cannot afford to lose ment to tell the Pashtuns that “we are here posts there in 2010 was not a sign of “a this war, but it cannot win the war the to protect you from the Taliban” is akin to clueless military.” It was, rather, some- way it is currently being fought. The the British telling Catholics in Ulster that thing even more sobering: a “key to a problem arises from a combination they were there to protect them from the diligent, thoughtful strategy” that was of two factors: over-ambitious goals— IRA. Because the tribes have calculated nonetheless wrong. grounded in the belief on the part of the that the American troops will be leaving For West, the Korengal Valley is a U.S. that it can midwife the creation of a soon, that the central Afghan government metaphor for the war as a whole. It democratic state in Afghanistan, with is corrupt, predatory, and unable to pro- evokes the story of Sisyphus, whom the Hamid Karzai as president of a strong tect them, and that the Taliban are here gods punished by forcing him endlessly central government controlling 31 mil- to stay, they have been determined to to push a boulder to the top of a moun- lion uneducated tribesmen—and a faulty remain neutral. tain, only to have it roll back each time. strategy. West’s thesis is simple and straight- Long before President Obama’s “surge” The faulty strategy arises from the forward: The current counterinsurgency of troops into the country, the Americans This is Bing West’s first book on Afghanistan, and the message he delivers is not optimistic: The U.S. cannot afford to lose this war, but it cannot win the war the way it is currently being fought.

belief of U.S. military leaders that defeat- approach cannot work, because Afghan - in Afghanistan were adhering to a ing the Taliban insurgency requires our istan is a “shattered society,” the enemy “new” counterinsurgency (COIN) doc- soldiers to become “nation builders” in has a sanctuary in another country (Pak - trine. Unlike the “old” COIN approach addition to war fighters, indeed that istan), and—as Pashtuns—they have employed in the Philippines in the 1940s, insurgencies cannot be won by killing the allies among the very Afghan tribes we Malaya and Algeria in the 1950s, and enemy. As a result, West contends, the are trying to control. Vietnam in the 1960s, which stressed U.S. military in Afghanistan has come The organization of The Wrong War actions against the enemy, the “new” to resemble a gigantic Peace Corps, with may seem distracting to some readers. COIN stressed services and protection of U.S. soldiers and Marines conducting West, who made eight extended visits to the population, while downgrading the uncounted “shuras” (meetings with vil- Afghanistan in which he accompanied importance of killing or capturing the lage elders), drinking “billions of cups units on numerous patrols and combat enemy. of tea,” and handing out billions of dol- operations, spends most of the book In the words of the 2006 COIN manu- lars for nation-building projects. The describing those operations. He devotes al, “killing insurgents—while necessary, idea was that by protecting and winning the first part of the book to operations especially with respect to extremists— over the population, we would turn the in the north—Kunar and Nuristan Pro - by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. tribes against the Taliban, as we had vinces, encompassing the Korengal . . . Victory is achieved when the popu- turned the Sunni sheiks against al-Qaeda Valley and the Pech River—and the sec- lace consents to the government’s legit- in Iraq. imacy and stops actively and passively But as West observes, “an insurgency supporting the insurgency.” Critics con- . . . depends on local conditions, not upon tend that the new COIN turns a means to pronouncements from on high,” and cir- defeating an insurgency—protection of cumstances in Afghanistan differed con- the population—into an end, based on siderably from those in Iraq. In Iraq, the belief that counterinsurgency consti- al-Qaeda was alien to the Sunni tribes. tutes a two-way social contract: protect Having initially formed an alliance of the population and give them money for convenience with al-Qaeda after the fall economic development and in return the of Saddam, the Sunni sheiks rejected al- population will turn against the insur- Qaeda when their objectives diverged, “Are you sure you don’t want to marry me gents. But the social contract underlying joining with “the strongest tribe,” the just because I’m a woman?” the new COIN doctrine does not fit the

