Month: September 2006

Nixon: “Screw ‘Em”

by

Mark Safranski has had two good posts about Nixon, here and here, and promised one or two more. Nixon is one of my pet obsessions.

These posts reminded me of an anecdote about Nixon from R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.�s book The Conservative Crack-Up, which came out in 1992. Tyrrell was pretty astute in its prognostication, though he failed to foresee the 1994 takeover of the House � �Newt Gingrich� does not appear in his index. The book is mostly a backward look at the rise of the Conservative movement, focusing on an idiosyncratic mix of interesting figures whom Tyrrell had known — Reagan, Irving Kristol, Clare Booth Luce, Malcolm Muggeridge, Luigi Barzini. I think Tyrrell lost his way during the Clinton years, after foolishly moving from beautiful Bloomington, Indiana to the snakepit on the Potomac, and devoting the entire period to unproductive scandal-mongering. But “Crack-Up” is a good book, and there are copies literally selling for a quarter.

Here is Tyrell on Nixon:

The only glimmer I ever caught of the RN that prowled through Liberal nightmares came while we were riding along the East River Drive in the back of his ancient armored limousine. He was silently peering out on a bleak expanse of the river. We were on the last lap of the 1980 election. Republicans were in a sweat over reports of an impending hostage swap between Jimmy Carter and the Ayatollah. � [O]n the eve of the 1980 election Carter was obviously pursuing a deal. It was in the headlines, and I naturally asked RN what he would do if he were president. �Cut a deal,� he replied impassively. I objected, and sought further explanation. An impatient RN turned to me and repeated: �You cut a deal,� and looking back toward the river he added ��and then you screw �em.� When I asked how, the former president�s impatience enlarged into exasperation: �There are a million ways to screw �em,� he said. �Tell them the deal is tied up on Capitol Hill. Tell them the material is lost in the pipeline.�

I miss Nixon.

Quote of the Day

by

Hamstringing law enforcement with PC rules then reacting to the resulting public disappointment with magisterial pronouncements about the sole of legitimacy residing in the state has the effect of disempowering those who would trust the state and empowering those who would subvert it. Hence the bizarre phenomenon of laws which only restrict the law abiding, while scofflaws are more less left to scoff.

On an international scale the result is Darfur, where only the sleeping lifeguard is authorized to save the drowning man who, though capable of swimming, is prohibited from doing so.

–Wretchard

Quote of the Day

by

“Western nations yesterday pledged $500m (£263m) in aid to the Palestinians as the UN humanitarian chief warned an economic crisis meant the Gaza strip was a “ticking time bomb”.

A total of $114m will be spent on humanitarian aid. The remaining money will be used to meet a shortfall in UN emergency funding and to cover the reconstruction of infrastructure.”

Some Interesting Juxtapositions

by

From United Press International: Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, comments on the “evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon.” (Obviously, the world now appreciates the work of Green Helmet.) Chris Warren, spokesman for the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, responds “I don’t think journalists have got it so wrong as some governments did on weapons of mass destruction.” Pajamas Media reports on the newly declassified reports: “For those keeping score, this most recent discovery raises the total number of chemical weapons found in Iraq since 2003 to more than 700.”

Gateway Pundit graphs a decline in deaths in Iraq in August. However, even hawkish reporters have found the Pentagon downbeat this week. The AP military writer, Robert Burns, summarizes the testimony:

Sectarian violence is spreading in Iraq and the security problems have become more complex than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report said Friday.

In a notably gloomy report to Congress, the Pentagon reported that illegal militias have become more entrenched, especially in Baghdad neighborhoods where they are seen as providers of both security and basic social services.

The report described a rising tide of sectarian violence, fed in part by interference from neighboring Iran and Syria and driven by a “vocal minority” of religious extremists who oppose the idea of a democratic Iraq.

While the world is a complicated place and all may be true, surely each can’t be broadly representative.

