The Washington Post is a “right wing netherworld”? Who knew? Here’s Fareed Zakaria, published in the Washington Post this morning:

At his United Nations debut, Barack Obama urged global cooperation to combat nuclear proliferation, climate change and other problems that go beyond the borders of any one country. The speech was well received around the world, except in one place — America’s right-wing netherworld, which quickly began whipping people into a frenzy.

And here’s Michael Gerson, published in the Washington Post on Saturday:

I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced. It might be compared to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” — which made it sound like MacArthur intended to reconquer the Philippines single-handedly. But MacArthur, at least, imagined himself as embodying his country, not transcending it. He did not assert that while the Japanese invasion was certainly excessive, America had been guilty of provocations of its own — and now, in the MacArthur era, things would be finally different.

Twice in his United Nations speech, Obama dares to quote Franklin Roosevelt. I have read quite a bit of Roosevelt’s rhetoric. It is impossible to imagine him, under any circumstances, unfairly criticizing his own country in an international forum in order to make himself look better in comparison. He would have considered such a rhetorical strategy shameful — as indeed it is.

It’s a netherworld that apparently extends to the Champs-Élysées:

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, came close to mocking his American counterpart for the good intentions, which Mr Obama had heralded as an “historic” step towards nuclear abolition, even though it set no specific targets or fresh mandates.

“We live in a real world not a virtual world,” the Frenchman told the 15-member council. “And the real world expects us to take decisions.

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

“I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.

“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naïve”.

Now, I believe that there is a time for words and a time for deeds and right now is as good a time for words as we’re likely to get. Consequently, I wasn’t as outraged about President Obama’s remarks at the United Nations as some apparently were. Unless we’re extraordinarily lucky or President Obama is significantly more skilled than his detractors fear he is, the time for deeds may come all too soon.

However, hasty generalization leading to poisoning the well will not improve the level of discourse. Principled disagreement with President Obama is possible and it need not be politically motivated.

UPDATE

Howard Fineman and Newsweek have apparently entered the netherworld:

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

The protests in Iran have entered a third week and the state media acknowledges that the death toll has reached 19 and that hundreds have been injured. Fareed Zakaria, a man not noted for idle leaps, proclaims, “we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.”

In an interview with CNN, he explains:

No, I don’t mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may — I certainly hope it will — but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “divine assessment,” he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran’s supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today — legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

As for the United States,

I would say continue what we have been doing. By reaching out to Iran, publicly and repeatedly, President Obama has made it extremely difficult for the Iranian regime to claim that they are battling an aggressive America bent on attacking Iran. In his inaugural address, his New Year greetings, and his Cairo speech, there is a consistent effort to convey respect and friendship for Iranians. That is why Khamenei reacted so angrily to the New Year greeting. It undermined the image of the Great Satan that he routinely paints in his sermons. In his Friday sermon, Khamenei said that the United States, Israel, and especially the United Kingdom were behind the street protests, an accusation that will surely sound ridiculous to most Iranians. The fact that Obama has been cautious in his reaction makes it all the harder for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to wrap themselves in a nationalist flag.

I think a good historic analogy is President George H.W. Bush’s cautious response to the cracks in the Soviet empire in 1989. Then, many neo-conservatives were livid with Bush for not loudly supporting those trying to topple the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But Bush’s concern was that the situation was fragile. Those regimes could easily crack down on the protestors and the Soviet Union could send in tanks. Handing the communists reasons to react forcefully would help no one, least of all the protesters. Bush’s basic approach was correct and has been vindicated by history.

One of those neoconservatives, columnist Mark Steyn, points out that the Iranian regime will interpret whatever Obama does or does not do however they see fit, noting that they’re already railing against American “interference” and saying we have no right to lecture them about human rights given, for example, the debacle with the Branch Davidians in Waco during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder.