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Afghan dynamic. As the old Texas say- Vietnam: the CAP. He points to the suc- ing goes, some people actually “need cess of an Afghan battalion in which he killin’.” was embedded. The 400-man battalion Accepting West argues that the “new counterin- was advised by a U.S. special-forces surgency dogma confused the soldiers team and was fleshed out with a Marine Limits because it confused roles”: Corps rifle platoon, an engineer detach- ment, and fire-support coordinators capa- ANTHONY DANIELS The high command, beginning with ble of calling in supporting mortars, [chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] artillery, and air strikes. This success sug- Adm. [Mike] Mullen, had diminished gests to West the creation of an advisory the primacy of the military’s core com- petency—violence. Eliding the killing corps to enable the Afghan army to defeat needed to defeat a fierce foe reinforced the Taliban. He observes that the Taliban the growing instinct among senior com- fear the U.S. advisers, who are able to manders to eschew aggressiveness, “inspire loyalty and spirit among the due to fear of the political consequences Afghan soldiers.” of friendly or civilian casualties. Risk West argues that “we must commit to avoidance became the guiding light at stay in Afghanistan for as long as it takes, the brigade level. Colonels insisted on while cutting back our conventional detailed briefings before a single patrol forces and building an adviser task force. could conduct a night ambush. This self- In addition, Special Operations Forces The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal imposed restraint allowed the Taliban to must hunt down Islamist leaders, while Order: Defending Democracy against Its control both its casualties and the pace and place of the fighting. helicopter assaults by Ranger-type units Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends, continue along the border with Pakistan. by Daniel J. Mahoney (ISI, The goal of the Americans was to per- Neutralizing the enemy, not protecting 240 pp., $26.95) suade Afghan tribes to support a “central- the population, must be the main mission. ly controlled, deeply corrupt democracy.” The task of the advisers is to build and y favorite graffito is on the Although our counterinsurgency doctrine support Afghan security forces until they road from Alès to Nîmes, was well-meaning, “we were unable to are as fierce in battle as the Taliban.” This an hour from my house in transpose it inside the habits of the moun- is a long-term effort. M France. It is inscribed on a tain tribes. Tribal habits trumped the The Wrong War also asks an important gray metal panel of uncertain function by American offer of liberty.” In the case of question about civil-military relations: the side of the road, has been there for the Korengal, this meant that instead of Why did it take three years, two adminis- some years, and consists of a single word: the Americans’ separating the people trations, and three commanding generals Non. from the insurgents, the insurgents sepa- in country for the U.S. to finally get—in This seems to me perfectly to capture rated the people from the Americans. the words of Defense Secretary Robert one of the greatest prejudices of our age, The heroes of The Wrong War are the Gates in 2009—“its head into [the Af- at least among intellectuals: that to oppose grunts and special forces who attempt to ghan] conflict?” The broader problem and undermine or subvert is, in itself, implement an approach to war that puts was identified by military historian always more intellectually demanding, them at risk in pursuit of contradictory Richard Kohn, who called attention to the rigorous, and generous than to support goals. As West shows, that they are able inability of the U.S. military to connect and sustain. It is as if they believed that to do so in most instances is a tribute to war to policy: “The excellence of the their grit and professionalism. American military in operations, logis- Mr. Daniels is the author of Utopias Elsewhere But West takes to task political and tics, tactics, weaponry, and battle has and other books. senior military leaders alike, in both the been manifest for a generation or more. Bush and Obama administrations, for Not so with strategy.” He echoes the their failure to produce a coherent strate- claim of Colin Gray: “All too often, there “Rated One of New York City gy that is consistent with the dynamics of is a black hole where American strategy ‘Best Value’ Hotels.” ... Zagats Afghanistan. Obfuscation, says West, is ought to reside.” The Wrong War seems not guidance. While clearly an admirer of to validate the claim of some that there is Gen. David Petraeus, who replaced Gen. something inherently dysfunctional in Stanley McChrystal as overall comman- current U.S. civil-military relations that der of the effort in Afghanistan, West accounts for this strategy deficit. hints that Petraeus has become so invest- The U.S. must do what it has to in ed in the COIN doctrine he successfully order to prevail in Afghanistan. In this New York’s all suite hotel is located in implemented in Iraq in 2007 that he is book, West provides a roadmap. But, the heart of the city, near corporations, theatre & great restaurants. Affordable prone to overlook the shortcomings of more important, U.S. policymakers must elegance with all the amenities of home. that doctrine in the Afghan context. look at the failure of American civil- As a solution to the problem the U.S. military relations to generate strategy, a 149 E. 39th St. (Bet 3rd & Lex) New York, NY 10016 faces, West falls back on the program he failure that The Wrong War chronicles Reservations 1-800-248-9999 helped to implement as a young officer in in distressing detail. Ask about our special National Review rates.