War and Peace

So, Leo Strauss is now OUT as the brooding intellectual omnipresence lurking behind the puppet-masters who pull the strings on poor, unwitting Dubya. That rube. No, get this, Leon Trotsky is the true master-mind, ruling the 21st century from the grave, through his minions who have seized the commanding heights from within. Whoa.

Actually, this is probably truer than the stupid Strauss brouhaha. The intellectual background of many of the original Neocons of the ’70s (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, et al.) was Trotskyist, just as many of the original circle at William F. Buckley’s National Review in the ’50s were former communists (James Burnham, Frank Meyer (I think), Whittaker Chambers). These guys retained some pretty hard-nosed notions about the use of force after their “conversions”, and they had no sentimentality about the nature of the enemy. So, Trotsky is certainly somewhere in the gene pool of modern conservatism. So, grandpa Leon, welcome to the war on terrorism.

Another thing, that article has this passage:

In 1933, while in exile in Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the Fourth International. Never amounting to more than a few thousand individuals scattered across the globe, the Fourth International was constantly harassed by Stalin’s secret police, as well as by capitalist governments. The terrible purge trials that Stalin ordered in the late 1930s were designed in part to eliminate any remaining Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. Fleeing from country to country, Trotsky ended up in Mexico, where he was murdered by an ice-pick-wielding Stalinist assassin in 1940. Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Stalin became even more obsessed with his great foe after killing him. Fearing a revival of Trotskyism, Stalin’s secret police continued to monitor the activities of Trotsky’s widow in Mexico, as well as the far-flung activities of the Fourth International.

There are some analogies here. It makes Trotsky sound like Osama and his Fourth International sound like Al Qaeda. Like Osama Trotsky was a man who proved himself on the battlefield, but was unable to seize political power in his own country, and was driven out of it, who relied on literary skills and charisma to attract a multinational gang of followers, who had sympathizers in many countries who supported and financed him, who was willing to use and advocate violence. The parallels are not that strong, but are still interesting. Critically, Osama will not manage to secure a sympathetic segment of public opinion in Europe or America.

Anyway, I just hope that if Osama is alive, that our Delta Force guys don’t use an ice pick on him when they find him. Too risky. Just shoot him like a rat at the dump.

(Via Arts and Letters Daily.)

Rev. Sensing has posted this insightful essay in which he discusses what he calls the “Northern” and “Southern” approaches to war. He draws on the typology used by Walter Russell Mead, referring to Wilsonians and Jacksonians. He also seems to have in the back of his head the distinction between southern attitudes toward war and that of the “Greater New England” of the Yankee diaspora which is discussed brilliantly in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.

But at one point Rev. Sensing says “Wilsonianism is not inbred is us and neither is Jacksonianism. Both are like coats that we shed or put on as best serves our interests.” This does not sit well with his better-founded Northern/Southern distinction. But I think I see where he has gone awry.

Which groups in America support a war varies from war to war. Building a coalition often means that the leadership must appeal to different groups using different arguments, whether cynically or not. In this case, I think Bush has put both types of argument out all along, i.e. national security and prestige as against righting the world’s wrongs and, ahem, “nation building.” Nonetheless, while Bush has always said Saddam was evil, “regime change” always seemed more a means to “disarmament” than an end in itself.

Nonetheless, Rev. Sensing is on to something when he notes that there seems to be a public shift toward the war, and that the basis for that support is shifting as well. What has happened is that the leadership in the Wilsonian/Yankee/Northern group has joined the war camp, less because they want to, than because they think it is now inevitable and they want to have some influence on what happens. The recent issue of the New Republic features many essays along these lines. As to the public rather than the elite, the Jacksonians (including the suburban “crabgrass Jacksonians” whom Walter Russell Mead delineated) have been in favor of war with Iraq as a matter of U.S. security, but not enthusiastically so, since the threat is somewhat remote and Jacksonians really want to make sure Osama is dead, then come home. Bush knows this, and he always hedges when he talks about how long we are staying in Iraq or how deep a commitment we are going to make to rebuilding the place.

The thing that is interesting is that Bush is acquiring this grudging support from Liberal hawks without really asking them for it. Bush’s single-minded determination to destroy Saddam’s regime (or so it seems to be) is like a gravitational field which is dragging all kinds of unexpected objects into his orbit. (Bush can thank Tony Blair in large part for turning this into a crusade which has appeal to liberals. He has always taken that approach, whose antecedents lie in Gladstonian liberal imperialism.)

