People in Other Nations Don't Obsess Over Domestic U.S. Politics?

Okay, so that's not news to you, but it appears to be news to Anne Applebaum.

“Is this presidential election really the most important in our lifetime?” That was the question asked, in so many words, by a concerned Brit at a discussion here a few days ago. His words were directed at the political analyst Larry Sabato, whose countenance had been beamed onto a conference-room screen like some giant electronic guru. Sabato didn’t blink. “This presidential election,” he replied, “is definitely the most important since 2008.”

Appreciative laughter followed, but the audience wasn’t entirely satisfied.

Perhaps that should read, self-satisfied laughter followed, but the audience didn't entirely appreciate the joke? Applebaum continues,

For the British — as for most Europeans and, indeed, most other foreigners — that aspect of this election is extremely hard to understand. Is the 2012 presidential race “important”? That is, will it mark a momentous change in U.S. foreign policy and attitudes toward the world — or will its result make no difference at all?

Here's the thing: people in other nations pay more attention to U.S. presidential elections than we do to theirs, because the decisions of the U.S. President are more likely to affect them in some way than the decisions of their leaders are to affect us. It's also, frankly, a bit fun to be appalled by the low quality of one American politician or another, the crazy issues that Americans based their votes upon, and the staggering sums of money expended on the presidential race. A fair retort, in the U.S., it's unlikely that Silvio Berlusconi would have been able to buy himself into a higher office than... the U.S. Senate. A Canadian was giving me a "Mitt Romney, seriously", line the other day to which there is now an easy two-word retort, "Stephen Harper.")

Applebaum goes on to describe past elections in which... Europeans enjoyed being appalled by some of the politicians and their conduct, the money, and a larger indifference - as if they realize that the choice of President is more likely to affect our lives than theirs.

There are multiple reasons for this indifference, starting with the fact that people no longer believe, as many once did, that an American president can solve all of their problems.

You'll excuse me for asking, in what alternate reality did Europeans believe that our choice of U.S. President could result in a solution to "all of their problems"? I've lived in two other countries, have relatives who live in other countries, and have traveled internationally, and yet I've never met such a person.

The myth of America as an all-seeing, all-knowing superpower persists in a few places — ironically, one hears it most often in the Arab world — but most everywhere else it is long gone.

I have to wonder... Applebaum doesn't get out much, does she....

In my experience, people in other countries have long recognized what is only now dawning on Applebaum: That they have no say in U.S. elections and that, although U.S. elections may affect them and the policies of their own government, the primary effect of a U.S. election will be on the people of the U.S. - there, just as here, it's fun to watch the horse race coverage and make condescending comments about the candidates and system, but at the end of the day the elections they most worry about are their own.

In her slow recognition that the outcome of the U.S. election won't matter much to Europeans, Applebaum appears to also be suggesting that the outcome won't matter much to us. That's true to a degree - certainly true to those like her who are fortunate enough to live their lives in a gilded bubble, and it's certainly true that a change of President has no material impact on most international issues - but there are many domestic issues that will affect the middle class and less fortunate individuals in our society, and while a joke along the lines of "this is definitely the most important election since 2008" may seem funny to those who think the election is about a 3% tax increase (vs. a 20% tax cut) for the wealthy, it's not as funny if you're slipping out of the middle class, unemployed, or on Medicaid.

Partisanship and Political Satire

Anne Applebaum, apparently desperate to meet a deadline, has tossed out a word salad of conflicting thoughts about politics and parody. She is depressed that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are staging a giant party in Washington D.C., and is even more depressed that people are planning to attend:

I don't know about you, but my heart sank when I read about Jon Stewart's Million Moderate March, planned for the Mall next weekend. My heart sank further when I learned that liberal groups, lacking any better ideas, have decided to take this endeavor seriously. It's bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a "Rally to Restore Sanity" is to make it into a television comedian's joke. But it's far worse that the "moderates" in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

No, wait a minute, Anne. When a rally starts as a "television comedian's joke" it may be possible to turn it into something more serious, but it's a bit late to profess concern that it might "turn into" the very thing it has been since its inception. As for the attention-hound Arianna Huffington busing people in, or... PETA? (That's really her best, and only, second example of people "turning" the comedy event into a comedy event?) So what?

This is how words, and then ideas, vanish from our political lexicon: Whatever connotations it once had, the word "moderate" has now come to mean "liberal" or even "left-wing" in American politics. It has been a long time since "moderate" Republicans were regarded as important, centrist assets by their party: Nowadays, they are far more likely to be regarded as closet lefties and potential traitors.

Seriously, by throwing what is pitched as a bipartisan comedic event, named to parody various marches that preceded it, Applebaum is concerned that Stewart is going to forever ruin the word "moderate", the way Reagan and his successors marginalized the term "liberal"? Is it that she imagines a world in which the only political descriptor remaining in use is "conservative"? She believes that the Republican Party's marginalization of its "moderates" - something that long preceded the planned comedic event, is the consequence of the event? Has it even occurred to her that Stewart's use of the term "moderates" is a reaction to the marginalization of moderates that she so deplores? The moderates "taking back America"? The joke seems pretty obvious to me.

"Moderate" Democrats, meanwhile, no longer exist: In their place, we have "conservative Democrats." Nobody pays attention to them either -- unless, suddenly, one of them threatens to vote against health-care reform. And then he is vilified.

More stuff and nonsense. There are plenty of moderate Democrats. In fact the majority of Democrats are moderate Democrats. (Does Applebaum believe Russ Feingold is the norm?) A great many "conservative Democrats" are aptly named, because they were fielded as part of an effort to bring into the party seats that were traditionally Republican, and the people holding those seats hold many or most of the political views associated with the Republican Party.

It's similar to the long-extinct species, the Southern Democrat. "Blue dogs" are an endangered species not because the party hasn't been accommodating, but because the present sentiment of the moderate Republicans who voted them into office is to vote for (drum roll, please) Republican candidates. We speak of "conservative Democrats" as "conservative Democrats because (as surprising as this may be) they're considerably more conservative than the centrists. That's what happens when you massively expand your party - you bring in people who lean toward the other end of the political spectrum.

As for the "vilification" of "conservative Democrats" who "threaten[] to vote against health-care reform", who did she have in mind? Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu, who wanted to extort huge financial concessions to their states? Bart Stupak, whose concerns had nothing to do with the bill itself and everything to do with limiting women's access to abortion. Joe Lieberman, who after endorsing the expansion of Medicare suddenly changed his mind and threatened to withdraw support if a Medicare expansion were included in the final bill? Seriously, if you want vilification, look at the real and implied threats directed at Republicans who suggested that they might be convinced to sign on to a reform bill.

There is no lack of interesting people in the political center. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- one of the few popular incumbents in the country -- has not only declared himself a centrist but has also launched a campaign of support for other centrists. He flies around the country endorsing both Democrats and Republicans who he thinks show the ability to compromise and have the courage to depart from party orthodoxy on issues such as gun control (he is in favor) or more stringent financial regulation (he is against).

Okay, so we have lots of interesting people in the political center, such as Michael Bloomberg and... and... anybody? Bloomberg being a billionaire Democrat who changed party affiliations to run for Mayor of New York and demonstrates "centrism" by opposing financial industry reform and advocating for gun control laws? Sorry, but picking two issues, one of which is more associated with the political right (financial industry deregulation) and the other of which as been all-but-abandoned by the Democratic party even if popular with some on the fringe (gun control) does not demonstrate "centrism" - but it does reflect what you might expect from a Mayor of New York City who, even overlooking his personal ties to the financial industry, is looking out for the future of his city.

He nearly lost me when he inexplicably endorsed Harry Reid, but never mind.

