Kerry’s oh-so-’90s security nonsense. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 23, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.
Glick:
“There are several serious problems with
Kerry’s arrangements . . . their most glaring flaws are rooted in their
disregard for all the lessons we have learned over the past two decades.”
Like
his supporters, US Secretary of State John Kerry has apparently been asleep for
the past 20 years.
Kerry
has proffered us security arrangements, which he claims will protect Israel
from aggression for the long haul. They will do this, he argues, despite the
fact that his plan denies the Jewish state physically defensible borders in the
framework of a peace deal with the PLO.
There
are several serious problems with Kerry’s arrangements. But in the context of
Kerry’s repeated claims that his commitment to Israel’s security is
unqualified, their most glaring flaws are rooted in their disregard for all the
lessons we have learned over the past two decades.
Kerry’s
security arrangements rest on three assumptions. First, they assume that the
main threats Israel will face in an era of “peace” with the Palestinians will
emanate from east of the Jordan River. The main two scenarios that have been
raised are the threat of terrorists and advanced weaponry being smuggled across
the border; and a land invasion or other type of major aggression against
Israel, perpetrated by Iraqis moving across Jordan.
It is
to fend off these threats, Kerry argues, that he would agree to a temporary
deployment of Israeli forces in the Jordan Valley even after Israel expels all
or most of the 650,000 Israeli civilians who live in Judea, Samaria and
eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem.
We will
consider the strategic wisdom of his plans for defending Israel from threats
east of the Jordan River presently. But first we need to ask whether a threat
from across the border would really be the only significant threat that Israel
would face after surrendering Judea, Samaria and much of Jerusalem to the PLO.
The
answer to this question is obvious to every Israeli who has been awake for the
past 20 years, since Israel started down the “land for peace” road with the
PLO. The greatest threat Israel will face in an era of “peace” with the
Palestinians will not come from east of the Jordan. It will come from west of
the Jordan – from the Jew-free Palestinian state.
The
Palestinians don’t give us peace for land. They give us war for land. Whether
they support the PLO, Hamas or anything in between, the Palestinians have used
every centimeter of land that Israel has given them as launching bases for
terrorist and political attacks against Israel.
There
is no peace camp in Palestinian society. There are only terrorist organizations
that compete for power and turf. And to the extent there are moderates in
Palestinian society, they are empowered when Israel is in control, and weakened
when Israel transfers power to the PLO. Back in halcyon 1990s, Israeli
supporters of “land for peace” told us, “It’s better to be smart than right.”
By this
they meant that for peace, we should be willing to give up our historical
homeland, and even our eternal capital, despite the fact that they are ours by
legal and historic right. That peace, they promised, would protect us,
neutralize the threat of terrorism and make the entire Arab world love us.
Over
the past 20 years, we learned that all these wise men were fools. Even as the
likes of Tom Friedman and Jeremy Ben Ami continue to tell us that the choice is
between ideology – that is, Jewish rights and honor – and peace, today we know
that they are full of it.
Our
most peaceful periods have been those in which we have been fully deployed in
Judea and Samaria. The more fully we deploy, the more we exercise our legal and
national rights to sovereign power in those areas, the safer and more peaceful
Israeli and Palestinian societies alike have been.
The
only way to be smart, we have learned, is by being right. The only way to
secure peace is by insisting that our rights be respected. We won’t get peace
for land. We will get war – not from the Iraqis or anyone else to our east, but
from the Palestinians. And since the Palestinians are the people Kerry is
intending to empower with his peace plan and his security arrangements, both
his peace plan and his security arrangements are deeply dangerous and hostile.
As for
the threat from east of the Jordan, here too, Kerry’s security arrangements are
absurd. Kerry and his supporters claim that by enabling Israel to maintain a
limited force along border with Jordan for a period of 5-15 years, he will
build, in the words of Jeffrey Goldberg, his biggest fan, “an impregnable
security system.”
But
this is ridiculous. When Israel withdrew from the international border between
Gaza and Egypt, it wrongly assumed two things – first, that the regime of Hosni
Mubarak would always be in power, and second, that Mubarak’s regime would
secure the border.