And, of course, the United States, along with our NATO allies, ultimately decided we had no choice but to intervene, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

Like Zakaria, NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen thinks the situation permanently changed, observing that Khameini has “lost his aura.”

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner ss

For now, however, Obama is keeping his powder dry.  Yesterday, he issued his strongest statement yet:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reports that “U.S. officials say Obama is intent on calibrating his comments to the mood of the hour. They say he is seeking to avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges and is trying to preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues.”  He adds that, “Despite increasingly intense Republican criticism, and the passage of resolutions in the House and Senate on Friday that were tougher than the president’s words, U.S. officials say they will stick to their current course.”

Is there a point at which waiting will become intolerable?  Perhaps.

They say there is not much the United States can do to influence the situation — except make it worse for the opposition — but they have begun planning for the administration’s response if the crackdown turns very violent.

“We have to watch every day to see what is happening, even while we anticipate several different possibilities and what to do in those circumstances,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Within the administration, officials say, Obama’s cautious stance has the support of key senior officials, with disagreements centered mostly on quibbles over a word choice.

It’s a frustrating balancing act that will please no one.  It’s not at all clear, however, that there are better options at this point.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

When I read this transcript from Fareed Zakaria this bit leapt out at me:

The Chinese are by far the largest holders of American debt, for example. They buy billions of dollars’ worth of American Treasury bills every week.

Now perhaps Mr. Zakaria is engaging in a masterful piece of misdirection by conflating “debt” with “American Treasury bills” but, assuming he means U. S. public debt he’s flat out wrong.

Here’s the most recent version from the Treasury Department of foreign holders of U. S. securities. Japan, with $593.4 billion is the largest holder, with mainland China at $518.7 billion second. If you combine China and Hong Kong, the figure is $579.3, still not “by far the largest”. If you add Taiwan’s $40.2 billion, you arrive at $619.5, more than Japan but not by an amazing amount.

Here’s the data (from April) on foreign holders in pie chart form:

But that’s misleading, too, since it only looks at foreign holders of U. S. debt. Here’s the corresponding pie chart for all holders:

You can click on either image for a larger version.

The total U. S. public debt is about $9.7 trillion, China’s holdings about $502 billion of that or roughly 5% of the total. An accurate re-statement of Mr. Zakaria’s statement is

The American people are by far the largest holders of U. S. public debt and the Chinese hold about 5% of U. S. public debt.

That’s still a heckuva lot of money but, if we’re going to discuss the subject sensibly, we should probably leave the hyperbole and half-truths aside.

Dan Qualye was, rather unfairly in my view, a national joke.  From very shortly after George H.W. Bush picked a rising star senator from Indiana that few outside his home state had ever heard of to be his vice presidential running mate in 1988, Quayle became the butt of late night comics, “Saturday Night Live,” and other culture-setting institutions and became generally thought of as a not-ready-for-prime-time nincompoop.  People are still recycling the “you’re no Jack Kennedy” zinger that Lloyd Bentsen uncorked in the debates and the man’s supposed inability to spell potato is infamous if untrue.

But here’s the thing:  It really didn’t matter.    Bush-Quayle won in a landslide over Dukakis-Bentsen and, while they lost to Clinton-Gore in 1992, it had nothing to do with Quayle.

Sarah Palin appears to be this year’s Dan Quayle but with a twist.  She was instantly lampooned, including by McCain supporters such as myself, but then quickly made a huge splash with her acceptance speech at the Republican convention.  For a brief, shining moment, it became a Palin-McCain ticket.  She was tremendously popular and it looked like McCain had connected on his Hail Mary pass.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, though, and the pick is looking like a disaster.  She has embarrassed herself with poor performances in media interviews and she’s apparently lost even the Republican commentariat.  In addition to be lampooned two weeks in a row on the “Saturday Night Live” opening skit, she’s the butt of cruel jokes from late-night comics.  Andrew Sullivan passes on a particularly clever line from Jimmy Kimmel:

John McCain showed up without running mate Sarah Palin, which is a shame because she actually has a lot of experience with financial matters. You know, she lives right next to a bank.