Wait, why "never mind"? Harry Reid is a Nevada politician who has close ties to the financial industry, who has gone to the wall for the state's hotel and casino industry. Did Bloomberg "almost lose" Applebaum because Reid's support of "gun control" appears to be pretty much limited to wanting background checks for firearms sales at gun shows? Seriously, Anne, tell us what your gripe is.

Others are trying, usually behind the scenes, to find solutions to problems that divide liberals and conservatives bitterly.

For her example of this, Applebaum doesn't draw examples from the center, but speaks of people who hold strong political views coming together under the auspices of their "think tanks" to create joint reports. As with Bloomberg, her evidence for this "trend" is a single example, the joint production of "a report called 'Post-Partisan Power'",

which calls for the removal of wasteful subsidies and advocates investments designed to make "new clean energy sources" commercially viable. Just as important, though, is the point this group made by working together. In their introduction, they note that bipartisanship has helped create economic growth. And not only the distant past: Welfare reform was passed thanks to both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

Ah yes, the good old "bipartisan days" when Newt Gingrich stewed over having to use the back entrance to Air Force One, shut down government and whined that Clinton's welfare reform proposals represented his stealing Republican ideas. Ah, the bipartisan harmony....

As I see it, to be meaningful bipartisanship has to tackle a large, difficult issue. Welfare reform represents an easy issue because, for the most part, Americans don't care for welfare programs, are easily led to believe that they're too generous, and will support cuts even when times are good. Clinton defused an issue that the Republican Party had been pushing hard for years (think Ronald Reagan and his Cadillac-driving "Welfare Queen") at no real risk to his own electoral future. That's Applebaum's vision of bipartisanship at its best? It seems more like "politics as usual."

Bipartisanship is, of course, the source of plenty of disastrous ideas itself. Sometimes it produces worst-of-all-possible-worlds types of legislation, like those energy bills that subsidize gas, oil, wind, nuclear, coal, biofuels, hydrogen and anything else that might keep a swing state happy.

Are we truly reducing the concept of "bipartisanship" to its most basic definition - anything that is supported by at least one member of the opposition party is "bipartisan"? I had thought Applebaum was trying to advance a more sophisticated notion of "bipartisanship", involving the two parties working together to solve difficult problems. Passing around enough money to gather enough votes on both sides of the aisle to pass a bill may, in a nominal sense, represent "bipartisanship", but it really seems that we're again talking about "politics as usual".

Sometimes it produces agreements that are so centrist that one or the other party eventually rejects them. That's what happened to the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform, a bill I'm sure John McCain wishes he'd never laid eyes on.

Bipartisanship can produce legislation so centrist that it becomes unacceptable to one of the sides that negotiated the bill? Does that even make sense? As Applebaum has to know, the problem with the bill that she identified is not that it is "too centrist", whatever that would mean. It's that it made any concessions at all - that was too much for the Republican base to swallow, particularly in this era of anti-immigrant rhetoric and popular fear (fanned and exploited by Republican politicians and pundits) resulting from a severe recession and ongoing economic malaise.

Applebaum lectures that without "cross-party compromise... our system doesn't work." She purports,

That's what "checks and balances" means. In American politics, if you don't want to cooperate with your political opponents -- if you prefer to scorn them, shun them or call them names -- that means that you don't, in fact, want to get anything done. Moderates often achieve less than they could. But extremists achieve nothing at all.

First, no, that's not what "checks and balances" means. "Checks and balances" refers to separation of powers - the division of government into three co-equal branches, structured in such a way to keep any one branch from becoming too powerful. The House and Senate can be viewed as institutions within Congress that serve to check and balance each other, but nothing in the concept of "checks and balances" requires that there even be political parties, much less that they cooperate.

Second, although it may be true that extremism is rarely a short-term approach to legislative victory, over the longer term ideas that started out as unambiguously "extreme" have become accepted by a majority and incorporated into our system of laws and jurisprudence. Abolish slavery? Grant women the right to vote? Prohibit alcohol? Forbid state-sponsored racial discrimination? Gender discrimination? Decriminalize homosexuality? Mainstream those with physical and developmental disorders? Permit the organization of labor? It's easy to look at today's society and see "nothing extreme", but you don't have to go back very far to find strong and often violent resistance to what we now take for granted.

And no, there was never an era in which the political parties held hands and sang songs of unity. Dirty politics, name-calling, and everything else Applebaum deplores existed before our nation was founded, and is often more obvious in parliamentary systems where you are more likely encounter opposition heckling on the floor of parliament. Does Applebaum believe more has been accomplished when politicians have been outwardly meek, focused on calming their supporters, emphasized the importance of working with the opposition, and pressed for compromise on everything? (I thought she didn't like Harry Reid.)

This, Applebaum lectures us "is why this Jon Stewart rally is such a gloomy development" - I mean the very idea that people might get together in a public square and engage in a lighthearted celebration of their centrism. What could be more destructive to Applebaum's brand of centrism - the approach to politics in which there are no absolutes, no lines that can't be crossed, and in which the best measure of legislation is not its quality but whether it earned "Ayes" from both sides of the aisle?

One of the many things Applebaum misses, and she seems to be trying to break a record for "most whiffs in a single column", is that to the extent that there are people who fit her narrowly constrained concept of "centrist" - people who scorn strong political ideology, will compromise on everything, and will celebrate that compromise above all else... Applebaum, Broder, and... I'm sure there's a third somewhere... they don't organize. Nobody organizes them - what's the point of holding rally for people who don't have an ideology? And they don't organize themselves because they have no issues around which they might coalesce. Yes, as right-wing critics of the Stewart/Colbert rallies point out, the primary appeal of these rallies is likely to be to politically active people whose politics are from the center (not Applebaum's bland center - one that is comprised of people whose political beliefs don't fit neatly under a party's tent and who, for example, may lean toward the Republicans on business issues but toward the Dems on social issues) and left-of-center - but so what? How, in Applebaum's sea of non sequiturs, does that become "blackly humorous" verging on "tragic"? And for somebody so devoted to "centrism", why is Applebaum's concern limited to entertainment-oriented rallies that are nominally centrist, when she doesn't appear to care about the rabid rallies led by demagogues like Glenn Beck?

Were Applebaum a more thoughtful person she might recognize that this nation does face serious issues, that there are serious ideological differences in how those issues might be approached, and that partisanship is not a bad word. What is in many ways a bad word is "bipartisanship" as used in the manner of David Broder, in which the term is reduced to "politicians setting aside their differences and agreeing with my agenda." Applebaum's notion of solutions to problems as being "too centrist" only serves to highlight the sloppiness of her thinking - again, it is the partisans who keep such legislation from passing, not the centrists. And "centrist" solutions to non-pressing, non-controversial issues does not illustrate how "centrism" is effective - it highlights how much easier it is to address the little things that don't excite the voters than it is to address the big, difficult issues that raise hackles on both sides of the aisle.

Where Can I Find Employers Offering Pensions?

In a rather silly tribute to what she sees as a British love of austerity, Anne Applebaum lectures,

Hardly anyone in America is talking about cuts in Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, for example, the biggest budgetary items (even though "private" pensions now look a lot safer, even when taking stock market fluctuations into account, than those who will depend entirely on a bankrupt federal budget 20 years hence).

Where exactly can I find a job that offers me a private pension? A secure one, that is. (Given her faith in private pensions, would Applebaum eliminate the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as unnecessary?) Seriously, what country does she live in because... oh yeah, that's right, it isn't this one.

If Applebaum lived in this country, perhaps she would have noticed that Social Security cuts are very much on the table, and that the discussion recently made headlines in rather colorful terms. Medicaid benefits have been slashed across the country. Sure, Medicare reform is difficult, although the Obama Administration should get credit for going after Medicare Advantage subsidies; but when Applebaum comments, "In Britain, by contrast, everything is on the table: pensions, housing benefits, disability payments, tax breaks" it's interesting to note that her list of "everything" does not include cuts for the NHS - the budget has been "ring fenced" with some shifts in spending and plans to limit future growth. Sound familiar?