In the
event, Mubarak, Israel’s peace partner, did not secure the border. According to
then Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, in the three months after Israel withdrew
from Gaza in August 2005, the Palestinians smuggled more weapons into the Gaza
Strip from Egypt than they had in the previous 38 years, when Israel controlled
the border.
And of
course Mubarak did not remain in power. He was replaced by the Muslim
Brotherhood.
While
it is true that for now, the Egyptian military has wrested control over the
country from the Muslim Brotherhood, and is reportedly cooperating with Israel
in the Sinai, there is no reason to assume that the present conditions will
prevail.
Kerry’s
security arrangements along the Jordan Valley are predicated on two similarly
dim-witted notions. First, that the Hashemite regime will remain in power
forever. And second, that the Hashemites will want to protect the border
forever.
Given
the instability of the Arab world as a whole and the fact that the overwhelming
majority of Jordanians are Palestinians, the most likely scenario is that the
Hashemites will be overthrown at some point in the eminently foreseeable
future.
Moreover,
even if King Abdullah II manages to remain in power, his children are half
Palestinian. So even if the Hashemites remain in power, there is no reason to
believe that their commitment to peace with Israel will be maintained over
time. This is doubly true given the rise of jihadist forces aligned with Iran
and al-Qaida battling for power in Syria and Iraq.
The
third foundation of Kerry’s security arrangements is that Israel can trust
America’s security guarantees.
This
position of course was completely discredited by the nuclear deal that Kerry
and President Barack Obama have concluded with Iran, which paves the way for
the genocidal Islamic Republic to acquire nuclear weapons.
After
the Iran deal, only the most reckless and irresponsible Israeli leaders could
take American security guarantees at face value.
Israelis
frustrate the land-for-peace processors from Washington because we have
actually been awake for the past 20 years. And we refuse forget what we know.
Land
for peace was killed by Palestinian terrorists.
Jordan
is not forever.
And US
security guarantees are about as useful as a three dollar bill.
A Spirit of Absolute Folly. By Ari Shavit. From My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013. Pp. 331-334. Originally published in Haaretz, August 11, 2006, here, here.
Shavit:
In the
difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in astonishment:
They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They surprised us with
Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets and they surprised us
with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with anti-tank missiles. And they surprised
us with the operational skill of the anti-tank squads. They surprised us with
the bunkers and the camouflage. They surprised us with the command and
monitoring. They surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting
spirit. They surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army
with low technology and high religious motivation can have.
However,
more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of Hezbollah, they
surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They surprised us with
ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of national leadership. They
surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling. They surprised us with the
lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of determination on the part of the
senior military command. They surprised us with faulty intelligence and a
delusionary logistical network and improper preparedness for war. They
surprised us with the fact that the Israeli war machine is not what it once
was. While we were celebrating it became rusty.
Generally
it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure
during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli
defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government
is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no
evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the
contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness
to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to
prevent bloodshed is costing a great deal of bloodshed. So that now of all
times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no
escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able
to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve
their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we
must ask already now: What has happened to us? What the hell happened to us?
First
and foremost, we were blinded by political correctness. The politically correct
discourse that reigned supreme over the last decade was disconnected from
reality. It focused on the issue of occupation but did not address the fact
that Israel is caught in an existential conflict fraught with religious and
cultural land mines. It paid too much attention to Israel’s wrongdoing, and too
little to the historical and geopolitical context within which Israel has to
survive.
Israeli
political correctness also assumed that Israeli might is a given. Therefore, it
was dismissive of the need to maintain this might. Because the army was
perceived to be an occupying force, it was denounced. Anything military or
national or Zionist was regarded with contempt.
Collective values gave way to individualistic ones. Power was synonymous with
fascism. Old-fashioned Israeli masculinity was castrated as we indulged
ourselves in the pursuit of absolute justice and absolute pleasure. The old
discourse of duty and commitment was replaced by a new discourse of protest and
hedonism.
And
there was something else: Israelis were besotted with the illusion of normalcy.