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS the recognition that they had inherited the writings officially ascribed to him, not In other words, you seek perfection and anything worthwhile from the past dimin- that they are anything to be proud of). you get North Korea. It is worth noting, ished their own importance in the scheme Here he explains the Juche idea pro- incidentally, that it is not the capacity for of things, and thus left them without the pounded by his father, the Great Leader, thought that, in the Dear Leader’s view, providential role they so earnestly seek Kim Il Sung: gives man an intrinsic worth (an unpleas- and that gives meaning to their lives. ant enough formulation in itself), but the The utopian impulse, which fills the The Juche idea is based on the philo- actual content of his thought that does so. metaphysical vacuum left by the death of sophical principle that man is the master In other words, those who have the wrong God and the abandonment of religion, is of everything and decides everything. . . . thoughts cease to have value. No despo- That man is the master of everything the greatest enemy of a free and liberal tism was ever more absolute than this. means that he is the master of the world order. In this book of essays, Daniel and of his own destiny; that man decides I think Mahoney proves his case that a Mahoney, author of an excellent work on everything means that he plays the deci- sense of limitation is necessary if the Solzhenitsyn, explores the relationship sive role in transforming the world and in democratic ideal is not itself to become between religion, freedom, and democra- shaping his destiny. despotic in its pursuit of perfection. So cy. He draws inspiration particularly from far, so good. But what he does not do is Tocqueville and Raymond Aron, the great As if to provide an instance of Shigalev’s explain how such a sense is to be encour- French social philosopher who, much famous deduction in Dostoevsky’s The aged in a population whose elite is either against the current of his time and place, Possessed, quoted by Mahoney, that not religious, or religious only pro forma, resisted the totalitarian temptation and “starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive and which is already much influenced, never departed from an undogmatic liber- at absolute despotism,” the Dear Leader not to say rotted, by Promethean Yes-we- alism. continues: can-ism. Contemporary militant atheists treat The acceptance of limitation is a habit religion as if it consisted solely of the The Great Leader [i.e. Papa] put forward of the heart as much as a doctrine of the Spanish Inquisition and the stoning of the idea of revolutionizing, working- mind. Clearly it is possible to develop that adulterers. That its history has included classizing and intellectualizing all mem- habit without being religious, but it is bers of society and thus transforming things that are inimical to a liberal order more difficult, for it requires not only a them into communist men of the Juche is undeniable; but to treat them as the type, as a major revolutionary task in certain temperament but also an intellec- whole of its contribution is like treating modeling the whole society on the Juche tual sophistication by no means common the history of medicine as nothing but idea. . . . Thoughts define men’s worth or easily acquired. Raymond Aron was amputation without anesthetic and the and quality and, accordingly, ideological an atheist, but also a man of immense cul- employment of Perkins’s metallic trac- remodeling is of the utmost importance ture, personal experience, and reflective tors. in the transformation of man. power. He therefore was, or became, what Mahoney points out that one of the might be called an imperfectionist (he advantages of a religious sensibility for briefly flirted with socialism as a youth): the liberal order is the acceptance of limi- He did not conclude from the non- tation that it confers. A religious sensibil- SAYING NOTHING ON divinity of a Christ whose kingdom was ity accepts not only existential limits to WALNUT STREET not of this world that it was for man to human life that are not of man’s making (a build the kingdom of God in the here and great advantage in facing death), but ethi- For once thinking of the right now. But a moral and intellectual trajec - cal ones as well, because the moral law is Thing to say, not later on: tory such as Aron’s is not to be repro- laid down by a will external to mankind’s At a Beckett play at Annenberg duced on a mass scale. (Incidentally, one own. This precludes the radical egotism of the things that Mahoney does not that insists that every question should be remark upon with regard to Aron, but I A Penn student snapped open judged by the light of every individual’s think very important, especially in Aron’s A can as the second act started own unaided reason: which all too often, particular cultural context, is the brilliant And a Dublin actor looked up of course, accords with, and gives its clarity of his prose, which gave the lie to blessings to, the secret desires of the heart, the idea that in order to be profound it was as well as leading to conflict with others At him and said nothing, an necessary to be obscure.) whose unaided reason tells them some- Inquisitive Irish face staring I do not think there is much prospect in thing quite different. Into darkness, without a word the