Fareed Zakaria has delivered this brutal assessment:

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start.

As Kevin Drum observes, “it’s definitely a sign that Palin’s jig may be up.”

Zakaria frequently writes astutely, but he’s something of an establishment weathervane, reluctant to state firm opinions unless he’s got plenty of company. So if he’s willing to say flatly that Palin is “utterly unqualified,” it suggests that the center-right establishment pretty unanimously agrees about this. I don’t know for sure that this will have a noticeable effect on the campaign, but when you add it to the growing list of conservatives who have taken similar stands (George Will, David Frum, Rod Dreher, Kathleen Parker, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer), it suggests that dismay over Palin may be reaching critical mass.

Indeed.   The only good news for McCain-Palin is that the expectations are now absurdly low.  Palin can “win” Thursday night’s debate with Joe Biden simply by coming across as something other than an absolute moron.  I’m not at all confident at this juncture, however, that she can clear that hurdle.

Fareed Zakaria contends that, President Bush’s attempts to brand himself as a “war president,” the United States isn’t really at war.

America (and before it, Britain) has felt it was “at war” when the conflict threatened the country’s basic security—not merely its interests or its allies abroad. This is the common-sense way in which we define a wartime leader, and by that definition the politicians in charge during World Wars I and II—Wilson, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Churchill—are often described as such. It’s not a perfect definition. The United States has been so far removed from most conflicts that even World War I’s effects could be described as indirect (incorrectly in my view). But it conjures up the image of a threat to society as a whole, which then requires a national response.

By any of these criteria, we are not at war. At some level, we all know it. Life in America today is surprisingly normal for a country with troops in two battle zones. The country may be engaged in wars, but it is not at war.

Of course, by that standard, the United States hasn’t been at war since, oh, 1865.  Sure, we had gas rationing and whatnot during WWII but the homeland wasn’t in danger.  Hawaii was merely a territory in 1941, after all.  Yes, a U.S. naval base was attacked and, yes, military response was warranted.

By contrast, the current wartime posture is a response to a direct attack — more precisely, a series of them — on the U.S. civilian population.  Virtually everyone supported war to remove the Taliban in 2001 and there’s strong bipartisan and international consensus that the ongoing mission there is vital.  (There’s less consensus that it’s achievable.)

Now, are we subjecting our citizens to the same privations we did during WWII?  No.  We’re a far wealthier country than we were six decades ago and we’re much less hesitant to borrow.  So, no gas rationing, no paper drives, no war bond drives.  We’ve got a large standing military rather than relying on conscription.   We buy weapons systems ahead of time, keeping them for upwards of twenty years, rather than taking over the civilian manufacturing sector to gear up in midstream.  But just because this isn’t WWII doesn’t mean it’s not “wartime.”

He continues:

It is by now overwhelmingly clear that Al Qaeda and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization’s ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an “existential threat” to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al Qaeda and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself.

Of course, al Qaeda was a small group on  September 11, 2001, too; that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.   Are they an existential threat to the United States?  Not unless they get a large nuclear arsenal, no.  Then again, the Soviets presented an existential threat to the United States and Zakaria doesn’t consider that era to be “wartime,” either.

He then goes on to argue that the next president needs to be more like Ike:

Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Vietnam or support the British at Suez. He turned down several requests for new weapons systems and missiles, and instead used defense dollars to build the interstate highway system and make other investments in improving America’s economic competitiveness. Those are the kinds of challenges that the next president truly needs to address.

Then again, the United States already had a huge economic and military advantage over the Soviets during the Eisenhower years.  The same is true, of course, vis-a-vis the Islamists.  The latter seem less amenable to traditional modes of deterrents than the Soviets, however. Beyond that, where’s the evidence that we’re failing to build highways because we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Photo credit:  GlobalSecurity.org

In the cover story of the new American Prospect, Matt Yglesias describes John McCain thusly:

The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he “hates war,” not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He’s the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable.