But on its most basic level, Israel is not a normal nation. It is a Jewish
state in an Arab world, and a Western state in an Islamic world, and a
democracy in a region of tyranny. It is at odds with its surroundings. There is
a constant and inherent tension between Israel and the world it lives in. That
means that Israel cannot lead the normal European life of any EU member. But
because of its values, economic structure, and culture, Israel cannot but attempt to lead a normal life. This
contradiction is substantial and perpetual. The only way to resolve it is to
produce a unique, positive anomaly that will address the unique negative
anomaly of Israeli life. This is what Zionism accomplished in the three decades
leading to the founding of the state, by formulating unique social inventions
such as the kibbutz and the Laborite social economy of the Histadrut. This is what
Israel did in its first three decades, by striking a delicate balance between
Israel’s unique national requirements and its inhabitants’ need for personal
space and a degree of sanity. But after 1967, 1973, and 1977, this balance was
lost. In the 1980s and 1990s, Israelis went wild. We bought into the illusion
that this stormy port was actually a safe harbor. We deluded ourselves into
thinking that we could live on this shore as other nations live on theirs. We
squandered Israel’s unique positive anomaly, all the while chipping away at our
defensive shield. Ironically, those who wished Israel to be normal brought
about a chaotic state of affairs that could not but lead to the total loss of
any normalcy whatsoever.
Both
political correctness and the illusion of normalcy were strictly phenomena of
the elite. The public at large remained sober and strong. Middle Israel did not
forget Israel’s existential challenge. In times of trouble, it was tough and
resilient. But the Israeli elite detached themselves from historical reality.
Business, the media, and academia dimmed Israel’s vision and weakened its
spirit. They did not read the geostrategic map. They did not remember history
or understand history. Their constant attacks on nationalism, the military, and
the Zionist narrative consumed Israel’s existence from within. Business inculcated
ad absurdum the illusion of normalcy
by initiating sweeping privatization and establishing an aggressive capitalist
regime that didn’t suit the needs of a nation in conflict. Academia instilled ad absurdum a rigid political
correctness by turning the constructive means of self-criticism into an
obsessive deconstructive end of its own. The media promoted a false
consciousness that combined wild consumerism with hypocritical righteousness.
Instead of purpose and promise, the Israeli elite embraced self-doubt and
cynicism. Each sector undermined Zionism in its own way. They misled Israelis
into believing that Tel Aviv was Manhattan, that the market is king, and that
mammon is God. By doing so, they didn't give young Israelis the normative tools
needed to fight for their country. A nation with no equality, no solidarity,
and no belief in its own cause is not a nation
worth fighting for. It’s not a nation that a young woman or a young man will
kill and get killed for. But in the Middle East, a nation whose youngsters are
not willing to kill and get killed for it is a nation on borrowed time. It will
not last for long.
So what
we see now, as rockets pound our cities and villages, is not only a failure of
the Israeli Army to defend its citizens, but the grave outcome of the historic
failure of the Israeli elite. This Israeli elite turned its back on reality,
turned its back on the state, stopped leading Israel, and stopped holding
Israel together. With every fiber of its being, Israel wished to be a
modern-day Athens. But in this land and in this era there is no future for an
Athens that doesn’t have in it a grain of Sparta. There is no hope here for a
life-loving society that doesn’t know how to deal with the imminence of death.
Now we must face reality. We must reconstruct our nation-state. We must restore
the delicate balance between forcefulness and normalcy. And we must rebuild
from scratch our defensive shield. After years of illusions, delusions, and
recklessness, we must recognize our fate. We must live up to our life’s decree.
The Left against Zion. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 19, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.
Glick:
The Left’s doctrinaire insistence that
Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.
In the
1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur.
In the
1970s, the Left’s foreign policy focus shifted to calling for unilateral
nuclear disarmament by the US and its Western allies.
In the
1980s, supporting the Sandinista Communists’ takeover of Nicaragua became the
catechism of the Left.
In the
1990s, the war on global capitalism – that is, the anti-globalization movement
– captivated the passions of US Leftists from coast to coast.
In the
2000s, it was again, the anti-war movement.
This
time the Left rioted and demonstrated against the war in Iraq.