Western world of a religious revival, Promethean atheism refuses to ac - nor does Mahoney suggest that there is. knowledge any limits to man’s possibili- As if challenging the Atlantic, While people might be willing to believe ties or his moral right to pursue his ends, Before the talk resumed, one in the healing power of crystals or the whatever they might be. In so far as there Lost man to another, with no chakras of the earth, at least until they get are any limits, they are only those of his really sick, they are unlikely to submit to imagination. A good example of this self- Interruptions to the silence the disciplines of a genuine religion that deification of man is to be found in the The comedians on-stage defying makes moral and temporal demands upon writings of that great friend of human Anyone to out-clown their despair. them. This would be so even were they not freedom, Kim Jong Il, Dear Leader of already so susceptible to the arguments of North Korea (or perhaps I should say in —LAWRENCE DUGAN their local village atheists. The likelihood,

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then, is that people will continue to seek Ingratiating, bespectacled Felix Frank - not only the meaning of their lives, but furter arrived from Austria at age twelve their salvation, in a variety of secular caus- Begaveled and rose to become, in succession, a es promoted by narrow ideologies that manager of Henry Stimson’s 1910 cam- serve as lenses through which everything Neuroses paign for governor of New York, a lawyer in the world can be seen and interpreted. in President Taft’s War Department, a I confess that, after the end of the Cold JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY Harvard professor, and (what seems to War, I looked forward to a world of poli- interest Feldman most) an ACLU ac - tics shorn of ideology. I did not take suffi- tivist. So invested was Frankfurter in ciently into account the role of ideology the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti as a substitute religion, the means by that when the anarchists were finally exe- which people in a post-religious world cuted in 1927, his wife sank into depres- would achieve their transcendence. I had sion. understood well enough that Marxism robert Jackson, the most inscrutable of was a kind of religion, complete with its the four, started out arguing livestock trinity and promise of ultimate salvation cases in upstate New York; in one, held in after its Day of Judgment; but it did not a lamp-lit barn, he clashed with opposing occur to me that, with the death of belief counsel over the question of Holstein or in Marxism’s teleological end, its mono - Jersey paternity before jurors sitting on theism would (if I may be allowed to mix potato crates. His law practice would metaphors slightly) Balkanize into poly- Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of eventually afford him a 30-foot yacht on theism. Some henceforth would demand FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, Lake Chautauqua and Depression-era the absolute equality of women with the by Noah Feldman (Twelve, trips to Bermuda. He first met FDr, then male elite, some of homosexuals, some of 528 pp., $30) a young state senator, in 1911, and always blacks, some of transsexuals, etc., not kept a foot in Democratic politics. In only in income and living conditions but or Franklin roosevelt’s most 1934, Jackson was appointed general in unmeasurable regard or esteem: a goal famous Supreme Court ap point - counsel to the Internal revenue Service, cherished not despite its unattainability ees—Felix Frankfurter, Wil - after which his rise was swift: Within a but because of it, there being no possible F liam o. Douglas, Hugo Black, period of three years, he moved from end in sight despite its apparent earth- and robert Jackson—just getting to law solicitor general (winning 38 of 44 cases) boundedness. A perfect goal for someone school was the hard part. Frankfurter to attorney general to Supreme Court in search of a transcendent cause who missed his first week at Harvard because justice. does not care for religion, or believe in he so desperately needed his full salary Hugo Black grew up in an unpainted any religious tenets, is one that appears as a municipal clerk. Black enrolled only home deep in Clay County, Ala. He stud- secular but in reality is not. because a law degree was easier for ied law under the two professors of the Cultural diagnosis is always easier than him to get than a regular one. Douglas University of Alabama School of Law prognosis, let alone treatment. Never - financed his travel to Yale by feeding and became, at 25, a police-court judge, theless, Mahoney has some useful pre- sheep on a freight train. And Jackson, per- where he handled as many as 100 drink- scriptions, or at any rate warnings, where haps the greatest of them, couldn’t even ing and theft cases in a morning. After 20 foreign policy is concerned. If it is true that get his father to pay. To reach the bench, years of private practice he became a political freedom is as much a habit of the on the other hand, they needed only proud, bullying U.S. senator and a radical heart and of civilization as of formal poli - FDr’s good graces, which each man had New Dealer; in 1932, he proposed