But this is wrong in almost every sense imaginable.

Can anyone seriously doubt that a man who spent 5-1/2 years being tortured by the Viet Cong hates war? But one can simultaneously hate war and think it preferable to allowing despots to gain nuclear weapons.

I’m not sure undermining the United Nations, which has been virtually useless at preventing wars or enforcing its own Security Council mandates, is necessarily inconsistent with hating war. Regardless, McCain isn’t seeking to undermine it but rather augment it with a “League of Democracies,” which he has described as a “SEATO-type” ad hoc coalition of states with similar values. Indeed, pressed by this author on the question, he specifically said that he did not envision this as a military alliance ala NATO. Whose existence, oddly enough, hasn’t undermined the UN.

Nor has McCain advocated “new cold wars with Russia and China.” Rather, his critics, like Fareed Zakaria, have posited that as a likely outcome of the League of Democracies.

Now, I agree with Matt that McCain is the neo-cons’ neo-con who “truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11.” He’s a “national greatness conservative.” I’d prefer a president with a little less confidence in our ability to make the world a better place through the force of arms and a little less interested in shaping the internal politics of far-away lands, period. But that’s not likely. We’ve alternated between hawkish Republicans and interventionist idealist Democrats since the end of the Cold War. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are also interventionists, just stressing different places to intervene. And Hillary Clinton was for the war in Iraq before she was against it. Or, rather, before the political winds shifted.

McCain, at least, is unlikely to intervene half way, as John Kennedy did in the Bay of Pigs, Jimmy Carter did in Desert One, and Bill Clinton did pretty much everywhere. Or, for that matter, as George W. Bush did in Iraq and Afghanistan. If military interventionism is inevitable — and I believe it is — then we might as well at least do it right.

Fareed Zakaria argues that John McCain’s foreign policy would be bellicose whereas Barack Obama’s would be conciliatiatory but, as Dave Schuler notes, both are “confrontational” and “interventionist,” just with slightly different priorities.

Zakaria points to a recent McCain speech:

Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?

But this vastly overstates and misunderstands McCain’s proposals — not to mention the nature of the presidency.

McCain does not “declare war on Russia and China” or even place “the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies.” Rather, he argues that we should seek to pursue our interests through the venue of an alliance with those with whom we share values.

He thinks Russia, which has not lived up to the bargain through which it was granted membership to which it was never due to the G-8, should be removed from that institution and that it should be expanded to include emerging economies that are on the same path as the core members of that group. Russia was not admitted to the club of the world’s greatest economies either through having a great economy or, as Zakaria asserts, “to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well.” Rather, Boris Yeltsin showed up at the meetings and the other leaders didn’t really know what to do about it. Russia was finally admitted in 1997 after making agreeing to and reaching certain milestones but has backslid toward autocracy and regional belligerence in recent years.

China is an emerging economy and I agree with Zakaria that expansion of the G8 to include the likes of India but not China would be problematic. On the other hand, India is more-or-less democratic and complies with the rules of international law; China, not so much.

The idea that a League of Democracies would somehow lessen our mutal interest-based relations with Saudi Arabia and others is likewise puzzling. Does our membership in NATO do that?

Further, as Dave notes, while Obama is more open to diplomacy for its own sake than McCain, as demonstrated by his stated willingness to talk to the leaders of Cuba, Iran, and other states — which I support, incidentally — we shouldn’t pretend that he’s Jimmy Carter.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are equally confrontational and interventionist. You can hardly interpret Sen. Clinton’s bellicose statements about Iran and her stump speech hostility to China or Sen. Obama’s stated willingness to intervene in Dar Fur or invade Pakistan in pursuit of Taliban and Al Qaeda finding safe haven there in any other way.

[...]