What is interesting about Applebaum's list is that she's principally rattling off benefits for the poor. She should recall from the 1990's that "welfare reform" is both popular and easy. She should be aware that Britain offer significantly more generous social support than the U.S., and that's unlikely to change even after the cuts are made.

Yes, wartime rationing had an effect on the nation, and I remember my grandmother's cupboard overflowing with boxes of sugar cubes - she was not going to go through another war without having sugar for her tea. But really, no, other than the handwriting on the wall being much more obvious, I don't sense that the British are slashing the budget because they want to show of their stiff upper lips and whatnot. If they loved austerity as much as Applebaum suggests, how does she imagine they got into their present financial crisis?

The Price of the Iraq War

I don't know whether to praise Anne Applebaum for acknowledging the huge price that the U.S. has paid (and continues to pay) for the Iraq War, or chide her for continuing to insist that it could turn out to be sunshine and lollipops. I do think it's fair to observe that nowhere among the prices she has listed will you actually find a dollar figure. The war has drained trillions from the treasury, and the bills keep coming. To quickly hit Applebaum's points, she believes that among the casualties of the war are,

1. America's reputation for effectiveness;
2. America's ability to organize a coalition;
3. America's ability to influence the Middle East;
4. America's ability to think like a global power; and
5. America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.

As with the dollar cost of the war, the impact of the war on Iraqis goes unmentioned.

I find many of Applebaum's points to be unpersuasive. In terms of America's reputation for military effectiveness, the initial war was a success. The mistake was embracing the notion that it would be quick and easy (not to mention free) to occupy Iraq and reinvent it as a right-wing utopia and corporate grab-bag. Tyrants may not be trembling that the U.S. will attempt such a project in their nations after they are deposed, but they know that we can depose them.

In terms of the impact on coalition-building, the war can't be said to have had any appreciable effect. The war was unpopular with most of our allies, and coalition-building was difficult even before the war began. To the extent that the war "", that's his own fault, he managed to serve as Prime Minister for another four years (considerably beyond the term he negotiated with Gordon Brown when he became party leader), and if he's crying on the way to the bank his tears are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

In terms of Georgia, if the lesson to a nominal coalition member (and by that I mean no offense to Georgia, a nation that lacked the capacity to contribute more substantially to the war effort) is that their participation won't inspire the U.S. to militarily back them if they provoke a war with Russia, I would have to call that a good thing. Truly, if building a coalition is nothing more than promising a return greater than the investment - in Applebaum's words, "economic or diplomatic benefits" and "special American favors" in exchange for a small commitment of troops - we are going about it the wrong way. When Applebaum complains, "'Iraq' is part of the reason there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan", she displays amnesia - the Afghanistan war started first. To the extent that the effort to maintain a coalition in Afghanistan has suffered due to Iraq, it is much more because of the Bush Administration's change of priorities and diversion of resources from the Afghan war.

As for "why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran", sure, having launched a war in Iraq on the basis of its possession of WMD's and coming up empty, it's harder to convince other nations to follow us into a potential war with Iran over WMD's we concede that it does not possess. At best that has to do with having demonstrated the limits of our nation's intelligence on the state of other countries' weapons programs, and at worst it's because the exaggeration of the threat of Iraq has damaged our credibility - but either way, the outcome was avoidable. If Applebaum is speaking not just of an initial war but of a prolonged occupation, even as the effort to democratize Iraq continues to wobble, few are eager at repeating the experiment in a nation with about twice the population and four times the land mass.

In terms of influencing the Middle East, the Bush Administration made no serious effort to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. It instead tightened the U.S. embrace of Israel. I'm not sure if Applebaum believes that to be good or bad, but it was foreseeable. She claims that the war increased the price of oil, and snipes at war opponents, "this was supposed to be a 'war for oil,' remember", but she misses the boat there as well. Even if we assume that she has never heard of the Carter Doctrine, and even if we view the war proponents who believed that the war would significantly reduce the price of oil and undermine the finances of the Arab oil states, she surely can't have missed that the war in Iraq did remove a potential threat to the world's oil supply. (Memories of the first Iraq war.) It would be naive to have imagined that launching a war in Iraq would flood the world with cheap oil, but it's no less naive to pretend that oil played no role in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Applebaum refuses to reconsider her support of the war and, although she concedes a high price with no basis to yet declare victory, she offers a defense of her stance by way of anecdote,

Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai - who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that "it's too soon to tell."

If we were to assume that the anecdote occurred, our interpretation of the comment perhaps tells us more about us than about the speaker. Had, for example, G.W. made that comment during a debate, it would have been framed as a gaffe, a mistake, a reflection of ignorance. Had Al Gore done the same, it would have been equivocation, pointy-headedness, waffling. But when framed through the idea of a Chinese leader who is presumed to take an exceptionally long view of history, the statement is viewed as deep and meaningful.

Odds are if it actually occurred it was because of a translation error, Zhou Enlai's misunderstanding the question, or his providing a murky answer because he didn't know enough French history to know that the revolution had occurred almost two centuries before. But under any interpretation, it won't take two centuries for us to learn the impact of the Iraq war or, as Applebaum's own column reflects, its impact on the United States.

There's Nothing Wrong With a Good Rant....

And Applebaum offers up a good entry in the "Americans are stupid" category, the type of rant that Americans love to hate, or hate to love, or... maybe it's a little bit of both. But I think that it's reasonable to expect that a rant that is published in a major newspaper be factually accurate.

Applebaum's argument could easily be paraphrased as, "If like me, you spend a lot of time living in Europe, you'll come to see Americans as selfish and stupid." With due respect to Applebaum's attempt to suggest that Europeans are less selfish and more enlightened, or expect less from their government, she does a poor job making her case. I think it's more reasonable to say that Americans are people, and thus are subject to being selfish, misled by demagoguery, and at times irrational. Look at one culture, look at 'em all - people are people.

Beyond that, Applebaum seems eager to shift the responsibility for a mass response to demagoguery onto the people. Not onto the "Mama Grizzlies" who actively and dishonestly attempt to whip up a frenzy of self-contradictory anti-government sentiment - "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Paul Krugman addressed the issue in a manner that, although not original, recognizes where the responsibility belongs:

There’s no point berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the lives of people they know.

Applebaum faults the American people for listening to the nation's political opinion leaders and acting as if the analysis that's presented to them is accurate. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she and her peers have a role in the equation, and that when seeking out the roots of the problem she would benefit from consulting a mirror.

But the biggest problem is that her editorial is replete with errors of fact and logic....

• "Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world" - Applebaum should take note that while the U.S. relies heavily on litigation to resolve its disputes, Europe relies much more heavily on regulation. Yes, in the U.S. you might get a class action suit over a product that fails five minutes out of warranty (not that it would be a very strong suit), but in Europe you're more apt to have the government tell the company that produced the product that, despite the duration of its warranty, consumers had a right to expect greater durability so they must fix or replace the item. We could argue about which approach is better, but it's dishonest to pretend that Europeans merely accept the status quo while Americans go off to court.

  It's also fair to ask, if we're accused of having a "lawsuit culture", how many Americans actually file a tort lawsuit during their lifetimes? Most people seem to get through life without suing somebody else - so, other than media spin, what makes that a "lawsuit culture"?

  It's also reasonable to ask, if the U.S. is deemed to be "addicted" to government spending, what spending programs that directly benefit individuals do we have in the United States that are absent from typical European nations, and for those with counterparts how do benefits and expenditures compare? I'm having a difficult time thinking of government sponsored social programs where, on the whole, Europe lags behind the U.S.

• "They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong." - Would people respond to this differently if Applebaum said "you" instead of "they"? And if we are talking about the society and not individuals, how is this actually different from Europe? What risks do Americans deem unacceptable that Europeans shrug off as part of life?

