The Pathos of Helplessness

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”:

The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take jobs, as a very important for-instance: the loss of middle-class jobs is America’s worst economic problem. But that would be so even if China were still as closed as under Mao. According to prevailing economic theory, a country’s job structure and income distribution are determined more by its own domestic policies—education, investment, taxes—plus shifts in technology than by anything its competitors do. That’s especially true of a large economy like America’s. Those policies are ours to change.

My problem with the “America is in decline” narrative is that it’s usually made to imply that China and India’s rise has some of direct barring on America’s problems. When people talk about America’s problems, they’re using talking about things like: a declining middle class, an absurdly inefficient healthcare system, an oil dependency, run-away debt — issues that have only a highly-abstracted relationship to our relative geopolitical power vis a vis China, and a more clear relationship with things like domestic policy decisions and public-private investment choices. Our problems are, quite literally, ours to change.

But you wouldn’t believe it by looking at Congress today. We’ve got one political party that officially refuses to take responsibility for solving these problems, and then we have an antiquated and dysfunctional political system that empowers them. We can solve our own problems — China has little to do with it one way or the other — but, probably, patently, we won’t. It’s remarkable and depressing. Fallows:

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

To me, fixing our government is the issue that needs to be tackled. Unless we fix our government, we can’t fix ourselves. Larry Lessig, who founded Change Congress and came over to the Harvard law school last year to start the Center for Institutional Corruption, uses the analogy of an alcoholic: his job’s in jeopardy, his home life is in shambles, his liver is failing; his drinking, clearly, isn’t his biggest problem, but it is his first problem, the one that precedes all the rest, the one that, until fixed, will continue to enable and exacerbate all the rest.

The positive news to come out of our healthcare reform debates is that all the dysfunction of our political system got brought to the fore in a very big way: the relentless obstructionism, the corrosive influence of money, the absurdly unequal concentrations of political power, the acrid partisanship, and, reflective of all this, the general loss of trust in the governing process writ large.

This isn’t simply an institutional failing. We have a political party that’s taken this generalized sense of political helplessness and turned it into a system of belief. And we’ve had thirty years of theory and politics attempting to legitimize anti-communitarian selfishness and greed. I think it’s fair to say that this is nothing less than a loss of confidence in the American system of self-government — in our specific institutions and also in the idea of a polity that not only goes on and gets on, but one that actively saves itself again and again, and that distributes the responsibility for doing that into the hands of the people. If there’s any truth to the “America is in decline” narrative then it’s in this: this loss of confidence in our own ability to govern ourselves. It has nothing to do with China and it’s up to us to change.

What if Sergey Brin Were Denied a Visa?

[Crossposted from the HPR blog]

The NYT came out with Part IV of its "Remade in America" series. It's a great series, full of the cool graphics that the NYT does so well. But the thesis of the piece, I suggest, is rather obvious (at least to anyone who's walked around Harvard's campus lately). Simply: immigration really, really helps America.

“Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said.

“The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realize how dumb they’re being.”

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

To be fair, we're talking about the easiest cases -- immigrants who have enter our skilled labor forces vis a vis Ivy League schools. But in some ways that's the point: these are easy cases.

America's ability to attract the brightest students from around the world remains one of its greatest advantages -- one that distinguishes it, finally, from other great powers at their senescence. Britain never had the same universalist appeal that America has. It couldn't. For Britain, an old and rich cultural-racial heritage made the assimilation of immigrants fraught with difficulties; it's complicated, but the bottom line was that the darker your skin, the less British you could ever be.

That's not the case in America. America was founded on virgin soil; there was no antecedently established culture (well, almost none...). So we were constituted on a set of ideas -- ones that, conceivably, anyone from any part of the world could aspire to. I think this aspirational quality is key. It means that our ability to attract diverse and talented students isn't just an artifact of our wealth; it's built into our source code, into the way that we were founded. It's because our national identity isn't predicated on a cultural heritage but on ideals. America is a framework not a race.

This is something that's often neglected both by the "United States is in decline" crowd and the "I'm a real American" crowd. Both groups misunderstand how the founding of our country makes us unique; and they both undervalue the material advantages this confers, Google Inc. as a great example.

Of course, you could ask, Should we be skimming off the most talented students from developing countries? Maybe not. But if they want to come, surely we should take them.