a law tical arrangement, it is in vain that we basked in for years. to limit the employment hours of all inter- demand of others that they should be free Noah Feldman’s Scorpions is the story state businesses to 30 a week. He always in our sense. Indeed, we should be better of how FDr remade the Court—and our preferred to forget that his election was employed in looking to ourselves, for cer- country’s federal jurisprudence general- underwritten by the Ku Klux Klan, which tainly a case can be made that we have in ly—by installing these four allies, hard- he had joined in the early 1920s. part turned our back on our own traditions headed New Deal loyalists all, between William Douglas, raised in poor by our demand for something more than 1937 and 1941. Feldman begins with Yakima, Wash., obtained, at age 30, the mere freedom can offer us. Accustomed to short biographies that trace each man’s job of professor of corporate law at Yale. the argument that freedom brings prosper- path to their common patron. From there He published energetically but soon ity, we are perilously close to valuing free- he carries them through the tumults of struck out for D.C. and high office. In dom because it brings prosperity. When it the age—Depression, New Deal, court- 1934 he began at the SEC, where the fails to do so—at least that increasing packing, World War II, desegregation, “sheriff” quailed plutocrats by posing prosperity that we now regard as our Communism—weaving in discussions of in a ten-gallon hat, six-shooter on his birthright—we shall be only too ready to notable cases that confronted the justices. desk. The restless Douglas twice came ditch it for something else. Where the within reach of the vice presidency: whole purpose of life is a constantly rising Mr. Tartakovsky is a student at Fordham Law School first, in 1944, when he was vetoed by level of consumption, freedom will not and a contributing editor at the Claremont Democratic-party bosses who favored always find its defenders. Review of Books. Truman, and again in 1948, when he

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS declined Truman’s offer of a spot on the Feldman, “the title Justice is the closest Court spun a “constitutional web” in ticket. thing the U.S. system has to nobility.” which “creatures, great and small, [found] Though they rode in grandly on FDR’s Black, for instance, “ascended” from themselves caught.” He means to convey coattails and shared his vision of broad Senate to Court. For Feldman, a judicial the simultaneous power and passivity of federal power, the erstwhile “allies” (in opinion can be a statesmanlike act. He the court, not a fearsome vision of fanged Feldman’s words) soon became “ene- hails Black’s vote for desegregation in arachnid predators, but one can’t help mies.” This unraveling occurred, we are Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—the thinking of spiders in black robes. (Not told, when the justices began to develop last case in which all four justices sat “scorpions,” as the title would have it.) hostile constitutional theories. Feldman together—as an act of “exceptional brav- Frankfurter thought Douglas the most affixes an idea-label on each justice, and ery.” One might more naturally apply the “shamelessly amoral character I’ve ever applies it so relentlessly that in virtually term to the lawyers who risked their lives known,” while Douglas merely thought every legal discussion the reader must to bring the suit. Frankfurter “utterly dishonest.” Jackson, hear of Frankfurter’s “judicial restraint,” Strange, though, that despite such adu- abroad in Germany in 1946 as chief pros- Jackson’s “pragmatism,” Douglas’s “real- lation, Feldman so frequently undermines ecutor at the Nuremberg trial, maneu- ism,” and Black’s “originalism.” Not his tale of a noble clash of theory by look- vered to secure the post of chief justice that such categorization explains much. ing to psychology. Black’s desegregation (which FDR had promised him), only to Frankfurter had a “deeply romantic con- vote, he suggests, was actually an ex - learn, in vain fury, that Douglas and Black ception” of the “liberalism” of Americans piation of his Klan past. Douglas, mean- had thwarted him by threatening to as “manifested” in their “embrace of pro- while, when he finally accepted the end of resign. gressive ideals.” Black, for his part, is his political dreams, grew unstable; he The book, well paced and readable, credited as the “inventor of originalism,” divorced his wife—the first of four— is fine popular history, but Feldman has a theory Feldman defines as “looking at making him, in that era, permanently une- a bad habit of paraphrasing—letters, the text of the Constitution as it would lectable. Feldman writes that his opinion speeches, judicial opinions—when he have been publicly understood when writ- in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), hold- ought to allow his very articulate subjects ten.” (One wonders what John Marshall ing that the Constitution forbids a state to to speak for themselves. This saps his thought he was doing.) FDR appointed ban the use of contraceptives by married story of life. He also tends to reach for the eight justices, more than any president couples, was an instance of his “personal obvious