So, as the left intelligentsia has started to buy in, and speak out for a war of liberation, the more liberal areas in the USA are becoming convinced, as they did in the case of Serbia, that there is a wrong to be righted. And they are supporting a war against Iraq despite their loathing for Bush. This group has a positive aversion to using military force if there is any American interest at stake, and it must feel that it is on the moral high ground before it will approve of the use of force. The very attenuated nature of the Iraqi threat, as against the overt nature of the evil of the regime, actually plays well to these liberal hawks. This phenomenon points out yet again the accuracy of Walter Russell Mead’s typology — liberals are divided into Wilsonians, who are willing under the right circumstances to use force, even massive force, and Jeffersonians, who in effect are never willing to use force abroad. The Left had its own “Vietnam Syndrome” — which really ended with Serbia. My peacenik father in law, a Vietnam-era war protester and leftist academic, was appalled that many of his friends supported the attack on Serbia. He, interestingly, is a product of a Midwestern, populist, isolationist upbringing – classic Jeffersonian origins. The alliance between the Wilsonian and Jeffersonian groups has come unglued. It can no longer be taken for granted. There is now a respectable left/liberal hawkish position, though it is so far a minority position. So, Wilsonianism and Jacksonianism are, if not “bred in us”, nonetheless enduring inclinations of certain regional, ethnic, and cultural communities – though few of us are pure exemplars of only one school (or Jeffersonians or Hamiltonians, either, for that matter). It is not so much that Americans “put them on or shed or put on as best serves our interests”. Rather, which arguments are advanced and which rationales are found to be compelling vary from war to war and from group to group. What we are seeing in this case is a President who has melded onto a primarily Jacksonian base of support an additional group of Wilsonian supporters, and thereby increased the overall support for the war. But in so doing he has also shifted the rationale for the war. In other words, Bush has gotten a certain influential portion of the the “liberal” community on board for the long post-war commitment. Bush will then be able to play this group off against the Jacksonian inclination to bring the boys home, with Saddam’s scalp on their belt, and not meddle too much in Iraq. All in all this has been an extraordinary demonstration of the deep continuities in American political life, and a demonstration of George W. Bush’s almost uncanny ability to navigate among them.

Here’s a reason to be skeptical that they will happen. Justice and deterrence may be served better by having our military kill Iraqi leaders (or allow them to be killed) rather than subject them to a legal process that is potentially hostage to State Department whims.

(Via Jim Miller)

More antidote to Mearsheimer and Walt – Kenneth Pollack’s recent editorial “A Last Chance to Stop Iraq”. Pollack demonstrates once again that Saddam has consistently surprised the world with how far along his weapons programs are, and that he is not deterrable. As Pollack puts it, Saddam may not be suicidal, but has on several occasions been “inadvertently suicidal”. Time to take him up on it once and for all.

The real-money odds of Saddam Hussein’s defeat, as determined in an online market established by an Irish betting shop, have drifted lower recently. The odds of his defeat by March 31 were last priced at only 27 percent, down 6 percent today; odds he will be out by June 30 were last at 73 percent, down about five points in the past few days.

Look at this as an options market. If the market’s expectations for the date of a U.S. attack on Iraq were converging on April or May, one would expect March odds of overthrowing Hussein to decrease but June odds to increase. By the same reasoning, market expectations of an attack in March or earlier would raise the odds for all expiration dates. And if there were increased uncertainty about the timing of our attack but no change in the expectation that we would overthrow Hussein (i.e., a situation analogous to higher implied volatility), one would expect the March odds to increase, and the June odds to increase or remain unchanged. Yet in the actual market both March and June odds are lower in the short term, which suggests either that there is less likelihood that we will attack than is popularly believed or that there is less likelihood that we will depose Hussein if we do attack. Neither possibility is attractive to those of us who want to purge Hussein ASAP.

The odds outlook can always change, however. In particular, a resumption of the long-term upward trend (click on “IRAQ.SADDAM.JUNE03” in this window to see a chart) in the June odds would suggest that the odds were converging on a post-March attack date, which would be encouraging. It would probably not be as good as attacking earlier, but it’s not so bad given diplomatic delays (Turkey) and what we can speculate about the pace of U.S. preparations.

Still, the real concern is whether U.S. involvement with the UN will substantially delay or ultimately prevent our attack. I doubt it, but it’s possible, and that’s why these short-term retracements in the odds make me nervous. I think the case for invasion is crystal clear, but it’s easy to forget that lots of people see things differently. I hope that the people who don’t want us to attack Iraq will change their minds, and that my blog-centric view hasn’t distorted my judgment about what’s likely to happen.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this article suggests that Iraqis are optimistic, which is a very good sign indeed. (Via Iain Murray)