Crisis at Home and Abroad

The American people face the dilemma of the man whose willful apathy allowed him to be robbed of his wealth and status by those closest to him. The dispirited man could choose, as he likely might, to ignore the theft of his identity. He could elect to deny the character inefficiencies that allowed his cherished possessions to be purloined so effortlessly, from beneath his trusting nose. Otherwise, he could admit that something valuable was lost and that he must, once again, try to regain it.

We the American people must make this choice – to concede that the checks and balances of our little-r republican government are eroding, that bits of our democracy and freedom were taken from us with nary a muted objection, and that we must now fight to regain them. Or, we can blithely ignore the situation, until we arrive finally at the constitutional impasse towards which we have been heading, and the principles that define our nation become completely up for grab by those in power.

Nearly everyone – the American electorate, its representative organ in Washington, our military and diplomatic experts, world opinion and the Iraq government itself – resoundingly opposes our presence in Iraq. If one man can lead a nation to war, despite its citizens and legislature, in order to gratify his own ideological predilections and consolidate his own executive power, then do we have a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word? The rift between public opinion and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years. However, as the ruckus over Bush’s prime-time “surge” reveals, we have not admitted to this democracy deficit, which accompanies, of course, our budget and trade deficits. Instead, we have buried our heads, like the robbed man in denial, within the minutia of logistics. While we debate troop levels, the political fundamentals of our nation crumble. The question is not, How did we lose the war? It is, Why have we waged the war, and at what costs in American treasure, blood and constitutional integrity?

The American struggle in Iraq is less about oil or democracy or terrorism than it is about power. That Bush wanted to invade Iraq before September 11^th is a fact beyond dispute. Iraq is but the amphitheater of chaos and blood, not the play itself. The war is about the power of the president as he consolidates his unitary control over the American state. The war is the struggle between republic and empire.

History has proven that the two – republic and empire – cannot not be simultaneously sustained. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and destroyed Rome’s republic in order to preserve the empire. Great Britain withdrew forces from around the world in order to renounce its empire and salvage the democracy. Like its predecessors, the United States must make the choice in the tug-of-war between the primacy of its democratic heritage and that of its imperial ambitions.

Empire is defined as a militarized state with a global, hegemonic agenda. The Golden Age of the American Empire thus began, appropriately, with war. World War II taught America the value of a sustained military establishment – importantly, not just as a tool for expansion abroad, but as a means for creating an efficient and obedient society at home. Indeed, the American military establishment did as much to save Europe from the hell of fascism as it did to lift the United States from the hell of poverty. If the New Deal “primed the pump” by providing civil service jobs, then the military economy did the same, with the added bonus of loyalty and national obedience – jobs were supplied to the unemployed from bullet metallurgy to detailing the planes that the government hoped, one day, the workers would die in fighting for their nation. Exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki described the process of predicating the national economy on the national military establishment as “military Keynesianism,” a tactic which, simultaneously, revitalized both the American and German economies, inaugurating the empire of the former, and collapsing the empire of the later.

The short-term economic gains of a militarized economy are obvious, but the price, paid with our national character of boisterous democracy and grassroots dissent, is insidious. Since its inauguration at the onset of WWII, the behemoth weapons industry – the industry of commercialized violence – has been entrenching itself into the American economy like an octopus, fed by nearly a trillion dollars a year, more than one and a half times all the other countries in the world combined, and smothering our republican virtue. The cephalopodan tentacles reach not just to the thousands of good American families who depend on the manufacturing of weapons for their daily sustenance, but, increasingly, to the capitalists and corporate profiteers, whose businesses depend on the exportation of mechanized carnage. Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in the American state, during his 1961 presidential farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower knew that militarism and democracy do not pair well. The arms race has the momentum of provocative rhetoric and the inertia of national loyalty, so it stifles debate. The race depends on a constant state of emergency, and thus plays out most effectively in a simplified world of allies and enemies, terrorists (or fascists or communist) and freedom-lovers. The establishment sustains itself when national prosperity is intertwined with the specter of war, and no one wants to stop priming the pump.