word, which is to say the dull after Washington, but the others—Byrnes chaos [giving] meaning and direction to one, never more so than when he tries to (who served a year), Murphy, Reed, and his liberal constitutional values,” which lend human drama: People “stand up” for Rutledge—don’t interest Feldman, for, seems rather close to saying that Douglas principles; struggles are what we “never as he says of the Truman-appointed worked out his personal problems on the give up”; difficulties, naturally, are what Vinson, another ignored judge, they had bench. folks “bounce back” from. In places, no “grand theories.” The justices, when not depicted as Feldman’s imprecision leads to inadver- Feldman is a law professor at Harvard walking theories or begaveled neuroses, tently comic sentences, e.g.: “In March and served as a constitutional adviser to behave like thoroughly political animals. 1933, days after Roosevelt assumed the the Coalition Provisional Authority in Especially Frankfurter, who in Feldman’s presidency, Adolf Hitler stage-managed Iraq. He marvels at the power of brainy telling comes off as a sort of epistolary his own takeover of absolute power in go-getters to “reshape” a country. The vizier, endlessly dashing off letters that Germany.” book leaves one in doubt as to whether crow about FDR’s latest address or advise Feldman thinks the New Deal a neces- statutes are the work of elected legislators on tax reform, the Anschluss, etc.; as a sary “triumph.” Readers less wholly or of New Deal wizards like Tommy justice, he felt no compunction regarding sympathetic to FDR will still take from Corcoran, who churned out laws over the tipping off friends in the solicitor gen - Feldman’s book the sense that unprece- course of a weekend. Power, in this book, eral’s office about the confidential views dented change was afoot—especially on means big ideas in action, and big ideas, of colleagues. Feldman doesn’t have a a bench where eight of nine justices of course, mean academia. We learn about favored justice; each receives praise were Roosevelt men. Jackson, for one, grades, law reviews, and prestigious pro- according to who achieves the most “lib- entered politics in 1911 to help friends fessorships, and that the better part of eral” result, which Feldman seems rough- get postmasterships, still the main fed - American law is something run out of ly to define as the leftmost position. eral patronage position. Thirty years Harvard. Half the people in the book seem Douglas, for instance, seizes the “mantle later (in a case Feldman doesn’t men- to have gone there; Feldman notes one of liberalism” from the others when tion, along with many other watershed minor figure’s Harvard education five he argues, in Dennis v. United States Commerce Clause cases), Justice Jackson times in three pages. (1951), that the First Amendment pro- upheld, in Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the The closest thing the book has to a hibits Congress from criminalizing the power of Washington bureaucrats, in an thesis is Feldman’s remark that “these conspiracies of Communist “bogeymen.” unprecedented expansion of their reach, four men reinvented the Constitution.” That Douglas (with Black and Frank - to limit the private wheat production of Leave aside the interesting question of furter) also held constitutional the a farmer in Ohio. Remarkable progress their constitutional authority to do so: The internment of Japanese Americans in for the old livestock litigator, and his substory of Scorpions concerns the power Kore matsu v. United States (1944) is coun try, but whether this was a “triumph” of the Court. “Although the framers of the apparently soon forgiven. depends, I suppose, on whose cow is Constitution did not anticipate it,” writes Feldman writes that the Roosevelt being gored.

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sets painted by numbers, lines and blotch- old that they include, in their salad of typo- City Desk es fetched from Abstract Expressionism graphical symbols floating above their via Leroy Neiman. numerals, the encircled a that meant “at”: the photographs in thrift shops are of @. But now, like the Baltic nations, @ has Usable Past two kinds. there are formal group por- made a comeback. traits, sometimes framed: office parties, On one recent visit to such a store, I graduations; I once saw a picture of a found a signed item: an old stamp album. grand jury. Unless a face pops out—a Here were the collectibles of the early 20th beautiful girl of World War II—the for- century: Marianne and Germania, George mality of these efforts repels the attention V and George Washington, kangaroos and it was meant to attract. More compelling kookaburras from Australia, dragons and are the boxes of old snapshots, the black- junks from China. On the first page were and-white legacy of Kodak. Are these kids the names of two brothers and an address still alive? When did these adults die? in Brooklyn. stamp collecting is often a Who took these pictures? Who got rid of youthful passion, the fury before girls; them? Never never never never never. what girls replaced these bits of paper? RICHARD BROOKHISER As soon as something becomes a rec- the next step is to move beyond the ognized mood, style, or stance, someone objects and use them, or