And in
this decade, the main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and
energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize
Israel’s right to exist.
This
week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few
days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and
the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts
against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in
April by the Asian Studies Association.
These
groups’ actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with
ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout
the United States.
Between
the growth of Israel Apartheid Day (or Week, or Month) from a fringe exercise
on isolated campuses to a staple of the academic calendar in universities
throughout the US and Canada, and the rise of the boycott, divestment and
sanctions (BDS) movement to wage economic war against the Jewish state,
anti-Israel activism has become the focal point of Leftist foreign policy
activism in the US and throughout the Western world.
Every
week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel
activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were
sent fake eviction notices from the university’s housing office. A
pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate
the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.
At
Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are
insisting on using Hillel’s good offices to disseminate and legitimate
anti-Israel slanders.
And the
Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not
limited to campuses.
At New
York’s 92nd Street Y, Commentary
editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to
explain why the ASA’s just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of
bigotry.
Many
commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe
groups.
They
represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines
predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic
regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000
members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The
NAISA has even fewer members.
It
would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups’
members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very
much in line with the general drift of the Left.
Rejecting
Israel’s right to exist has become part of the Left’s dogma. It is a part of
the catechism.
Holding
a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological
camp. It is an article of faith, not fact.
Consider
the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate
professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San
Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies.
He
doesn’t know anything about Israel. He just knows that he’s a Leftist. And
today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything
Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating
Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just
things that good Leftists do.
And
Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD.
This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the
university to divest from companies that do business with Israel.
Why?
Because hating Israel is what Leftists do.
The
Left’s crusade against the Jewish state began in earnest in late 2000. The
Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood and renew their terror war against
Israel ushered in the move by anti-Israel forces on the Left to take over the
movement. And as they have risen, they have managed to silence and discredit
previously fully accredited members of the ideological Left for the heresy of
supporting Israel.
This
week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law
faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their
boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel
Left that Dershowitz represented.
For
years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the
table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is
finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max
Blumenthal.
The
progression is unmistakable.
The
question is, is it irreversible? Must supporters of Israel choose between their
support for Israel and their affinity for the Left? Certainly it is true that
the more the issue of support for Israel splits along ideological and partisan
lines, the more reasonable it is for supporters of Israel to move to the
ideological camp and the party that supports Israel, and away from the ones
that do not support Israel.
The
average voter is not in a position to change the positions of his party or the
dogma of his ideological camp. He can take it or leave it. With rejection of
Israel now firmly entrenched in the Left’s dogma, and with the Left firmly in
control of the Democratic Party under President Barack Obama’s leadership, for
those who care about Israel, the Republican Party is a more natural fit.
So,
too, the ideological Right is far more congenial to the Jewish state than the
Left.
While
the most sensible place for supporters of Israel to be today is on the
political Right, it is also true that it is neither smart nor responsible to
abandon the Left completely. Jews should be able to feel comfortable as Jews,
and as supporters of Israel everywhere. Ideological camps that castigate Jews
for their pride in the accomplishments of the Jewish state, and for their
support and concern for its survival and prosperity, are camps in desperate
need of fixing.
But we
should not fool ourselves. Challenging the likes of Marez, or the Swarthmore
students, or Max Blumenthal or Peter Beinart to a reasoned debate is an exercise
in futility. They do not care about human rights. They do not care that Israel
is the only human rights-respecting democracy in the Middle East. They do not
care about the pathological nature of Palestinian society. They do not care
about the Jewish people’s indigenous rights and international legal rights to
sovereignty not only over Tel Aviv and Haifa, but over Hebron and Ramallah.
Being
hypocrites doesn’t bother them either.
You can
talk until you’re blue in the face about the civilian victims of the Syrian
civil war, or the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia and the absence of religious
freedom throughout the Muslim world. But they don’t care. They aren’t trying to
make the world a better place.
Facts
cannot compete with their faith. Reason has no place in their closed
intellectual universe.
To
accept reason and facts would be an act of heresy.
Marez
may be a hypocrite, and even a servant of evil. But he is no heretic.