Arming for prospective war tends helps the economy, but it also tends to lead to real war. America has found out that bombs have a peculiar tendency of being dropped. And it is during times of war, when our nation is most vulnerable to evildoers abroad, that the president can arrogate the rights and power of a free state – unregulated speech, open elections, due process of the law – for himself in the name of national security. Thus there exists a feedback loop between the powers of the executive and the size of the nation’s military: the greater the American war machine, then the stronger the executive and the quieter the masses. James Madison warns us:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. In war…the discretionary power of the executive is extended…and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…

In this way, in every way, constitutional crisis at home is inextricably related to military crisis abroad. Take, for example, Richard Nixon whose unlawful expansion of executive might came at a time when the United States was floundering in a likewise debacle of imperial nation-building, Vietnam. His power abuses at home were utterly linked to his power abuses abroad. And so reveals the rift between democracy and empire. Nixon wiretapped Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the pentagon papers; he broke into Watergate to monitor war critics; and he compiled an “enemies list” cataloguing American treason, as troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and bombs were piercing Cambodian skies. Indeed, the overall atmosphere of mistrust and presidential paranoia was borne out of fledgling foreign intervention. The expansion of empire demanded the reduction of democracy.

Nixon's dual crisis abroad and at home is eerily similar to our situation today. In the fall of 2002 the administration announced its National Security Strategy of global dominance: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” The Bush Doctrine equates to the declaration of unquestioned supremacy. Implied is that no country can ever confront the unipolar power of the United States and, if it does, we retain the right to invade at any moment. Our intentions are so brazen and disrespectful to the premise of a global order that, surely, imperialism will be one of the profound legacies of the Iraq war.

To enforce the Grand Strategy of preventative imperialism, Bush has used executive power as a birthright. Bush's expansion of our military might thus is intimately connected to his expansion of his executive might. He has pitted our empire against our democracy.The enraging narrative of his affront to American democracy -- aggrandizing the powers of the president in war time at the expense of the powers a free state in peace time -- is both over-repeated and undertold. To the minority that cares about the dire state of our union, it has been heard too many times. But the audible silence of our national media and citizenry suggest that the story, both repetitious and unheard, bares repeating: Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were not weapons; he said that Al Qeada was implicated in 9/11, but it was not; he officially sanctioned torture at prison cells like Abu Ghraib and Uzbekistan; he has detained “enemy combatants” without habeas corpus; he used the National Security Agency to “data mine” American speech, violating an explicit congressional law banning such an action and fourth amendment restrictions of search and seizure; and he has penned secret memos about the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of soldiers that, if accepted, would fundamental alter the structure of American government. "We're at war," the president maintains. "We must protect America's secrets." The premise of sustained war has allowed the president, in the name of national security, to appropriate the tools of tyranny.

Republic is not feasible with an empire abroad and a congress, corrupted and complacent, that has forfeited its right to regulate the president, whose unilateral aggression, domestic spying, arbitrary violation of federal law and unregulated torture are hallmarks of dictatorship. However, empire itself is no longer feasible – and self evidently not moral. In a post-imperial world, with heightened sensitivity to local autonomy, the United States cannot hope to absorb other nations into its dominion. Also, in a post-nuclear age, it cannot hope to defeat its rival nation-states on the battlefield. We cannot be Rome, in a world so very different. And by reenacting, or, one might say, re-reenactment, the follies of this delusion of imperial grandeur, we pay too high a price with the fabric of our national republic. We should wake from the soporific of empire and resolve to fight to gain back what we have lost, like the robbed man who has dried his tears, stood up from the curve and stares into the sun.

Veterans' Day: Remember the Mistakes

One of the most profound sacrifices someone can make is the exchange of his life for his principles. This Veterans’ Day weekend, we ought to remember those soldiers who made this exchange, considering not just their deaths with the depth of our humanity but their principles with the scope of our intellect.

I can think of few things that would make me sadder than to believe that my sister or my grandfather or my uncle died on the battlefield in vain. Even ignoble wars of chicanery and deceit can have noble purposes if the legacy of those who fell lives on in our minds and our heart. To "never forget" means more to me than harboring a hostility towards America’s enemies and the world's evildoers. It means harboring a hostility towards the errors of America's past.

Veterans remind us not only that our freedom and ways of life are costly but also that our convictions are not infallible. If we want to honor our veterans, then we owe them reverence deeper and richer than magnetic ribbons and robotic patriotism. We owe them the solemn oath that though we will look to our past with pride, we will also look to our future with an unrelenting, dogged skepticism, careful not repeat or to reenact or to glorify the legacy of our follies or the price of their sacrifice.