• "And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too." - The only people who got serious financial help due to the collapse of the housing market were bankers. Other than the failed HAMP program, ordinary homeowners were told to suck it up. So what is Applebaum talking about?

• "When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane last Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible" - I remember things a bit differently. It seemed to me that it was the right-wing media that howled for blood, and whined that President Obama didn't respond quickly enough, or (like Bush did with the shoe bomber) dared to allow the suspect to be Mirandized and treated like a criminal rather than being whisked away to a black hole where he could be held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant". Sure, a lot of people responded to that demagoguery. But why is Applebaum faulting the people and not the demagogues?

• "When, because of bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again." - Actually, wasn't it the same story over again? President Obama responded as if the matter were appropriately delegated to BP and a variety of government agencies, the media howled that he wasn't taking things seriously enough until he finally spoke on the subject, the media then howled that he didn't show enough emotion, and when he devoted more time to the matter after-the-fact the media howled that he was being distracted from his other duties? Again, even if people bought into the media's spin and right-wing demagoguery, how is that their fault?

  For that matter, where can I find Applebaum's sane voice, debunking the rhetoric and challenging her peers to report the actual story rather than trying to transform it into yet another hypervenitlation about Obama.

• "Nevertheless, these kinds of events set off a chain reaction: A government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports or new monitors sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, 'A hidden world, growing beyond control.'" - Yes, it's good of the media to occasionally point out to us that the consequence of having an irresponsible media is that some people gain unrealistic expectations of what the government can and should do. But it's fair to observe that there's no shortage of fancy, new bomb detection equipment in European airports, and that European countries have their fair share of "hidden world" surveillance programs. Has Applebaum been to London lately? Without ending up on police-operated CCTV?

• "It's true that the French want to retire early, and that the British think health care should be free, but when things -- any old things -- go wrong, Americans also write to their congressional representatives and their commander in chief, demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy, Congress and the president respond, pass a law, build a building." - I'm not sure that there's a country in the world in which people don't want to retire early, including this one. (And on that subject, is Applebaum imagining that the French want to retire early based upon private savings?) It's also not my impression that the British want healthcare to be "free" - they have the notion that they pay for the National Health Service (NHS) through their taxes, if you can imagine, not that it's "free".

  But the notion that Americans need only write to a Member of Congress and, poof, instant legislation results? Beyond silly. First, last I checked, Europeans at times will write to their elected representatives. No difference there. Second, if it's that easy, why are we waiting for legislation on so many issues that the people deem important? Why wasn't a "public option", favored by a majority of Americans, part of healthcare reform? Why did we launch a war in Iraq after public opinion had shifted, and a small majority opposed the invasion? Where can I find an actual manifestation of the fealty Applebaum imagines?

• "To put it bluntly, middle-class Americans of the right, left and center have come to expect a level of personal financial security that -- despite the stereotypes -- most people around the world would never demand from their governments." - So, pray tell, what are the benefits demanded and received by Americans that aren't either wanted or needed by "most people around the world"? Universal healthcare? Some form of government-sponsored retirement benefit? Seriously.

• "The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don't trust free markets and also think that "the benefits from . . . Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs." And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The share is still 62 percent." - So Americans are wary of free trade... as opposed to, say, France, in which the typical citizen fully embraces free trade, and calls for the abolition of all tariffs and other barriers to international trade? Americans trust "free markets" less than Europeans?

  As for Social Security and Medicare, how is it incorrect to believe that those programs are worth what they cost? And in what European nation can I find the opposite - the majority of the people saying that their national health insurance programs and retirement benefits aren't worth what they cost?

  Applebaum seems to be confusing the views of the aristocratic circles of Europe, in which she socializes, with the views of the masses - but that, also, is no different here. You'll find the greatest opposition to national health insurance and Social Security among the people who need it the least.

• "Yet it is Social Security, Medicare and the ever-expanding list of earmarks -- federal grants -- that are going to sink the American budget in the next few decades, not President Obama's health-care reform (though that won't help)." - "Can we afford to pay for this", of course, is a different question than "Is this worth what it costs". For all I know, a Lamborghini is worth every penny its owners pay for it, and it's probably a lot of fun to have one; it's still not in my budget.

  Yes, over the long-haul, we need to find ways to improve the financial viability of Medicare and Social Security, although it's dishonest or at best sloppy of Applebaum to suggest that they threaten imminent bankruptcy. In relation to the healthcare reform bill it's flat-out wrong to suggest that "it won't help", because it is both projected to lower government spending and introduces tools and measures that are intended to help the government identify and act upon areas of potential savings. Could it do more? Sure. no small part to demagogues and a lazy media, screeching about "death panels" caused legislators to back away from anything that might be construed or misconstrued as rationing or limiting access to health care.

  Earmarks, of course, have minimal impact on the deficit - they direct how money, already allocated, is to be spent.

• "Yet in Washington, these expenditures are known as 'third rails': If you touch them, you're dead." - As I recall, John McCain gained significant public support for his war on earmarks. Third rail? Try finding a politician willing to defend earmarks, particularly as they've been used over the past decade.

  As for Social Security and Medicare, they're not "third rail" issues because you can't get a majority of Americans to agree with the need for reform, or the need to establish long-term viability. They aren't touched because politicians fear that cuts will incur the wrath of a small but consistent voting bloc - the elderly - and get voted out of office, and that a fix via a tax increase will bring about anger from groups that are wealthy and influential. Both programs have been tweaked and modified over the years without the sky falling. If the Republican Party would back away from its demagoguery, I think that a similar fix could be implemented within months.

• "President George W. Bush talked a little about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The 'privatization' of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was too unpopular, particularly among his supporters." - And again the real problem appears to be that Applebaum is channeling the concerns of her aristocratic peers. The reason that President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security was called "privatization" was... because it was privatization - taking money from Social Security and putting it into private accounts. At first, G.W. and his fellow "reformers" had no apparent problem describing his plan as privatization. When they couldn't sell their idea under that honest label they did attempt to sell the same thing under a different brand. Given how the stock market has performed since G.W.'s plan tanked, even before considering the fees that private money managers would have taken to manage those private accounts, it's difficult to see how opponents of G.W'.s proposals were wrong.

• "Look around the world, and we don't look as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement." - Yes, look around the world - but not at Europe. No, don't look around the word - look only at Chile. And while you're at it, pretend that U.S. citizens don't save for their retirement through 401k, 403b, IRA, 457b, and similar private accounts. As for Chile, Applebaum's talking point has passed it's expiration date.

• "Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology." - The same, of course, is tru of most Americans. The issue is that when it's you or your loved one who needs that treatment, you want them to get it. I somehow doubt that's any less true in Europe than it is here.

• "A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security guards would seem absurd in many countries" - Well, yes, but their Secretaries of State aren't the credible targets of kidnapping and assassination attempts. Ours is.

• "...as would the notion that the government provides a tax break if you buy a house" - Different nations offer different subsidies, depending upon what they value. The U.S. emphasizes home ownership, and thus subsidizes home ownership. But you know what home ownership does? It ties people to a location and a mortgage, making them less able to move to change jobs and more dependent upon a steady flow of income - and is associated with lower levels of labor organization and strikes. So, Anne, is the problem that the U.S. too heavily subsidizes housing, or is the problem that too many Europeans rent?

• "...or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads." - Pray tell, what nations don't have "snow days" when they have reason to be concerned that the roads will be dangerous? What nations in which the state offers school busing don't have snow days? I suspect that the correct answers are "none" and "none".

• "Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -- democratically, constitutionally, openly -- to deliver it." - Ah, if only we lived in Europe, where everybody loves the government, nobody complains of government waste or inefficiency, nobody expects the government to address society problems, nobody strikes, and nobody protests.