The
only real way to mitigate the hard Left’s devotion to Israel’s destruction is
by changing the power balance on the Left. For the past decade, donors like
George Soros have been open in their commitment to elect Democrats who oppose
the US’s alliance with Israel. A decade ago, Soros and fellow Jewish American
billionaire Peter Lewis funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into
Moveon.org. Moveon.org became a clearinghouse for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish
messages that became the stock in trade of the ideological Left, and of
Democratic candidates in need of campaign funding.
It was
due to then-Democratic senator Joe Lieberman’s refusal to get on the Soros- and
Lewis-funded anti-Israel bandwagon in the 2004 elections, that they turned
Moveon.org against Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary for his seat in the
Senate. His Democratic challenger, Ned Lamont, who won the primary, ran a
campaign laced with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.
There
are Democratic funders, like Penny Pritzker, Lester Crown and Haim Saban, who
support Israel. If they were so inclined, they could use their considerable
funds to change the power equation in the Democratic Party. They could
cultivate and support pro-Israel Democratic candidates. They could take the
Democratic Party back.
This
week ended with Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer finally breaking his silence on
Obama’s Iran deal and joining forces with his fellow Democrat Sen. Robert
Menendez and Republican Sen. Mark Kirk to defy Obama on Iran’s nuclear weapons
program. Given Obama’s floundering popularity, it is possible that Schumer’s
move will open the door for a change in the Democratic Party.
In
truth, there is no reason for the Democratic Party to remain in place. It isn’t
ordained that the Democrats must cleave to the hard Left.
The
rejection of Israel is not a natural component of leftist dogma. It’s just that
for the past decade, the smart money and the rising power on the Left has been
with those who oppose Israel’s existence as a strong, independent Jewish state.
While
the ASA and its comrades are on the fringes of academia, they are not fringe
voices on the Left. The Left has embraced the cause of Israel’s destruction.
And its financial power has made it difficult for pro-Israel Democrats to act
on their convictions, and those of their voters.
The
combination of an exodus of supporters of Israel – Jews and non-Jews alike –
from the Left and from the Democratic Party on the one hand, and generous
funding for pro-Israel Democratic candidates on the other, can change the
equation.
America
lost the Vietnam War. The Sandinistas are back in change in Nicaragua. But if
people are willing to stand up now and be counted, America need not harm
Israel.
The World In Crisis. By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, December 24, 2013.
Domenech:
We
close 2013 in a world that seems to be swiftly tilting toward ever-larger
crises of government legitimacy, oncoming clashes of foreign powers, and an
abiding sense of concern on the part of the American people that the economic
realities of long-term unemployment, wage stagnation, and the working class
squeeze of higher prices for health care, higher education, and basic goods and
services are not a brief trend, but enduring problems for which Washington has
no solutions.
On the
foreign policy front, 2013 may well turn out to be the year in which offered a
preface for the Next Big War. From Iran to Syria to China, the American
position has collapsed with such rapidity that our understanding of these
situations from just a year ago are dramatically altered. The era of the Monroe
Doctrine may be over, but the lack of an American grand strategy has left our
approach to foreign policy an extended drama of incoherence, and our inability
to grapple with the unraveling of the Middle East in the wake of the Arab
Spring is only one of many challenges which will present themselves in the
coming year. Unrest is only likely to increase in a global economy where youth unemployment has actually increased to the same levels as during the economic
crisis.
But the
crisis closer to home may be the one which proves more troublesome in the long
term: a crisis of legitimacy within Western democracy, one that has gripped the
American system in the wake of the mismanagement of elections, disasters, wars,
financial crises, stimulus packages, bailouts, and now health care overhauls.
Americans are losing faith in the American Dream for themselves and for their
children, and they are roughly evenly split on whether the solution to these
problems is more government or more liberty – a question which is becoming the
defining decision of our era.
This is
about more than just who we elect or which party we trust in which arena. It
represents a very real schism about first principles and the universe – a
division between an approach to life which considers natural law, inherent
rights and duties, the rule of law and more as important, and one which views
as essential the ongoing actions of the collective to achieve a secular social
justice. The shared underlying assumptions about life and the ordering of
society, which had such a strong role in America’s early success, are largely
gone or greatly diminished. They aren’t coming back.