Why We Fight, a Political Documentary

Questioning why we fight is natural and important during a time of war. If we can resist the urge towards knee jerk patriotism, we quickly find that the question reveals many layers of complexities. Indeed, perception of American foreign policy takes different forms: democracy and imperialism perpetually oppose each other on the broad landscape of our nation’s military involvement and our motivations for war. Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight convincingly argues that it’s imperialism—not freedom and not democracy—that is winning out, and that it’s the survival of mankind, we can only assume, that is losing out. Deliberately freeing himself from intellectual chains of impassioned rhetoric or partisan talking points, Jarecki, neither inflammatory nor conciliatory, paints a picture of an American war machine powered by a systematic desire for global hegemony, and greased by political collusion, big business profits, media obedience, and exploited patriotism.

In 1961 a war-weary Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation, warned the American people of the unholy alliance between big business and big military, and the damage that this “military-industrial complex” can inflict on the crucial decisions of American policy makers and on the free and democratic process of public policy debate.

Jarecki’s documentary, simple in concept but broad in scope, patiently explores how the hulking military-industrial complex has entrenched itself ever deeper into American culture—and how the world must soon pay the price. Jarecki explains that a complex web of causality makes war a big money business itching for military expansion; he explains that rationales like “freedom” and “democracy” placate a nation in mourning, and divert a populous grasping for certitude; he explains that ignorance and obedience are both comforting and dangerous. The documentary follows the war-time money trail from military supply companies—the Kellogg, Brown and Roots, the Halliburtons, and the Boeings—that leech off the inflated war budget to turn tremendous profits (up over 25 percent since the war), to congressmen who exploit armament development for district job creation and votes, and finally to the United States government that establishes military bases around the world for oil and political influence.

The documentary powerfully maintains that the cost-benefit ratio of military invasion, of war, and of destruction is computed not based on human suffering or on death or on humanity, but based on political importance and economic gains. Once the decision is made, it’s the thinks tanks that engineer the war justifications and it's the media that advertises them. Indeed, our political polemic--what we know and what we do not know--is defined by those making the foreign policy, and truth is constructed based on political needs. Fundamentally, the lurking military-industrial complex will continue to snake itself throughout society until we cast down the shackles of emotional comfort and intellectual ignorance--and Mr. Jarecki wishes to begin the process.

The question becomes, so why do we fight? Well, we fight because the impoverished people of our nation need some direction in life, and the army is hiring. We fight because we’re scared, we’re hurt and we want to feel a little security, and the army has big guns and lots of American flags. And we fight because our leaders want to globalize our nation and line their pockets, and they just don’t give a damn about who lives and who dies.

We fight because, “not enough people are standing up saying, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’”

Sobering truths. Bravo Mr. Jarecki.

Petro-Politics: Iran, Dictators, and lots of Oil

Let's talk about Iran, while most of the world refuses to listen. Let's talk about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's ultra-theocratic pseudo-democratic president that wants Israel "wiped of the map," and believes that the Holocaust is a "myth" propagated by anti-Arab European countries. Let's talk about the fact that Ahmadinejad's cleric plutocracy wasn't elected by legitimate means, or about the fact that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the support of the poverty-stricken citizens within his own country, and or even that, in one of the tragic ironies of American foreign policy, Iraq's free elections only extend Iran's Shiite influence over Baghdad's fledgling democracy. Let’s talk, and hope someone will listen.

Perhaps, while we’re at it, we should mention the nuclear weapons; you know the ones capable of decimating tens of thousands of people instantly that Iran’s been developing since ‘95. Or maybe we should discuss the ferocious purging of western liberalism and freedom from the corridors of Tehran's intellectual circles, the restoration of Iran's '79 Cultural Revolution. Let's mention that Iran's brutal government is the most aggressive anti-democratic force in the Middle East—and we can't do anything about it.

Yep, Iran is free to do just about whatever it wants, terrorists, nuclear weapons, and otherwise, and we too can talk about it all we please, but the rest of the world will continue to turn a deaf ear so long as oil continues to flow. Yep, all the freedom and democracy George Bush hopes to spread in the Middle East means nothing so long as most of humanity must suckle on the teat of Iran's oil monopoly in order to sustain existence--so long as Europe's addicted to Iran's oil and China and India (about a third of mankind) are utterly dependant on Iranian economic alliances.