Applebaum's editorial doesn't really say anything of note, and thus appears to have passed with little critical attention. But given that most people who read a newspaper aren't aware that op/ed writers aren't fact-checked, it perhaps highlights a need to better educate the public that what they read in the paper may be something the author just made up. After all, a lot of Applebaum's concerns are based upon exactly that - the people believing stuff that politicians and pundits made up.

Update: E.J. Dionne gets it right:

Yet [in jumping the gun in the Sherrod case] the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet," but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Does Anne Applebaum Own a Map?

Seriously, Anne Applebaum posits the following:

The defining moment of [Barack Obama's] presidency may well come at 2 a.m. some day when he picks up the phone and is told that the Israeli prime minister is on the line: Israel has just carried out a raid on Iranian nuclear sites. What then?

Well, if his next move isn't to fire a whole lot of people who didn't wake him up sooner, I'm not sure what it would be. Seriously, is Applebaum picturing a Middle East with a vastly different geographic layout than the one she might find if she looked at a map, and also imagining an alternative history where the U.S. has no military presence in the Middle East or Persian Gulf?

Does Applebaum imagine that the Israeli bombers would get permission from Turkey to fly through its airspace for the bombing run, without the U.S. learning of the plan? Does she imagine fighter jets trying to fly to the north of Turkey, over the Black Sea, without the Russians noticing and with the permission of... say, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan... again securing the consent of those nations and without the U.S. finding out? Does she imagine that they'll fly over Jordan or Saudi Arabia, without the consent of those nations, then through Iraq, without the massive U.S. military force in Iraq looking up in the sky and saying, "Hey, those aren't our jets!" I can almost picture the pillow talk at the Applebaum mansion.

"Radoslaw, honey, is it realistic that Israel could bomb multiple targets in Iran, with the President not being able to do anything about it and not finding out until after the fact?"

"Anne, sweetie, that would be impossible - a neocon fantasy."

"I'm going to run with it anyway. Good thing that I write for the Washington Post editorial page."

Also, while I acknowledge that it's fun to imagine that every crisis in the world happens at 2:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time, you would think that by now Applebaum would be cognizant of the fact that the world has more than one time zone. Operation Opera, Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear facility, was launched at 8:55 AM EST, allowing President Reagan ample time to finish his breakfast and coffee before getting "the call".

No, the tough decision for the President would be to determine what U.S. fighter jets, scrambled to intercept Israel's bombers, should do.

It's fair to note that Applebaum isn't entirely ignorant of the 1981 raid, noting that Israel "had no qualms about sending eight jets to take out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981". That, for what amounted to an unobstructed raid on a single, highly visible facility. How many fighter jets does she imagine Israel will deploy to strike only the most significant Iranian targets (that we know about) to bring about a significant setback in Iran's nuclear ambitions?

Good grief, if it were as simple as taking out a single, effectively undefended site in pre-war Iraq or Syria, with the worst consequence being a public lecture, it would be done already. Instead, again, take a look at that map. To Iran's immediate east, one country in which we're at war. To Iran's immediate west, another country with which we're at war. Applebaum is not so clueless that she doesn't hint at the consequence to the U.S. of an Israeli attack.

If that ever happened, then the 2 a.m. phone call would be followed by retaliation, some of which would be directed at us, our troops in Iraq, our ships at sea. I don't want this to happen - but I do want us to be prepared if it does.

So... she wants the U.S. fighter jets, scrambled in response to Israel's massive bombing run - probably half or more of Israel's air force overflying a NATO country or U.S.-controlled airspace without permission - to shoot down Israel's bombers? Or is she calling for a resigned acceptance - "If Israel sends 80 or more fighters and bombers across U.S.-controlled airspace, we have to let them through, even though it will severely undermine all of our diplomatic and military actions in the region, so let's plan for the post-attack world in which Iran is arming insurgent groups in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, is turning a blind eye to cross-border raids that severely strain or break the supply lines we use to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of other retaliation against U.S. targets around the world and the likelihood of having to invade Iran." No, what Applebaum appears to want is for the U.S. to first permit the attack and then to follow up by invading Iran.

But I do hope that this administration is ready, militarily and psychologically, not for a war of choice but for an unwanted war of necessity.

It's fair to ask, if Applebaum imagines that the invasion of Iran, which would be ruinous for our current war efforts and for the U.S. economy, is an inevitable consequence of what she admits will be a hit-or-miss Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, what world does she live in where Israel's attack could be regarded as sane?

Meanwhile, a few column inches to the left, Richard Cohen ponders his navel lint and asks, "Is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad crazy like Adolf Hitler, or is he crazy like, of all people, Richard Nixon?" Typical of people who are either ignorant of Iran or who are dishonest about Iran, Cohen implies that Ahmadinejad somehow has his finger on a nuclear trigger - never mind that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons or that Ahmadinejad has no control over the military. Since we're talking about Richard Cohen, I'm going to assume ignorance.

Let's skip right past the fact that the U.S. routinely attempts to paint as "crazy" the leaders of foreign nations that it wants to depose, or would otherwise prefer to be deposed. Which is not to say that we don't occasionally encounter world leaders who exhibit signs of mental illness or megalomania. Heck - over the centuries we've elected a few. Let's ignore the fact that there are politicians in this country, right now, who attempt to make political hay out of threats to attack Iran, and that Iranians could reasonably ask, "Was that old man, standing on a stage and signing 'bomb bomb bomb Iran' crazy, or merely pretending to be crazy?" What's his conclusion to his ramble on "Iran and the crazy factor"?

I have no idea whether Ahmadinejad merely acts crazy or is crazy.

Then why the [bleep] are you writing a column on the issue, rather than leaving the subject to somebody who actually knows something about Iran?

I do know, though, that Iran seems intent on getting nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. I also know that nothing the United States and its allies have done has dissuaded Ahmadinejad (or the mullahs or the Revolutionary Guard Corps) from his goal.

If you bypass Cohen's confusion about the power structure in Iran, his keen gift for stating the obvious shines through, once again. Yes, Iran is intent upon getting a nuclear weapon. Their investment in their nuclear program, and the manner in which they've spread the program out among numerous hardened sites, should clue pretty much anybody in to that fact. The most we can accomplish without going to war is to convince Iran not to have an overt nuclear weapons program - but they will continue their "nuclear energy" program and even a lawful, peaceful program will lead to a point where they're able to produce weapons grade uranium pretty much at will.

It's also obvious that two successive U.S. administrations have looked at the costs and benefits and have decided that the cost of a military intervention sufficient to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program vastly outweighs the benefit of such an attack. Cohen and Applebaum ask us to see the situation through Israeli eyes. Fair enough. But the U.S. and Israel are different countries with different goals for the region. It's easy for Cohen to sneer out an insult at those who recognize that fact:

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski even suggested that if Israel tried such a thing, the United States might have to back it down with force. The Brzezinski Doctrine is refreshing in its perverse boldness: We shoot our friends to defend our enemies.

Good grief, Richard, talk to your colleague. Is Cohen so stupid that he believes the U.S. is better served by potentially being drawn into a third war in the Middle East, against a much stronger enemy than we face in either Iraq or Afghanistan, with the likely consequence being that a decade of military and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East are wasted, than by making it clear to Israel that it won't permit an attack that could bring about that consequence? Because the only significant distinction between what Brzezinski suggests and what Applebaum concludes is that Brzezinski recognizes that the U.S. could prevent the Israeli attack, whereas Applebaum prefers to pretend that it could not while recognizing the parade of horribles that could easily follow the attack. Of the three, only Brzezinski addresses the reality of the situation. No, Richard, you moron: It's not about "shoot[ing] our friends to defend our enemies" - it's about forcing a friend to stand down when the consequence of its actions would be devastating to our military and diplomatic goals for the region, and potentially crippling to our economy if Applebaum is correct about the inevitability of expanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into Iran.
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Update: Brzezinski responds to Cohen:

I hope that Richard Cohen's characterization of my opposition to Israel's use of U.S.-controlled airspace over Iraq as a policy of "we shoot our friends to defend our enemies" is a case of unintentional or exuberant distortion. What I have said repeatedly is that an Israeli attack on Iran through U.S.-controlled airspace would make the United States complicit, and the United States would then become the target of Iranian retaliation.

