Bonfire of the Vanities

One of the best lessons of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the fratricidal viciousness of the left's internal squabbles, seemingly more passionate about fighting each other than about fighting General Franco. An unforgettable vignette from Monty Python's Life of Brian parodies a similar dysfunction, with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, and -with only one member- the Popular Front of Judea all too busy in petty internal disagreements to have any effectiveness against mighty Rome. Highbrow or lowbrow, a common thread is inescapable: allowing for exceptions and varying degrees, the political left tends to divide itself and amplify internal differences, while its opponents on the right do exactly the opposite.

To the disbelief of most observers, Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy for the third time a couple of weeks ago, commanding a coalition that stretched from the political center to the secessionist and xenophobic Lega Nord. The anti-Berlusconi camp, appalled that the wealthiest man in Italy, routinely indicted and prosecuted for corruption, and owner of more than half of all media outlets, was too divided to prevent Berlusconi's resounding success.

This pattern can manifest itself not only in multi-party, parliamentary democracies, but also in bipartisan, presidential ones like the United States. American progressives usually blame the corporate media, or, more abstractly, the "system" for their electoral under-performance, but sometimes, and not only when Ralph Nader shows himself, they should blame themselves. The Democratic primary is still ongoing, despite being almost mathematically clinched since the Wisconsin primary two months ago. Barack Obama, now running out the clock, would prefer to use this time to pool some of Clinton's advisers and money, campaign in Florida and Michigan, win over skeptics in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and peel off McCain's support among independents instead of courting white, working-class Democrats. Both candidates are getting scratched up and battered, more by the insufferable and exhausting length of the race than by a gaffes-obsessed media. The Democrats, who are right about the issues but are quite clumsy about process, are readying themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose another unlosable election.

If ignorance is the cardinal sin of the right, vanity is the cardinal sin of the left. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, spent the weekend on a vanity tour that could only damage the electoral prospects of the member of his church. But it is not just Wright that is vain or narcissistic. Since Obama won eleven contests in a row and emerged as the front-runner, the senator has received as much venom from allegedly liberal journalists as from conservative ones. Tavis Smiley, for example, is less than enthusiastic about Obama, partly because his views don't go far enough for his political taste, partly because Obama did not show up at his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans. In response, Bill Maher summed up the feeling of many viewers when he said: "I know, he won't do my show either, but if that's what he has to do, and it's working for him, maybe we should accept it and get over ourselves." Paul Krugman, who many expected to support the anti-war candidate, has spent most of his columns this year attacking Obama over disagreements with details of his health care reform plan. Markos Moulitsas, a strong Obama supporter, spoke in the harshest terms against Obama's decision to be interviewed by Chris Wallace in FoxNews. Obama may be the first liberal Democrat to be elected in a long, long time, but all of us have left-leaning friends that refuse to join the bandwagon because of disagreements over the candidate's policy on Israel, or a specific trade deal, to name only a few.

On a New York Times' article commenting Reverend Wright's exercise of narcissism, Alessandra Stanley closed with a quote from Chuck Todd (and a Carly Simon song): "You're so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you." But that's all of us. It's who we are, and it's why we lose. We are so vain, we think this campaign is about us. And not "us" as in community, or country, or even the progressive movement, but "us" as individuals.

Obama's Foreign Policy Experience

After twenty wins in coast-to-coast state primaries and caucuses, record-breaking turnout in most contests, and a level of national enthusiasm that threatens to alter the political map of the United States, Barack Obama is still asked in interviews, almost without exception, how can a candidate with such "little foreign-policy experience" be viable or electable in a presidential race. Other candidates receive different treatment. That affirmation, for example, never made it to any question posed to the former front-runner for the Republican nomination, Rudolph Giuliani. Before the collapse of his campaign, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Rudy was favored by national-security conservatives, who imagined that only America's mayor could beat radical Islam worldwide. And yet Joe Biden, who called Giuliani "the most uninformed person on foreign policy now running for president" was correct, if only a bit unfair. He forgot Mike Huckabee, but then again, no one bothered to say anything at all, good or bad, about Mike Huckabee those days. Huckabee and Giuliani never got the "little foreign-policy experience" bit from interviewers or debate moderators. Obama has to deal with that assumption as a given.