So how do we go about controling the rising tide of radicalism in Iran? It sure won’t be easy. With China, a permanent U.N. Security Council member, nestled in a tremendously expensive and comprehensive Iranian oil contract for a cool 30 years, it's likely a veto will be smacked on any attempt at world economic sanctions; so that's out of the question. With Iran's nuclear arms program in full gear, and the United States' institutional means severely decayed, outright invasion would be supremely dangerous and monumentally misguided; so that too is out of the question.

As far as I see it, the answer is sobering and simple: not a costly war or a tenuous diplomatic bargain, just a global and determined effort to once and for all decrease the world's dependence on oil—then we no longer must comply with dictators' insidious demands in the name of industrial and commercial necessity. Sever the artery of Iran's economic lifeblood and you suffocate the air from their tyrannous regime. If George Bush really wants democracy in the Middle East, he has to fight to phase out oil, not to set up military bases at the heart of it; you can treat the symptoms only so long, it's time now to cure the disease.

Perhaps as a New Years' resolution this year we should decide to make the research and development of a secondary energy source a top priority in our War on Terrorism. Until then, Iranian petro-politics will allow radical jihadism to bludgeon unbridled through regional governments, and freedom can never ferment in the Middle East.

The Case for the Withdrawal from Iraq

There can no longer be any doubt: the Iraq war, immoral and unjustified, is the greatest threat to United States' national security and the most potent danger to our principles of freedom and cultural respect. A war waged on pretexts of fraud and deception, our presence in Iraq has strengthened and emboldened terrorists worldwide, resulted in the death of more than two thousand American soldiers and ten and a half times as many innocent Iraqi civilians, rotted our domestic and military institutions, and devastated a country to the brink of civil war. Do not be fooled by the hollow and self-congratulatory rhetoric of our president, this is not a war of Jeffersonian idealism, but of insidious and undeterred imperialism. Before anymore American blood, wealth, or political effort is poured into this futile and illegal war, U.S. forces must make a speedy withdrawal a top priority.

As you reflect this Thanksgiving on the disaster of Iraq--the death of our fellow countrymen and the death of innocent Iraqi civilians, the billions of dollars we will someday be made to pay, and the terrorists invigorated by a desire for vengeance threatening our safety--—consider this: nothing is worse than knowing that your mother, your father, your brother, your aunt or your uncle died in vain. The Iraqi people--—though at times it'’s hard to imagine--—also want democracy and freedom. Let's heed their call for autonomy, for representation, and for peace; let's give a noble purpose to an ignoble war. The United States can't ship Iraqis democracy on the barrels of M-16s and AK-47s, we can give the Iraqis freedom by allowing them to be free--free from American rule.

Read my entire newspaper article.

The Emergence of Political Parties

I've posted my essay about the emergence of political parties in the 1790s.

Since the divisive domestic affairs of the 1790s, political parties have functioned within our democracy as bulwarks of liberty. When the Federalists in 1798 passed the Alien and Sedition Act through congress, stripping the nation of its cherished freedom of dissent, it was not the courts or the Constitution which defended the rights of the individual—it was the presence of a coherent and well defined party of opposition, it was the Democratic-Republicans.

George Bush's Iraq Obsession

I wrote this short piece as a response to The West’s post equating The War to Katrina. This logic is accurate. In fact, in early 2001, before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned the newly appointed president George W. Bush that the three most dangerous disasters facing America were: 1) a terrorist attack in New York City, 2) a flood in New Orleans, and 3) an earthquake in San Francisco. Incompetence, negligence, and a fetishistic infatuation with Iraq have realized and exacerbated all but one of FEMA’s three fears. Here are some of the tragic costs of George Bush’s fixation with Iraq.

If George Bush wasn't obsessed with Iraq…

• The United States could have focus on Al Queada pre-9/11 like the FEMA and the CIA advised, not only would it have been potentially preventable, but first responders would have been swifter and more communicative. In fact, many top analysts in Washington feel that the response to September 11th, the invasion of Afghanistan, was warped by The Obsession with Iraq to such an extent that troops were being withheld from deployment to preserve resources for future Iraqi invation.
  
• Two wars would not have occurred simultaneously; Afghanistan could have been pacified while Saddam could have been contained through sanctions.
  
• Border control funding would not have been sacrificed, and the nearly 500,000 illegal immigrants last year would not have been able to blithely pass into our country (a growing number from the Middle East).
  
• National Guard units in Louisiana would have been more numerous by nearly ten thousand, swifter, and more effective after Katrina.
  