That is why the United States should make it clear that its airspace is not available for a unilateral Israeli attack, and that a violation of it could lead to an incident reminiscent of the attack on the USS Liberty, about which I added "it is nothing to be wished for."

Exuberance would be an odd explanation. But unintentional? If there's an error, it would be in Cohen's reading of Brzezinski as suggesting that the U.S. might have a military alternative to allowing an Israeli attack to proceed, unimpeded, leading to his taking great offense at the U.S.S. Liberty reference.

The reference to the U.S.S. Liberty is unambiguously about a possible U.S.-Israel military confrontation - given the history of that incident, I don't see that any other interpretation is possible. It's possible that Brzezinski was worrying about what the U.S. might do if Israeli fighters lock radar on U.S. jets sent to intercept their bombers - does the U.S. stand down or do things potentially escalate into shooting. But the possibility of shooting appears to be what inspires his conclusion "it is nothing to be wished for."

This part could also be applied to Applebaum:

One should not lose sight of the larger issue involved in loose advocacy of an Israeli attack on Iran that would implicate the United States in an act of war. Those advocating such an attack not only overlook the fact that such an incident might be designed to draw the United States into war with Iran but, even worse, the fact that U.S. acquiescence would mean nothing less than abdicating to Israel the decision on whether to go to war. Such an abdication is hardly in America's interest, and it is not the way that decisions involving American lives should be made.

Diplomacy as Speed Chess?

Roger Cohen's impatience is bringing out his inner (and outer) Kissinger:

I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger at a New York dinner and asked him how he thought President Barack Obama was doing.

"He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games," Kissinger said. "But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one."

Cohen bought into Kissinger's analogy without asking the appropriate follow-up questions, "How many chess games did you finish during your first ten months, whether as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State? And how many key matches did you and Nixon win?" In one particularly memorable multi-year game, the Vietnam War, the Kissinger team pulled an "illegal war in Cambodia and Laos" gambit, attempted an end-game that revolved around the Paris Peace Accords and "peace with honor", and shortly thereafter was checkmated. Maybe Kissinger there's a reason Kissinger chose the word "finish" instead of "win".

Kissinger could respond that these issues are hard, many will take years to wrap up, and it may take many more years before it's clear who won or lost a particular match. And that would be a fair response, but for the fact that it undermines his analogy. It's fun to drop bon mots, but it's hard to imagine that Kissinger didn't know he was pushing for an impatient response to problems that can only be resolved through care and patience - and perhaps not even then. (How well did Kissinger's policies work to unify Cyprus? Does he still want Cyprus under Turkish control?)

Cohen eagerly accepts the role of the impatient American:

I thought that wasn’t a bad image for Obama’s international gambits, and then here, at the first Halifax International Security Forum, I heard a similar observation from one participant: "We’ve had the set-up, but is there a middle game?" Or, put another way, can this probing, intelligent president close anything?

Cohen should know better, and probably does. Most likely, though, he doesn't care about the half-dozen high stakes games President Obama is working through. Most likely he cares about one, maybe two, and he's less concerned that Obama can't "close" than he is that Obama will choose to close in a manner inconsistent with his own preconceptions of how the matter should be handled.

Cohen also misses the boat with his comment on Obama's talk of a world without nuclear weapons,

It’s an idea with resonance, and may provide some moral suasion over countries contemplating pursuit of a bomb, but I can’t help recalling that the worlds of 1914 and 1939 were worlds without nukes. No thanks to that.

To bring up the subject is something of a red herring, given that even if Obama makes progress toward reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, I know of nobody with the slightest sense that he will eliminate nuclear weapons during his Presidency - at best it would take decades. But he should consider also that the present world is nothing like 1914 or 1939. Now granted, should Russia or China start acting in a militarily threatening manner to the United States or each other, possession of nuclear weapons by all parties does deter transforming a cold war into a hot war. But the U.S. can presently militarily crush any nation it chooses... except for those with nuclear weapons.

Does Cohen believes that détente can be achieved between any two nuclear-armed nations? Clearly not. The present danger is that an otherwise militarily weak nuclear-armed state might use its weapons in a war with a neighbor, might lose control of its nuclear arsenal in a coup, or might sell or trade its knowledge, components, or even a nuclear device in exchange for cash or weapons. That's the danger Obama is attempting to address.

On Russia, Cohen offers a conclusion that sounds like it was lifted from a corporation's annual report: "I don’t believe Obama has yet shifted the basic confrontational optic of a resurgent Russia emerging from the humiliation of imperial collapse." Cohen sees Russia as having two conflicting approaches to the world: one comes from Dmitri Medvedev, and "The other perspective is called Vladimir Putin." (Ah, memories.) Is Cohen arguing that Obama needs to take a hard line with Russia and somehow force it to act against its perceived best interest on foreign national policies, such as its relations with Iran - with the probability that Russia will respond by saying no? Is he arguing that the U.S. should give up on diplomacy with Russia, and just let Russia do what it wants? Seriously, what's his point? As Cohen knows, we have no military option against Russia.

On Afghanistan, Cohen is critical that while Obama showed "clarity" in March by sending a lot more troops, he is presently showing "uncertainty" because he didn't immediately agree to send tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan seven months later. I'm not going to dig through Cohen's past writings to try to determine if he wrote something similar about Bush during the former administration's seven years of malign neglect of the Afghan war, but it's worth noting that by way of comparison Obama is running laps around the mediocre record of his predecessor. No, the real fear isn't that Obama's indecisive - it's that he won't commit to endless war:

I worry now that Obama’s quest for perfect calibration will yield a less than resounding fudge where the tenacious message of a troop increase is undermined by talk of exit timing. That’s not how you break the will of an enemy.

How many times in its history has Afghanistan been the subject of an invasion attempt, invasion, or occupation? How many times in its history has it been successfully pacified, even when occupied by a superpower? Cohen truly believes that if Obama doesn't remind the Afghan people that we'll eventually pack up and go home, they somehow won't remember centuries of history - that the foreign occupier always packs up and goes home? Or that they have failed to notice that the same holds true in regard to any modern military engagement involving a long-term occupation in which the occupying power didn't engage in a massive population transfer into the occupied territory? Come on.

Cohen also seems to believe that every leader in the world wants to be Obama's best friend, and that they're all stinging at perceived slights:

In Europe, a more modest reset attempt has been compromised with political leaders (if not the public) by a perception of cool distance, underscored when Obama did not show at 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Feelings are particularly strong in Paris, where mutterings about Obama’s “Carterization” are heard. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ushered France back to NATO’s integrated military command structure, and shattered political taboos dictating coolness toward America, has seen his hopes for a special relationship evaporate.

(Ah, memories.) It sounds like he's describing junior high school. "Angela threw a big party but Barack said he was too busy to come. All of Angela's friends are mad at him. Nicolas offered Barack a BFF bracelet, and Barack told him 'I don't want to be your best friend,' and now Nicolas doesn't like him any more and called him a loser." Again, come on.

Anne Applebaum has a better take on what's involved in Europe, noting that there's nothing close to a European consensus or European decision-maker with whom Obama can work on the key issues of the day, and she correctly notes that nations like China are going to pursue their own foreign policy interests, although her conclusion (while suitable for an editorial) seems overblown:

Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. "Europe" will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America's full partner in foreign policy....

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe - never mind a military operation - will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, along with a vast army to match. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism, too?