allude to them, in fIrst started buying other people’s will make a buck off it. so there are stores design. there is a man in the East Village pasts when I wore second-hand that do not pretend their merchandise is who has been doing this for 20 years. His clothes. Wide silk ties, tweed pants useful, nor do they sell antiques, exactly store is like a lonely childhood with a I heavy as iron, cabana sets made (they have no interest in value or prove- beloved grandmother. He puts curlicues, “for the stars of Hollywood”—I scoured nance or beauty). they are salvagers and bits of typography, and animal prints on retro shops, some briskly selling out the retailers of the lost and gone. Here are old paperweights, plates, and wall hangings. contents of old warehouses as if they were globes, and on them once more are the His well-preserved ephemera can be both new, others offering dank items on bent soviet Union, two Germanies, two Viet - claustrophobic and oppressive, yet they wire hangers. I stopped looking once the nams, and one big Yugoslavia. On older are also fantastic and poignant. You find styles being resurrected were those I globes you can see the Polish corridor that yourself hunching your shoulders and remembered; I had heard the Mamas and so vexed Hitler. Be careful what you wish breathing shallowly, even as you dream. the Papas, I didn’t want to look like them. for: stalin got rid of it by getting rid of Maybe the market for pasts supplies an that left the scavenger in me with street East Prussia, and of Hitler. Africa is three American deficit. I rent, my father is in a fairs—the equivalent, my wife exclaimed colors, red for Britain’s possessions, nursing home. strangers live in the house delightedly, of looking through other peo- green for france’s, purple for Portugal’s. I lived in, and the house my grandmother ple’s closets. You found useful things, but No question here where Persian or lived in. And I’ve spent all my life in the closets, and the tops of kitchen cabinets, siamese cats come from. same state. What about army brats and and the floors under beds, whence street Another common item in such places corporate transfers, workers pursuing hi- fairs draw their stock, also tend to collect (because it is so uncommon outside them) tech start-ups or fleeing rust-belt col - superannuated things: yogurt makers, fon- is the pull-down school chart. the voy- lapses? Wherever anything old survives due pots, books by Herman Wouk and ages of discovery, the circulation of the it is dangerous. WAsPs squabble over Erica Jong. blood, the anatomy of the seed, cursive summer houses in Cheever or family curs- thrift shops are permanent street fairs. letters. Children in wooden desks sat and es in Hawthorne. t. s. Eliot moved to old My wife can find clothes there—she has watched, while the teacher (always Miss England, then built his greatest retro- more patience than I have, and a better someone) stood before them and pointed. spective poem around an air raid: “the eye—though she also looks for household Now they can read it online, between only hope . . . to be redeemed from fire by utensils, one of the thousand and one sexting. fire.” H. P. Lovecraft did the grindhouse kitchen implements that she unaccount- Did I mention manual typewriters? version; if you find an old copy of the ably does not have. thrift shops sell every- (this is dangerous ground—I used man - Necronomicon, watch out. thing individually, yet they plunge you ual typewriters.) some typewriters are so the collector who moved beyond more deeply into lost worlds, perhaps design to art was Joseph Cornell. I real- because the many pieces of furniture and ized, for the first time while writing this the way they are packed onto the floor piece, that the sadness of his little boxes of suggest odd corners of old living rooms: marbles and moons and imprisoned par- the unwieldy breakfronts, the ugly, shin- rots is twofold, for he not only pities new- barking coffee tables, the dust catchers ness—how bright and pert all these that once were artistic or whimsical in the bits of junk once were—he also pities eyes of someone who did not share your nostalgia—his own efforts to preserve taste, the stacks of Life, Look, and The Sat - and redeem. trinkets and art, take your ur day Evening Post. On the walls over- pick; both end up in a box. head loom the paintings: amateur portraits “I’m all tired out from creating—let’s just use Cornell, as everyone knows, lived on of women in evening dresses, winter sun- natural selection from now on.” Utopia Parkway—Nowhere street.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Budgets, Bulbs, and Buggywhips