• And, finally, over 40 million dollars in funding, between the denied 2005 request by the US Army Corps of Engineers to the slashed flood funds, would not have been diverted from the levees, and New Orleans wouldn't be the gravesite cesspool which it is right now.
  

As Michael Lind of The Financial Times noted, the dominoes aren’t falling in the Middle East, they’re falling in America.

Putting Iraq into Perspective

Is it unpatriotic to ask if the major reason for the fighting in Iraq is that we are still there?
-Richard Clarke

It's important to understand that the insurgency within Iraq now is just as strong as it was a year ago, and that insurgents of this class have lasted 7 to 12 years in similar wars; two observations made by the soon to retire head of the U.S. military, General Richard B. Myers. American casualties doubled last month, not to mention the 33% increase in Iraqi casualties and 75% increase in Iraq police deaths within the same month. Projected costs for the war are reaching 600 billion by the end of Bush's term in office; six times what was initially pitched to the American people. Army recruiters are coming up dry, and National Guards are being relocated into Iraq by the hundreds. According to Pentagon sources, our military is at its smallest and most vulnerable stance since after WWII, at a time when the North Korean threat is becoming increasingly imminent. If North Korea advances to the Southern border, the United States would be ill-equipped to defend our allies or defend ourselves. That's a fact.

It's easy to catalogue problems, but much more difficult to provide answers. Would an Iraq retreat instigate chaos--but don't we already have chaos? Are we perpetuating democracy or are we perpetuating death? I'’ve been ambivalent on this issue throughout my posts/articles: bad idea, but we have to stay the course or cut our losses and leave.

What Bush has Wrought

This past Wednesday, Amnesty International’s Irene Khan, Amnesty's Secretary General, berated George Bush and the United States’ government for condoning, sponsoring, and propagating “atrocious” human rights violation. Citing Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and the so-named “renditioning” of prisoners to dangerous countries like Syria or Uzbekistan, Amnesty International claims that the United States "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights." The United States, in the past century, has asserted itself as the leader of the free word: a leader economically, militarily, and (very importantly) a leader in freedom, egalitarianism, and humanity. The guise of “protecting our country from terrorism” has enabled this president to use his pervasive influence to subvert a great deal of this moral guidance, and has allowed the United States' authority on human rights to greatly diminish.

The United States calls on other countries to end practices of human rights violations, why should they listen? Especially when Amnesty International is calling Guantánamo Bay, a detention facility for more than 500 prisoners from more than 40 countries, "the gulag of our times."

This, truly, is a failure not just of our military, but a failure from the highest authoritative figures, even the president himself. Khan states that the Bush Administration has, “gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to 'redefine' torture."

A not surprising, perhaps incriminating, area of the United States' defense of these torture practices is, well, their indifferent lack of a defense. On a May 9^th television conference, when asked about the practice of renditioning (a euphemism for the capturing of prisoners, flying them to dangerous countries like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or Uzbekistan where torture laws are no existent, and torturing them) Bush made an almost laughably weak case, claiming that, “we send people to countries where they say they are not going to torture people.” He then goes on, in almost complete contradiction, to claim that in "the post-9/11 world, the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack.” Torture, it seems, is the United States' new export. My article from earlier this year: Cruel and Unusual Punishment.

American Arrogance

Could George Bush be the most arrogant person alive? It's tough to tell for sure, but the evidence is mounting against him.

RIGA, Latvia -
President Bush is used to taking center stage, even when sharing the dais with other presidents in their own countries.

That made for some awkward moments at a news conference Saturday with Bush and the leaders of three Baltic republics. Host President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia invited her counterparts from Lithuania and Estonia to make opening statements, but forgot Bush before opening it up to reporters' questions.

Bush interjected, and she demurred to her high-profile visitor.

"I think maybe somebody from across the ocean should be given a chance to make a statement, as well," she said, drawing laughs from Bush and the reporters.

After Bush finished, Vike-Freiberga then explained that they would take four questions — one for each president. Again, Bush tried to interrupt, saying, "Or you can have all four questions to me," knowing that foreign reporters usually want to use the opportunity to probe the U.S. president.

Vike-Freiberga ignored the remark as she called on a Latvian journalist, and Bush threw his arms up and looked to help from aides offstage. The Latvian journalist said he would prefer to question the U.S. leader, and Bush responded, "Yeah, I thought that might be the case."

And as he predicted, all four questions were for him.