It looks very much as though come what may we’re going to have a confrontational interventionist president and we and the world had better get used to the idea. So much for mending fences and restoring the U. S.’s lost credibility.

Which, frankly, isn’t surprising. To become president of the United States, after all, one has to be elected by Americans. Our political culture demands a willingness to stand tough against rogue regime and to use military force against those who attack our interests. Even Jimmy Carter had his Desert One. And Carter was a one-termer largely because of his (minus that botched rescue mission) diplomacy-only response to the Iran Hostage Crisis.

Beyond that, as I’ve noted in previous posts, American presidents operate within the institutional confines of the office. The bureaucratic information process remains largely unchanged despite the changing of the occupants of the Oval Office. Congress continues to have essentially the same institutional stance as well, putting enormous pressure on presidents to conform to the expected role of the office.

None of this is to say that the November election won’t impact America’s foreign policy. It will. The personality, temperament, and preferences of the president very much matter, especially in world affairs. But the impact is not nearly as radical as Zakaria and others would have you believe.

Fareed Zakaria reports that our counterterrorism policies have led to a marked decline in tourism during a tourism boom — and is even keeping out Brits and Japanese.

According to the Commerce Department, the United States is the only major country in the world to which travel has declined in the midst of a global tourism boom. And this is not about Arabs or Muslims. The number of Japanese visiting the United States declined from 5 million in 2000 to 3.6 million last year. The numbers have begun to increase, but by 2010 they’re still projected to be 19 percent below 2000 levels. During this same span (2000–2010), global tourism is expected to grow by 44 percent.

The most striking statistic involves tourists from Great Britain. These are people from America’s closest ally, the overwhelming majority of them white Anglos with names like Smith and Jones. For Brits, the United States these days is Filene’s Basement. The pound is worth $2, a 47 percent increase in six years. And yet, between 2000 and 2006, the number of Britons visiting America declined by 11 percent. In that same period British travel to India went up 102 percent, to New Zealand 106 percent, to Turkey 82 percent and to the Caribbean 31 percent. If you’re wondering why, read the polls or any travelogue on a British Web site. They are filled with horror stories about the inconvenience and indignity of traveling to America.

For many, the trials begin even before they arrive. In a world of expedited travel, getting a visa to enter the United States has become a laborious process. It takes, on average, 69 days in Mumbai, 65 days in Sao Paolo and 44 days in Shanghai simply to process a request. It’s no wonder that quick business trips to America are a thing of the past. Business travel to the United States declined by 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 (the most recent data available), while similar travel to Europe increased by 8 percent. Discover America, a travel-industry-funded organization that tries to boost tourism, estimates that the 17 percent overall decline in tourism since 9/11 has cost America $94 billion in lost tourist spending, 200,000 jobs and $16 billion in tax revenues.

This is unbelievably silly. Because we’re unwilling to admit that all travelers are not equally likely to be jihadist terrorists, we’ve made travel miserable for everyone. Without doing much to actually prevent terrorism.

Zakaria also makes a point that I’ve been making for years:

Except that since 9/11, the alert has never dropped below yellow (which means an “elevated” level of risk from a terrorist attack). At airports, we have been almost permanently at orange—”high risk,” or the second highest level of alertness. Yet the Department of Homeland Security admits that “there continues to be no credible information at this time warning of an imminent threat to the homeland.” The department’s “strategic threat perspective … is that we are in a period of increased risk.” What is this “strategic perspective?” Is it the same as the “gut feeling” that Secretary Michael Chertoff cited when he warned, in July, that we were likely to be attacked during the summer? Or is it a bureaucratic mind-set, the technical term for which is CYA?

That’s a rhetorical question, I presume.

Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty

Matthew Schofield wonders why the UK continues to be targeted by al Qaeda despite the fact that “the preferred villain is the United States.” His premise is likely untrue (the UK really hasn’t been the subject of a more al Qaeda activity than the US) but his answer is nonetheless interesting.