Cohen seems to be operating under the conceit that U.S. foreign policy interests are everybody's interests, and thus that it's absurd that Obama can't handshake his way to consensus - that it's somehow Obama's failure. He underestimates the effect of Bush's unilateralism, which if anything caused our traditional allies to become quite accustomed to saying "no". He disregards the fact that foreign nations have their own issues to worry about, and their most pressing issues may not be the same as ours. He also overlooks the fact that there can sometimes be a political gain to a politician, even in an allied nation, for standing up to U.S. pressure.

I also like this one:

In Israel-Palestine, Obama underestimated the damage of the past decade and has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

No, what happened was that Obama overestimated the resiliency of the U.S. economy, and severely underestimated his own party's willingness to address serious domestic issues such as stimulating economic recovery or passing a healthcare reform bill, and has had to expend significant political capital on those issues. Netanyahu, ever an opportunist, recognized that he could say "no" to the Obama Administration without consequence, as the Obama Administration is not presently positioned to impose a consequence. Is it a great shame that a Democratically controlled Congress doesn't have the President's back on key domestic and foreign policy issues? Absolutely. But what does Cohen expect President Obama to do about that?

Cohen has a sense of how skewed perspectives are in Israel, but compare and contrast Benny Morris who describes Obama as "a man who has, in the international arena, shown a proclivity for indecision (except when it comes to Israeli settlements in the West Bank)." Even with the retreat from his earlier demands for a mere freeze on new construction within those settlements, developed in knowing violation of international law, Morris sees Obama as having taken a hard line against Israel. (Meanwhile, Morris argues that an Israeli attack on Iran could bring chaos to the region, then turns around and suggests that it's the responsibility of the U.S. to bomb Iran so Israel doesn't have to, or at least to give it a green light and a massive infusion of high tech weaponry. Morris is definitely a person who brings to mind the phrase, "With friends like these....") It's also worth observing that Cohen sounds an awful lot like Pat Buchanan.¹

It's worth remembering that Cohen very recently argued that the time for achieving a bona fide peace, with a two state solution, started to vanish under President Clinton and was squandered under Bush.²

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

Peace is unattainable, Netanyahu's evasive, and all of this arose before Obama took office, yet it's somehow Obama's fault that his proposal for peace talks isn't working out. Or perhaps Cohen is now of the position that U.S. Presidents should pretend that the Israel-Palestine conflict is irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy interests, and give neither time nor effort to resolving it. Even a grandmaster will have difficulty ending a match, at least in a positive way, if Cohen is correct that he inherited a board where his only pieces are a king and a pawn while his opponent has retained most of his pieces.

The only thing Cohen offers that could approximate as a proposed solution is that Obama spend more time talking about "human rights and freedom". Does Cohen believe that in the prism of junior high school through which he views Europe, that will dissuade Nicolas Sarcozy from comparing Obama to Carter?

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1. Dan Larison offers a response to Pat Buchanan's arguments here.

2. You want to talk ineffectual? Or "dithering"? How about G.W. and his "road map" to nowhere?

Say What?

I have been following some of the news about Apple's decision to switch to Intel as the future supplier of its CPU's. Let's just say that although some people love Windows XP, I am not among them. I was not particularly impressed with early analysis, which often went along the lines of "Apple will never switch, so this is really about negotiating a better deal for the Power PC chip". Moving onto an Intel platform raises a number of interesting possibilities for Mac, presently theoretical, particularly if Microsoft continues to suffer delays in its release of its next generation operating system.

Some technology coverage, though, still leaves me scratching my head. For example, an article that asks (in its headline) "Apple Goes To The Dark Side?" How is switching from IBM to Intel "going to the dark side"? The author states,

For Apple, crossing over to Intel, which many of its longtime customers consider “the dark side”, makes for some interesting future directions.

Well, no explanation there. The author continues,

If the release of the Mac-mini was any indication, Apple has decided to try and lower the price of its systems to gain market share (currently a paltry 2 percent of the total PC market). With the move to Intel based machines, Apple will be forced to bring the price point of Macs closer in line to that of PCs.

Right.... Just like when GM puts the same engine in a Cadillac as it uses in a Chevrolet, it can't price the Cadillac significantly above the Chevy....

Furthermore, moving to the Intel platform will make it easier for other manufacturers to produce Mac clones – something Apple already knows will make a significant dent in its hardware sales.

Well, not really. That is, unless Apple permits other manufacturers to make Mac clones. One of the big attractions of the Intel chip is its built-in features which help facilitate the licensing of intellectual property (and make infringement more difficult) - something that should be of use as the iTunes Music Store continues to grow, but which could also help Apple block its OS from running on any unauthorized hardware. That is, the new processors should make it harder to clone a Mac, absent Apple's express consent.

That's not to say that we couldn't see Apple authorize Mac clones, or issue versions of its OS (or server software) which run on any PC. But I fully expect Apple to retain control of its hardware, until such time as it decides that "clones" should again be allowed.

Oh, the dishonesty....

In order to further an argument that some opponents of U.S. policy "hate freedom", Anne Applebaum presents the following "quote" which she attributes to the London Guardian:

In an article titled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," the newspaper described the events of the past 10 days as "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing."

Well yes, that's true, but... um, what about including the rest of the passage, Anne?

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

So yes, the article recognizes an American hand in the sophisticated campaigns behind these democracy movements - and then states that the technique has been used to advance freedom and democracy. The article concludes:

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

So is Anne grousing that the author "hates freedom" because the author suggests an American role in democratic campaings which "salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes"? He "hates freedom" because he acknowledges that these campaigns have helped advance freedom? He "hates freedom" because he believes that as events unfold the U.S. techniques may be "vindicated" and emulated to advance democracy in other nations with anti-democratic leaders? Um... whatever, Anne.

And her other "supportive" quote is this

In a separate article, the same paper described the whole episode as a "postmodern coup d'etat" and a "CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions."

Well, first it was an editorial, not a news article - a difference that should not be lost on Anne, given that she writes editorials. And second, she again omits very relevant content:

Intervening in foreign elections, under the guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the run-up to the postmodern coup d'etat, the CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days adapted to post-Soviet conditions. Instruments of democracy are used selectively to topple unpopular dictators, once a successor candidate or regime has been groomed.

Is Anne claiming that this is untrue? That the United States backs opposition candidates against dictators "just because", and without concern for whether the opposition candidate will be an improvement over the "unpopular dictator" the U.S. hopes he will replace? Does she believe that the CIA doesn't involve itself in foreign election campaigns, particularly when it has the opportunity to topple an "unpopular dictator" in favor of a candidate preferred by the United States?

Perhaps, even though Anne was unable to quote any, there is some mainstream evidence of the horrible "we hate freedom" attitudes she falsely attributes to those articles. Perhaps she thought that a more honest editorial addressing that some foreign columnists are skeptical of U.S. tactics, even while acknowledging that they can and have advanced democracy and freedom, would have been "too boring". But, one way or another, had she been honest enough to fully or accurately quote her pretended sources, her editorial would have collapsed before the end of its first paragraph.

She's Kidding, Right?

Anne Applebaum today suggests that it is okay for us to vote on ATM-style voting machines with no paper record or audit trail, because she often chooses not to take a paper receipt when she withdraws cash from her bank's ATM machine, and even purchases items or pays bills online with her credit card. Anne seems to be confusing the absense of a paper receipt with the absence of an audit trail. The financial transactions she describes are carefully tracked by the vendor, by her bank, by her credit card companies, and by any other affected financial and commercial institutions, each of which have systems in place to ensure that transactions are not lost.

If her point were that it is possible to implement a pretty sound system of verification without issuing paper receipts, there might be some merit to her column. But as it is, she doesn't even understand the issues.