One Noam Chomsky Too Many

Anti-intellectualism is a value intrinsically connected with neo-conservatism. Conservatives fear the unbridled exercise of free speech in the same way that those who espouse such academic freedom fear its suppression. Animated by political victory, the right has gone on a witch hunt in order to suffocate the final refuge for progressive thinkers—American Universities. American higher-level education is the last frontier for conservative power; according to an array of questionable polls and dubious statistics, democrats not only dominate the professorate, but infest their students with their radical beliefs.

Hate groups like Campus Watch, Academic Bias, and Students for Academic Freedom, along with new governmental legislature (Senate Bill 24), have formed for the sole purpose of battling leftism within academia. Throughout history, hatred for the radical professorate has faded in and out, reflecting our political landscape. Just like Senator McCarthy before us, we are entering a conservative right crusade against free thought, dissent, and a crusade to quell controversy.

In fact, Larry Mumper, senator of Ohio, introduced a bill, The Academic Bill of Rights, specifically to suppress left wing professors. Mumper claimed that “80 percent” of professors, "are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists.” I ask you, when is the last time you’ve met a communist? A socialist? Communism, according to Mumper, is merely a euphemism for, “people who try to over-regulate and try to bring in a lot of issues we don’t agree with.” Hmm. When asked how he would enforce his Academic Bill of Rights, Mumper admitted that, “we’re going to put in some ways to monitor classrooms” to enforce this bill. The irony is palpable.

With liberalism wounded, communism dead, and the power of democrats diminished, it’s hard to believe that the leftwing professorate is indoctrinating our youth with anti-Americanism like the conservatives might contend. The conservative desire for dissent within the classroom is propagated through a sense of affirmative actions and victim hood, trademarks of stereotypical liberalism. Should U.S. colleges truly mirror the socioeconomic landscape of the country? Jews, a mere 1.3% of the population, appreciably over represent universities, but that doesn’t mean they marginalize the views of the Christians; just like an overabundance of democrats doesn’t mean the views of republicans are marginalized.

David Horowitz, the leader of Students for Academic Freedom, encourages students to report professors who diverge from mainstream ideology, effectively empowering the students to regulate the professor. Though they claim they’re fighting for academic freedom, in reality, they’re merely restricting it.

Democrats Need Democracy

In recent history, two startling developments have taken place. The first development is an auspicious wave of democratization which has seemed to washed over the middle east; advancements towards democracy have taken place in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, and, yes, Iraq. These advancements, if continued, could put pressure on some of the most nefarious regimes in the region—Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—to abandon dictatorship. This, naively and idealistically speaking of course, could represent an important strike against terrorism and an even more important step in securing United State’s longevity.

A second development, not nearly as surprising or as genuine, is that the Bush administration has conveniently forgotten Iraq’s imminent threat, and vindicated their success through a humanitarian smoke screen; they have complacently accepted progress in the Middle East as a justification for Iraq.

Democrats, at this point in time, have put themselves in a precarious situation. These pro-democracy developments should not be viewed through the cynical lenses of partisanship; they should be embraced with the ideological fervor which has defined liberalism in the past. Democrats should not hypocritically belittle George Bush’s Russian democracy complicity, while disdainfully rejecting progress within the Middle East. The Bush administration’s shameful foreign policy of preventive war, chicanery, and ineptitude is precisely the reason why democrats have to be true to their roots in embracing struggles for democracy. Now that we’re at war, it may be more fruitful to discuss the perpetuation of liberalism within Iraq through free press, political parties, humane justice system, and the imbuement of the Iraqi mentality with concepts of freedom—ideals much more fundamental to democracy than a single election which has yet to enact change. Democrats are the party of human rights, freedom, and democracy; let’s try to embrace those ideals in a circumstance which we didn’t support.

Today marks the second anniversary of the United States' war in Iraq. Today, almost one hundred thousand people are marching throughout Europe against George Bush, the United States, and the war in Iraq. World mentality, the second global superpower, is a force that should not be underestimated. The United States has handicapped its democracy-building efforts by coming into the war in Iraq with a history of selfish support of dictatorship, arrogant disregarding for international mentality, and cruel sponsorship of its own form of torture (Guantánamo anyone?). It seems almost implausible that the United States’ democracy-creation efforts could ever be successful without unified domestic support.