Karl-Heinz Kamp, the security policy coordinator at Germany’s prestigious Konrad Adenauer research center, said it was easy to understand why. “The U.S. has a historical advantage; America is still the land of opportunity to the whole world. The people moving there believe the American dream of social mobility,” he said. “In Europe, we’ve historically treated our immigrants as hired help, and waited for them to finish the work they arrived for and go home.”

Bob Ayers, a security and terrorism expert with London’s Chatham House, a foreign-policy research center, thinks that immigrants to the U.S. actually become Americans, giving the United States a huge advantage in avoiding homegrown al Qaida terrorists. Europeans encourage immigrants to retain their native cultures, causing them to be ostracized more readily. “The Islamic population in the United States is better assimilated into the general population, whereas here, in Germany, in France, they’re very much on the outside looking in,” he said. “When people get disaffected, sadly, there’s not much loyalty to country in that sort of situation.”

Fareed Zakaria alluded to this well over a year ago

Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration — perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe’s mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this, but there’s a cycle at work. European societies exclude the immigrants, who become alienated and reject their societies.

One puzzle about post-Sept. 11 America is that it has not had a subsequent terror attack — not even a small backpack bomb in a movie theater — while there have been dozens in Europe. My own explanation is that American immigrant communities, even Arab and Muslim ones, are not very radicalized.

As I noted at the time,

While Steve Emerson and others can certainly point to radicalized Muslim communties in the United States (indeed, I pass by such a mosque on my way to and from work) the severity is nothing approaching what we’ve seen in Europe. Of course, assimilation is a two way street, requiring respect for the cultural norms of on the part of immigrant communities just as much as welcoming on the part of the receiving society.

In fairness, though, there are some significant differences at work aside from immigration systems. The proportion of foreign-born Muslims is much higher in both France and the UK than here, owing to their colonial legacies and we enjoy some advantages owing to our geographic isolation as well.

Matthew Shugart also notes some demographic issues:

Most of the Islamist terrorists are Pakistani or Arab Muslims. Arabs in the US are disproportionately Christians; there are very few Arab Muslim communities in which potential terrorists might be bred and hidden. Most American Muslims are either native-born African-Americans or are from South and Southeast Asia (where radical Islam is less established). There are hardly any Pakistani communities in the US.

Meanwhile, the UK has a huge Pakistani immigrant population and it is within those communities that most of the cells have formed or hid. There are also substantial communities from the former British colonies in the Arab world.

So, it’s far from an apples to apples comparison. Still, while our institutionalization of assimilation into the culture is surely at least part of the explanation. And it’s so fundamentally part of our culture that it appeals across the ideological spectrum, from Steven Taylor to Kevin Drum to Shaminic to Steve Benen. Yet most of the momentum seems to be behind those who want us to make our immigration system more like France’s.

UPDATE: SoccerDad emails that Daniel Pipes is making precisely the opposite argument.

Thanks to the war in Iraq, much of the world sees the British government as resolute and tough and the French one as appeasing and weak. But in another war, the one against terrorism and radical Islam, the reverse is true: France is the most stalwart nation in the West, even more so than America, while Britain is the most hapless.

[...]

The British have seemingly lost interest in their heritage while the French hold on to theirs: As the British ban fox hunting, the French ban hijabs. The former embrace multiculturalism, the latter retain a pride in their historic culture. This contrast in matters of identity makes Britain the Western country most vulnerable to the ravages of radical Islam whereas France, for all its political failings, has held onto a sense of self that may yet see it through.

It strikes me that both extremes are problematic. Certainly, though, the French have not solved their “Muslim problem” by this approach.

Fareed Zakaria notes that there are several hopeful signs in the fight against Islamist terrorism, including the capture of important leaders and several schisms threatening to break apart alliances in Iraq and elsewhere. Moreover, he argues, the jihadists face numerous structural problems.