Of course, he handily rejects that notion by reminding his audience that no one had more experience than Cheney or Rumsfeld, or that judgment can be more important than experience. Others point to the Kenyan or Indonesian chapters of his life story. And very few elected officials had the foresight and the courage to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, which would become the biggest strategic blunder of US foreign policy in the last decades. Less noticed is the fact that, before he began plugging his second best-selling book, before he was rumored as a presidential candidate and only C-Span junkies paid attention, Obama spent most of his time in the Senate talking about issues related to foreign policy, and doing so with the command and nuance that one associates with more seasoned legislators. Whether on the Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Homeland Security, or Veterans' Affairs, at Darfur rallies, or in conversations about the embargo on Cuba, Obama was at his best when he spoke about foreign policy.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of being naive and inexperienced on foreign policy when he stated that the United States should strike against selected targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan, provided actionable intelligence and Musharraf's inability to take action himself. Yet Clinton did not protest when a CIA airstrike in Pakistan killed one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives earlier this month, or back in 2005 when a CIA drone took a similar action against another leader of the network, also within Pakistani territory. She did not protest when Ethiopia bombed the Islamists out of Mogadishu a year ago, with help from the United States, or when Turkey repeatedly violated Iraq's northern border to stamp out PKK targets in its Kurdish region. Last September, Israel bombed Syria, unprovoked, in another cross-border attack that did not draw Hillary Clinton's opposition or condemnation. Fortunately, some people have begun to catch up and turn the argument on its head. After another flawed attempt at justifying her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion, Wolf Blitzer, in a rare display of inspiration, asked Senator Clinton: "Are you telling us that you were too naive in believing that George Bush would do the right thing?" She laughed, nervously, and replied without countering: "Nice try, Wolf, nice try." Indeed.

The Pastor's Dangerous Missive

First of all I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. The holidays, of course, pose a difficult hurdle for bloggers of my ilk. But now I'm back.

I, unlike some of my friends, have been diligently reading the foreign policy statements which had been put forth by the presidential candidates in Foreign Affairs magazine. While I have been stultified by the banal writings of the Democratic candidates, I have been incensed by the small-mindedness and, in some cases, radicalism of the Republican candidates. Obviously, my agita has not been so acute as a prompt me to write something about. However, after getting back from Florida, I was welcomed by the most recent copy of Foreign Affairs. In it was an essay by Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and fellow son of Hope (along with former President Bill Clinton). Now I have to admit that Huckabee makes me laugh on occasion. Growing up in the South, his soft-spoken ways and his pastoral (literal and figuartive) approach to politics speak to me, despite all my cerebrally-informed attempts for them not to. However after reading just a few paragraphs of his essay, the veil has been ripped from eyes. Now, I never thought he knew anything about international politics, but I was surprised to see that Chuck Norris’ candidate knows nothing about politics. Let me say it again: Huckabee knows nothing about politics.

The reason for this unqualified judgment is as follows: he says, "The first rule of war is know your enemy, and most Americans do not know theirs." He of course is talking about Islamic terrorists, and I agree with him there. Here comes the rub. Just a few sentences before he states that "they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it." This nonsense -- this Fox News, Ann Coulter, Kristol family nonsense -- cannot stand.

Osama bin Laden understands politics perfectly well. His decision in the late 1990s to abandon local wars in corrupt Arab states (the near enemy) and begin a focus on the global war against the United States (the far enemy) and its proxy in the region, Israel, shows calculation and an understanding of the way the world works, especially the postmodern, mass-mediated world in which live. Osama bin Laden has no desire to kill every last American. Only the greenest recruit in the Al Qaeda organization has the notion that they can actually rewrite the rules of civilization. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's mentor, has studied some of the greatest revolutionaries, including a Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. Al Qaeda's actions are carefully orchestrated to achieve tangible, concrete outcomes. If just killing Americans was their goal, there would be a lot more dead Americans.

Huckabee, while talking about Sayyid Qutb and other important aspects of violent global Islamism in his essay, fails to grasp even the most basic notions of political science. His embrace of this ideal of "Islamo-fascism" shows that his views of the outside world are just as paranoid and muddled as those of Rudolph Giuliani, who is currently under the tutelage of some of the most aggressive neo-conservatives. In Andrew Sullivan's recent article about Barack Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, discusses how having an American president whose father was born in Kenya, grandmother is a Muslim, and studied in a Muslim-majority school as a youth might actually deter some angry young Muslim youth somewhere in Pakistan at sometime in the future from sacrificing his entire life to kill Westerners. While I'm not sure I buy Sullivan's argument completely, a Baptist preacher from a Red state who sincerely believes that all Muslims want us dead will -- if elected to the presidency -- ensure that there will be at least a few more of those young men who choose the route of violence over pursuit of their own self-interest.