ETURN to 2008 spending levels? Are they mad? of the people who sent them to Washington regard the We all remember that nightmare year when we $100 billion reduction as the equivalent of spitting on your didn’t spend enough money. Bridges fell, sink- hands before you grasp the axe handle and really get to R holes ate schools whole, a sullen hobo army work. drifted through the nation’s cities wearing cardboard shoes, But it’s not just what they should cut. It’s not just about holding up their pants with one hand, panhandling with the reworking entitlements so the generations of the future other. It was the year the government officially used shady won’t be handing over 70 percent of their paycheck to pay payday-loan offices to fund essential things, like the for debt—if they can get a job that doesn’t involve hair - Strategic Hummus Reserve or the Federal Zeppelin Corps. nets, that is. It’s also about training the government to stop There wasn’t even money for a single blue-ribbon panel, thinking it must do something about everything. which led to a staggering dearth of Findings, and the low- For example. Buried in the mound of laws you’ll find est number of Recommendations since 1934, when the something minor that symbolizes exactly what we’re up Depression forced many panels to burn their white-paper against. In January, H.R. 91 was introduced: the Better Use reports to stay warm. If it hadn’t been for President Obama of Light Bulbs Act. Yes: the BULB Act. What a coinci- hosing us down with stimulus lucre, dence! This bill would repeal the immi- most Americans would be bony sacks nent ban on incandescent, or “good,” living in idled boxcars. Instead, we’re If it hadn’t been light bulbs, so you wouldn’t have to buy lucky enough to be lectured by the first CFLs, which are loaded with so many lady about our waistlines. How soon we for President nasty substances that al-Qaeda could shut forget. down an entire small town just by send- Thus this brilliant budget, which jacks Obama hosing ing someone to Home Depot to take a up spending to $46 trillion over the next us down with baseball bat to the CFL racks. Everyone’s ten years. (The official term for a number read the warnings: If you break a bulb, that large is a “Zim babwe.”) Granted, stimulus lucre, open up all the windows, go outside, there are cuts. The Zeppelin Corps will pound a FOR SALE sign in your yard, be merged with the Dirigible Reserve, most Americans live in a tent in the park, and mail the bulb for example. As the president noted in would be bony shards to NASA for eventual dispersal in a speech to Ohio Blacksmiths Local 203, the sun’s corona. The laws covering the the Equine Motivational-Instrument sacks living in disposal of a lawfully eliminated fetus Security Act, which has been subsidiz- are probably less stringent than the laws ing buggywhip production since 1901, idled boxcars. about getting rid of a CFL. Most people will be rewritten so we’re doing more will just throw them away, adding tons of with less—the subsidy will be cut 50 percent, and the gov- toxins to the waste stream. Domestic garbage: now enriched ernment will partner with buggywhip producers to find with mercury, for extra goodness! Anti-bulb-choice advo- new ways to inspire horses, using our 21st-century under- cates say that won’t happen because it’s not supposed to standing of brain chemistry and animal psychology. happen. Why, it’s against the law. Yes indeed. And no one “There are those who say the federal government should- drove 56 mph in the Carter years. n’t be in the business of making horses run faster,” the Sure, the president would probably veto your right to president said, his chin tilted up to indicate resolve in the choose a freakin’ light bulb because it will contribute to face of strawmen. “I say a nation crisscrossed with high- climate change, and people on the third floor of Miami speed stagecoach lines is equipped not just to help busi- condos will drown cursing his name for not holding back ness compete. They will also carry the mail and provide the oceans: You should have subsidized LED technology! easy access to jobs for tomorrow’s schoolmarms.” One Even though there were arsenic issues, they could have blacksmith, hearing the speech, said he hoped the horses been worked out, given time blub blub blub. But it’s would come back to his suburban community, which had instructive: The massive, complex, infinitely variable been home to a thriving medical-technology industry until planetary ecosystem can be tweaked to our benefit if we the taxes on medical devices forced most firms to relocate start to use poison bulbs. Fiscal catastrophe can be solved to one of those islands in the Caribbean where ships stop with teeny cuts, no structural reform of entitlements, the and everyone buys a T-shirt. wholesale inhalation of the medical system, crushing tax- Okay, that last part was a bit of hyperbole. Not everyone ation, and “investment” that subsidizes new techniques of buys a T-shirt. ex tracting red corpuscles from rocks. They think getting At least the Republicans have proposed cuts. But most oil from shale is ridiculous, but blood from stones, yes, that’ll work. Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. If we invest enough.

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HOW A STRATEGY TO HELP A IS HELPING BROADBAND TECHNOLOGY COMPANY GROW REACH PLACES IT’S NEVER BEEN

PROGRESS IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS

When a growing technology company was ready to sell shares to the public in order to raise capital, they needed a strategy. We identified ways to help them attract investors and utilize the additional capital to grow their business. Now they’re devoting more of their resources to researching and developing new technologies—as well as bringing broadband to a growing network of businesses and their customers, no matter where they may be. goldmansachs.com/progress