The split between Sunnis and Shiites—which plays a role in Lebanon as well—is only one of the divisions within the world of Islam. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners and, importantly, moderates and radicals. The clash between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories is the most vivid sign of the latter divide. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so the many varieties of Islam weaken its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. It would be even less dangerous if Western leaders recognized this and worked to emphasize such distinctions. Rather than speaking of a single worldwide movement—which absurdly lumps together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon and Sunni jihadists in Egypt—we should be emphasizing that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies and friends. That robs them of their claim to represent Islam. It describes them as they often are—small local gangs of misfits, hoping to attract attention through nihilism and barbarism.

The greatest weakness of militant Islam is that it is unpopular almost everywhere. Even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has some roots, it was widely reviled. And now, when Taliban fighters occasionally take over a town in southern Afghanistan, they disband the schools, burn books, put women behind veils. These actions cause fear and resentment, not love. Most Muslims, even those who are devout and enraged at the West, don’t want to return to some grim fantasy of medieval theocracy. People in the Muslim world travel to see the glitz in Dubai, not the madrassas in Tehran. About half the world’s Muslim countries hold elections—representing some 600 million people. In those elections over the past four or five years, the parties representing militant Islam have done poorly from Indonesia to Pakistan, rarely garnering more than 7 or 8 percent of the vote. There are some exceptional cases in places suffering from civil war or occupation, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hizbullah in Lebanon. But by and large, radical Islam is not winning the argument, which is why it is trying to win by force.

Zakaria is right on all counts. Unfortunately,winning by force may be possible. The terrorists don’t have to “win hearts and minds” or even occupy ground; they just have to keep up the pressure on the government and keep it from being able to fulfill its basic functions. As we’ve seen in Iraq, anti-government forces do not need to like — or even communicate with — one another in order to create and sustain an atmosphere of fear and chaos.

He’s right here, too, so far as it goes:

The only durable solution to these ongoing disruptions is for these people to see themselves—and, most important, the societies they come from and still identify with—as masters of the modern world and not as victims. How to open up and modernize the Muslim world is a long, hard and complex challenge. But surely one key is to be seen by these societies and peoples as partners and friends, not as bullies and enemies. That is one battle we are not yet winning.

Obviously not. There’s no obvious path for changing that, either.

In his article this morning in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria looks beyond Bush and calls for an America that is open, confident, and supine.

He may be objectively right.

But he should know better.

More at The Glittering Eye

Yoav Fromer expands the Iraq as Humpty Dumpty meme at TNR, perhaps even more soberly:

Despite utopian visions of an Arab nation-state with a modernized economy, social justice, and constitutional republicanism, the reality was sobering. Failed central planning, lack of capital, excessive military expenditures, and inadequate education–among other factors–cut short grandiose plans. The result plunged Arab countries into further poverty that bred further dissatisfaction, thus necessitating an even more authoritarian system to maintain order. Eventually, all that remained from the idealism of Arab nationalists was a single accomplishment (which, in retrospect, may have been the most important of them all): the formation of the state.

In Political Order in Changing Societies from 1968, Samuel P. Huntington made a Hobbesian argument for the essential role of political institutions and rule of law in the making of a state. As Huntington’s opening line makes clear, “The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.” And, appropriately, for all their failures, these Arab leaders consolidated power, centralized control of the state through complex bureaucracies, and effected the monopoly of violence that Max Weber had famously considered the defining character of the modern state. Saddam’s government was archetypal, to an extreme.

“If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism,” Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria once noted, “it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.” Indeed, there is an obvious relationship between the decline of the secular Arab nation-state and the rise of militant Islam. Transnational terrorism networks and an Iranian-backed Shia resurgence have begun to fill in the void. In Iraq, these forces are a one-two punch: Sunni Al Qaeda affiliates and Shia fundamentalists like the Mahdi Army have created one of the most deadly environments in the world. In Lebanon, the fragile government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora hinges upon the mercy of Hezbollah. And, in the Palestinian territories, a Hamas government financed by Iran has neutered President Mahmoud Abbas and edged the Palestinians to the brink of civil war. Even Syria, once a force to be reckoned with, has largely become a regional puppet jointly mastered by Iran and Hezbollah. Jordan and Egypt, which remain the most stable nation-states there, have become the exception, not the norm.