By no means is Iraq a success story; instead, it is the very opposite. We are so immersed in the Iraq debacle, including the death of soldiers, Iraqis, and the disintegration of the United States economy, that retreat now would spell the death of future freedom implications. Will democracy be ushered in by the Bush Administration? No. However, hoping for the failure of George Bush, and the failure of the United States, is the worst political course of action for defining the human rights ideals of the Democratic Party in the upcoming years.

Friends of America

During my daily cyber-visit to TLC’s quasi-political quasi-comical rival blog, Friends of America, I checked out one of the latest "posts" (if that's what you'd call it) about the radical Coloradoan professor, Ward Churchill. Burrowed within the incoherencies, flagrant plagiarism, and unduly prejudicial rants, I came accross a taunt within the post:

So now Max, if you would like to defend your party please counter this post on "The Liberal Conviction" and you can also try to tell us how the United States is going to hell.

So, Ricky, though I won’t defend Mr. Churchill’s statements and I won’t write about how the ‘United States is going to hell’, I will briefly school you in the importance of preserving dissent.

Clearly Ricky, the most important question here is not “why doesn't [Ward Churchill] attempt to run for office” nor, what the “innocent people and families” did to deserve what they received (because they did nothing), the real partisan contention of this debate is between a proclivity towards nationalism and anger verses a respect for freedom of thought. No one here supports the defamatory, benighted comments of Mr. Churchill, but the support they afford him is his federally protected right to voice his academic opinion regardless of public perception. Although Ricky, you claim that you “simply love America”, you evidently have little respect for the ideals that lay its ideological foundation, ideals like unquestioned freedom of speech and thought.

Analogous to the Lawrence Summers controversy, Mr. Churchill’s controversy surrounds the poignancy of his beliefs and ridiculousness of his rhetoric. If we attempt to restrict the beliefs of those who dissent within an academic capacity, then we tread a slippery slope. As A View from the West pointed out, if we restrict his ludicrous statements now, then we may, some day, begin to restrict other rhetoric which questions the status quo.

An important point is that Mr. Churchill is being paid by the state of Colorado. If his statements, rather than directed at the victims of 9/11, were direct to African Americans, Jews, or gays, would I be defending him? The answer, sadly, is yes. Should the state keep him on his payroll? That's up to the state. However, I will defend individual dissent because it is the lifeblood of democracy—regardless of how heartless, ignorant, derogatory, or insane the belief is. Luckly, in a true democracy, factions of one extreme will oft counterbalance factions of the opposite extreme. The United States can either be entirely censorious towards individual freedom of speech, or completely permissive. If we are completely permissive then one man's extreme will beget another extreme; by allowing an unregulated market place of ideas, minority opinions will countervail eachother.

As much as you "simply love America" Ricky, it is the fascists, not the democratic leaders, who advocate the death of dissenters like you do (“can someone put a cap in his ass to shut [Ward Churchill] up”). It is fascists who thrive using the same jingostic rhretoric that you employ. And, finally, it is fascists who believe that through non-violent speech, people can take their first amendment rights "to [sic] far". I say that the true “Friends of America” are those who respect the ideals enumerated within the constitution, not those who advocate the subversion of these ideals in the name of patriotism.

Global Nuclear Proliferation

George Bush is sending a clear message to the world: if you want to defend yourself, you must produce Nuclear Weapons. Iran and North Korea have faced none of United State’s aggression, while Iraq, a far less imminent threat, has. A well known specialist in United States foreign policy warned that the, “general strategy of preventive war” employed by the United States, provides other countries with, “overwhelming incentives to wield weapons of terror and mass destruction” as a deterrent to “the unbridled use of American power”.

This message was reiterated with the invasion of Iraq in 2002. The Bush Administration will gladly invade the devastated and defenseless Iraq; however, not North Korea, a much more tyrannous and dangerous country, because in doing so, great amounts of damage will most likely be inflicted on ourselves, a risk out of the question. This Friday, North Korea heeded the lesson by announcing that it had nuclear weapons, planned to continue to build them, and refused to negotiate. Mr. Bush, in an attempt to distance himself from the diplomacy of the Clinton Administration and the US North Korea Nuclear Pact, taught the world that, as foreign policy specialist Kenneth Waltz says, “the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence” and that “weapons of mass destruction are the only means to deter [us].” Tactful and enlightened diplomacy is the only means to truly curtail weapons of mass destruction proliferation, not aggression. Let’s hope Mr. Bush learns his lesson before it’s too late.