It's All About Power (and Money)

As Anne Applebaum's column indicates, it is very easy to assume that other people share your values and goals, and thus that grotesque acts of terrorism are always counterporductive. But the mere fact that terrorist acts set back the political cause of a majority of the people that a terrorist group ostensibly represents does not mean that the cause of the group itself has been set back at all. You can be quite sure that the terrorist organizations don't think so - they believe that they are acting rationally.

In relation to the Chechnyan terrorists, Applebaum claims,

Little is known about their stated aims, which allegedly included independence for the Russian republic of Chechnya, withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and an end to the nearly 10 years of brutal Russian-Chechen conflict in Chechnya. The only certainty is that they will achieve none of them.

What if their primary purpose is to prevent any compromise? That is, they want to interrupt political negotiations that might give "their side" less than they want? What if it's about power (or power and money) - with the terrorist groups recognizing that if a political resolution is achieved they will be frozen out of the peace deal (and resulting government structure)? What if they want to trigger a disproportionate Russian response against Chechen civilians - thereby hardening the attitudes of the Chechen people and helping to recruit new converts to their brand of "resistance"? Which of those ends is not advanced by this type of atrocity? Applebaum herself contends that decreased sympathy for the Chechen cause, resulting from terrorism, will result in less pressure on Russia to reach a political compromise, and that Putin is already discarding the notion that he should be attempting to negotiate:

Notice here that Putin draws no distinction between the terrorists of Beslan and legitimate, independent Chechen leaders, or even the Chechen nation as a whole. When he launched the second invasion of Chechnya in 1999, he called the attack a "counter-terrorist operation in the northern Caucasus." The foreign spokesman of the former Chechen government wrote yesterday that "with hindsight" he now sees that Putin used this kind of language to discredit the idea of Chechen autonomy, and to link the Chechen rebels firmly with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Beslan terrorists have now helped the Russian president complete that process.

Applebaum then proceeds to do pretty much what she criticizes in Putin:

Decades' worth of PLO terrorist attacks on crippled tourists and Olympic athletes achieved far less for the Palestinian people than television pictures of Palestinian children protesting in the streets. Even more was achieved, or almost achieved, when the Palestinians briefly ceased to use terrorism in the 1990s. By contrast, the resumption of Palestinian terrorism, and particularly the suicide bombing campaign, has led to a profound change of heart, a hardening of positions and, as in Russia, a much larger population of Israelis who assume that all Palestinians, whatever their views or background or grievances, are would-be terrorists.

Yet the resurgent terrorism was not from the PLO, which was transformed into the "Palestinian National Authority". It was from groups like Hamas, which opposed the political process, and which knew that Israeli "retaliation" for their acts would weaken the political process and the Palestinian Authority in their favor. And now we have a situation where the two parties responsible for ratcheting up the violence to the present appalling levels - Hamas and Sharon's Likud Party - have more power and "street credibility" than ever, while Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have been marginalized.

Can they deliver "peace"? What should make me think that they care? What should make me think they even include "peace" in their organizational goals?

Doublespeak

Today, Anne Applebaum complains that the Kerry campaign is using simplistic "lift the ban" rhetoric to explain its position on a complex issue - stem cell research. She asserts that no real "ban" exists, and laments that the Kerry campaign is not going into excruciating detail about present federal research and funding policies, and explaining precisely how its approach will differ from the Bush Administration's. Applebaum states,

The question now is whether we want, as a nation, to continue to have long-winded and complicated debates about complicated issues, or whether we want to resort to slogans such as "lift the ban" and "unleash the wonders of discovery."

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that a speech from Kerry on the intricacies of federal policy on stem cell research would be ignored by the news media and public, while providing endless fodder for the late night comedians (as was Ron Reagan's effort to get into the details in his convention speech), I wasn't aware that we were having those "long-winded and complicated debates" beforehand. I am not aware that Bush has ever given a "long-winded and complicated" explanation of his position on stem cell research, or that Applebaum has ever complained that he substitutes lines such as "respecting the sanctity of human life" for such an exposition.

After complaining about the role of sick people and pollsters in presenting this simplistic view, Applebaum continues her lament,

At some point we also need to make some distinction between science and "magic." It is true that funneling more money into biological research will produce more breakthroughs and more cures. It is also true that even with unlimited funding, Reeve might never walk again. This is research, not abracadabra. Talk of "magic" doesn't do much to reverse widespread scientific illiteracy either, which remains a far greater obstacle to scientific progress than the president.

That's quite a magnification of Ron Reagan's comment about the promise of stem cell research sounding "like magic" - and it seems more than a bit disingenuous of her to attribute that position to the Kerry campaign itself. But perhaps this is the only way that Applebaum can avoid addressing the real conflict, which is not of "hard science" versus "science as magic", but is about whether we should permit religious groups to strongly influence or dictate our national policies on science and public health.

Applebaum may be a little bit slow this morning, but isn't that how most voters see the question?

The Thin Line Between "Us" and "Them"

A couple of years ago I was discussing the horrors of World War II with a friend, and I commented that as a child the events of WWII had seemed like part of the distant past, but that as I grew older they seemed frighteningly proximate. She responded that they still seemed like ancient history to her. And I think a lot of people continue to view WWII that way - as something that happened "a long time ago" and, figuratively speaking, "in a galaxy far, far away".

More recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the atrocities of the Holocaust with somebody a few years younger than me, who had just seen the Dustin Hoffman film, "Marathon Man". In that film, Lord Laurence Olivier played Dr. Christian Szell, a sadistic Nazi war criminal presumably inspired by Dr. Mengele. Ensuing discussing revealed that over the course of twelve years of public education and four years of college, the Holocaust had never entered into her school curriculum, save as an abstraction.

Today in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum represents my view of human nature. After detailing the great effort some make to claim that cultures like pre-WWII Germany are somehow so different from our own that they created horrors that "could never happen here" she observes the brutal truth:

The argument that torture or mass murder could have happened only in a particular culture has deep appeal: No wonder it has been made so many times, about so many cultures. During any conversation about the Soviet Union, someone will eventually claim that Soviet totalitarianism derived from ancient Russian traditions of czar-worship. Many people also assume, even if they don't say so, that the mass slaughter in Rwanda would not have happened in a less primitive, more "civilized" place.

And yet -- the Soviet Union exported its concentration camps to places as un-Russian as Romania and North Korea. The Nazis found allies across Europe, in France and Holland as well as Lithuania and Ukraine. Explaining the Rwandan massacres by pointing to "primitive" Rwandan culture doesn't explain the Cambodian massacres, which took place in a very ancient, very different Buddhist society. Surveying the history of the 20th century, it's clear that any culture is capable of terrible atrocities, given the right conditions.

As some have pointed out, the American Indian didn't fare particularly well in early North America, both Canada and the United States were all-too-willing to round up and intern men, women and children of Japanese descent (but not of German descent) during WWII, and prior to the Civil Rights era many Americans suffered through a dark period of Jim Crow laws, segregation and lynchings. While Appelbaum correctly notes that offenses such as the torture at Abu Ghraib (or, although not mentioned in her column, the internment of the Japanese) are of a different order of magnitude than the crimes of Nazi Germany, "their actions do prove, if further proof were needed, that no culture is incapable of treating its enemies as subhuman."

There is an enormous comfort in thinking "it can't happen here", whether because of better social safety mechanisms or because "'we' aren't like 'them'". But we know that in individual cases, people still do commit unspeakable atrocities, people still do attack or lynch other people for their race or sexuality (while in some cases others applaud the murder), and the Iraq incident demonstrates that even within the context of an authoritarian command structure ostensibly replete with checks and balances to prevent this type of misconduct, some Americans not only find it amusing to torment and abuse prisoners, they take pictures as souvenirs. We also know that it is human nature to let other people fight the system, to turn a blind eye toward government excesses or abuses (especially when the subject of the overreaching conduct can be compartmentalized as "one of them"), and to protest primarily in retrospect - "If only we had known", or "What could one person have done?"

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