It’s true that the strongmen who once held these countries together were not exactly champions of Enlightenment liberal values–the ones the United States is supposedly fighting for in Iraq. But they were bulwarks against something worse, and it’s plain to see in Iraq what that is. Although Baghdad executed a murderous tyrant, it also ended–in Iraq–what few ancillary benefits that kind of ruler brought. Saddam’s demise could very well prove to be the beginning of the end for the Arab experiment with the nation-state.

That Arabs have not proven adept at forming political institutions, however, is hardly evidence that they are permanently incapable of same. After all, strongmen have every incentive to destroy nascent institutions; Saddam was archetypal here, too.

The Bush administration can be rightly faulted for overoptimism is thinking Iraq would magically become a modern democracy with Saddam’s ouster. Building institutions, especially in multi-ethnic states with little trust among factions, takes time. By the same token, the argument that all is hopeless because we haven’t succeeded after a little under four years is too pessimistic.

Despite significant cultural advantages when compared with Iraq, France took decades to emerge demonstrably better off from the Revolution. It doesn’t follow that they should have remained a monarchy for all time.

Brian Friel reports that,

The failure of the federal government to catch the 9/11 hijackers before they could carry out their attacks has been blamed in part on an artificial barrier between intelligence agents and law enforcement officers and organizations — known as “the Wall.” Four and a half years later, the Wall is mostly gone, and it’s probably not a coincidence that there hasn’t been a terrorist attack since. A reorganization of the Justice Department offices overseeing terrorism and intelligence prosecutions is getting under way this spring, one of the last steps in eliminating the Wall.

Much of this change has been invisible from the outside, with even knowledgable observers like Tony Zinni claiming that we have done nothing but add additional layers of bureaucracy.

Still, Friel may well be going too far in attributing the lack of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil to the restructuring of the security bureaucracy which was, after all, not immediate. Fareed Zakaria credits our immigration policy. Others credit the war in Iraq. Others chalk it up to blind luck and claim it is only a matter of time before another 9/11-style attack–perhaps with a dirty bomb–happens.

Fareed Zakaria observes that the United States has had a long history of attracting the best and brightest minds from abroad because of a very liberal immigration policy. He contrasts that with the approach taken by Western European countries like France and Germany, where skilled laborers from abroad are welcomed but given virtually no chance of becoming full-fledged citizens.

Germany was asking bright young professionals to leave their country, culture and families; move thousands of miles away; learn a new language; and work in a strange land — but without any prospect of ever being part of their new home. Germany was sending a signal, one that was accurately received in India and other countries, and also by Germany’s own immigrant community.

Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration — perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe’s mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this, but there’s a cycle at work. European societies exclude the immigrants, who become alienated and reject their societies.

A fair point. Of course, those who advocate “guest worker” programs in the U.S. mostly do so for Mexicans and others who are now coming in illegally, mostly without intention of assimilating into the culture. Still, his larger point has merit.

One puzzle about post-Sept. 11 America is that it has not had a subsequent terror attack — not even a small backpack bomb in a movie theater — while there have been dozens in Europe. My own explanation is that American immigrant communities, even Arab and Muslim ones, are not very radicalized. (Even if such an attack does take place, the fact that 4 1/2 years have gone by without one provides some proof of this contention.) Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

That’s a powerful argument. While Steve Emerson and others can certainly point to radicalized Muslim communties in the United States (indeed, I pass by such a mosque on my way to and from work) the severity is nothing approaching what we’ve seen in Europe. Of course, assimilation is a two way street, requiring respect for the cultural norms of on the part of immigrant communities just as much as welcoming on the part of the receiving society.