Mr. Vlahos’ Neighbourhood — Late Antiquity’s Upcoming Role in Constraining American Foreign Policy

by

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

In the past few months, I’ve had a chance to review two substantial books on the Fall of the Roman Empire and its after-effects (Peter Heathers’ Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.) These books summarize the post-WW2 archaeology and literary analysis covering the late Roman and post-Roman periods, and offer a useful corrective to a more recent trend in scholarship which has created a soft-soaped “Late Antiquity” … in competition to the “Dark Ages” of popular imagination. For these revisionist scholars of the last thirty years, the migration of barbarians into the Roman empire (both eastern and western branches) was both justifiable (“they only wanted the Roman good life”) and relatively benign (“they settled in and became staunch allies”). Heather and Ward-Perkins discredit this post-modern, New Age image of the Fall pretty thoroughly but we shouldn’t be surprised if major portions of Western academia and literati will choose to hold onto such a rosy-hued version of Roman/barbarian relations. If only the Romans had been nicer to the barbarians, they’ll proclaim, so much unpleasantness could have been avoided.

Equating America with Rome has been a spectator sport for a very long time. A dominant power — economically, militarily, and culturally — is widely resented, and subtly envied, whether by those pretending to dominance themselves, or those merely poor and hungry. Either too vulgar and decadent for ongoing success. Or too conservative and religious for such success. Either too powerful and entangled in every global squabble, or too disengaged and ignorant of the world’s woes and complaints. The Rome analogy is an endlessly flexible tool, especially when historical examples can be drawn from the founding of Rome (roughly 750 BCE) through to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453 CE. There’s something for every philosophical and political stripe in a Roman history that lasts more than two millenia. Pick and choose at will.

The Rome/America analogy has certainly been worked overtime since 9/11. Will Goliath topple? It’s the question of the era, just much as it was in the early fifth century. It’s not that people want the barbarians to win. It’s just that they really, really want the new Rome to lose.

A particularly ham-handed example of the comparison was written by Niall Ferguson in 2004 called Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. The counter-arguments … about whether America is an empire, about whether its best days are past, about whether “pride goeth before a fall,” about whether its decadence or its sanctimony is the greater global danger … obsess the domestic audience as much as the foreign. So we should brace ourselves for a steady, indeed growing, stream of public commentary that seeks to make comparisons with Rome, and if Heather and Ward-Perkins are correct, seeks to portray any Fall of an American Empire as altogether a matter of minor inconvenience on the way to a far, far better place. The fact that we’d have to see the American economy retrench to the 1820s (before telegraphy and mobile steam power) in order to make the Roman/Late Antiquity analogy ring true seems to have escaped the chattering classes completely. The fate of the hinterlands of modern globalization under such a collapse hardly bears contemplation.

Let’s take a look at a concrete example of how the academic confection called Late Antiquity will be applied to judging America and American options in coming years. Just recently, foreign policy academic Michael Vlahos wrote an article posted on TCS Daily called The Puzzle of New War. The article begins by noting that all the hand-waving about terrorism and guerrilla warfare being something “new” is in fact overblown. The Romans themselves dealt with a variety of antagonists: states (e.g. Dacians, Parthians, and Sassanid Persians), non-state actors (the various tribes, clans, and ethnic groups around Roman imperial borders), and mere “lawless elements” … the bacaudae or bagaudae of fifth century Gaul and Spain.

Then the author describes the Roman solution to non-state parties: negotiation and elite subsidies. If that didn’t work, legionary invasion and ethnocide were applied. The Romans had a very immediate practical use for conquered peoples, of course: slavery. Vlahos notes that the Roman way is clearly not the Israeli or American way. In the current Middle East conflicts, the goal has been the suppression of armed opponents, not the obliteration of civilian populations, let alone their enslavement. America (and Israel) won’t eliminate such populations, so how, Vlahos wonders, can they deal with them ultimately?

Read more