The
rise of the Nones – those who don’t believe in anything in particular, and
aren’t interested in investigating faith – is only likely to increase. One in three Millennials profess no religious affiliation, and one of the
underestimated aspects of their absence of participation in a faith community
of any sort is their lack of interest in seeking one out. Perhaps there’s a
silver lining here, from a secularist perspective: a less religious America may
sound like a context for less religious strife – fewer people who care, fewer
people to argue about it, right? But the reverse is true.
The
culture wars haven’t ended – they’ve escalated, and they will continue to
escalate in a society where people have fewer commonly held views, and less
respect for those who disagree with them for any reason, least of all a
religious one. The lack of a shared language of compromise and respect leads to
ongoing and increasingly contentious clashes of faith, politics, and sexual
rights, where lightning rods of courts and culture lead to flashpoints that
strain social bonds, break friendships, and end the ability to have a healthy
community where disagreement over law and politics does not lead to death
threats on social media.
The
next year will bring more flashpoints in the broken public square. In 2014, the
highest courts in the land will rule on the ability of Christian business
owners to practice their faith as they see fit, and the power of government to
compel them to go against their beliefs. We might hope for a country where more
people would lay down their arms and view those who disagree with their
ideology with respect and impartiality. But for all the handwringing, history
has shown us that this is the way things go when trust breaks down and respect
vanishes. As G.K. Chesterton notes: “Why should they be impartial, what is
being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a
devouring superstition or a divine hope?”
Of
course, there is still hope. The nation has survived incredible crises before,
on the global scale and within our society. The path toward liberty is still a
viable one. And perhaps we will find that even when things break down, when
government fails and grand strategies fade, the American people can count on
each other more than they thought. These are strange times for the country and
the world. But we may find that, even as institutions fail us, the American
people exceed expectations. They have done it so many times before. In the
coming year, they will be called on to do so again.
America’s Culture Wars Will Never End. By W. James Antle III. The National Interest, December 26, 2013.
Antle:
The
United Methodist Church defrocked yet another minister for officiating a
same-sex wedding, in this case his son’s. While some 70 Methodist clergy
members recently vowed to defy their church’s teachings on marriage, the
largest mainline Protestant denomination has been reaffirming them every four
years by commanding margins.
In
Utah, a law against polygamy has been weakened while judges struck down the
state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. Or, to frame the issue as Utah’s
Mormon majority might see it, the state’s reaffirmation of marriage as the
union of a man and a woman.
At
times it seems impossible to escape the controversy over Duck Dynasty, with the protests and the counterprotests that were
unleashed when GQ decided to ask one
of its stars to share his deep thoughts on human sexuality.
Leon
Trotsky, call your office. You may not be interested in the culture war, but
the culture war is interested in you.
The
objectives of the culture warriors are clear. The right-most flank hopes that
it can re-stigmatize homosexuality, nudging gays back into the closet. The
left-most flank aims to reclassify traditional religious and moral beliefs
about homosexuality as the equivalent of racism, to be stamped out by custom
and law like Jim Crow.
Both of
these goals bumps up against what Al Gore might call an inconvenient truth:
neither gay people nor people with traditional sexual values are likely to go
anywhere anytime soon.
With
the possible exception of smoking, there is no issue on which the culture has changed
so rapidly as homosexuality. Gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to
inevitable. Less than a decade ago, even mainstream liberal Democrats opposed
it (especially if they had national ambitions). Now even some conservative
Republicans are declaring their support.
At the
same time, the Christian churches that remain opposed are not small sects. They
are the biggest religious denominations in the country, and in a few cases the
fastest growing. The Protestant churches that are changing their positions on
marriage and sexuality are, like the Episcopalians and the United Church of
Christ, usually small and shrinking.
In an
odd way, both gay rights groups and social conservatives deal with two
different but occasionally overlapping motivations: they both want to be left
alone and to change the culture. Proponents of gay marriage want to be able to
live as they choose and also to make the culture more accepting of the way they
live. Social conservatives want to protect their own religious liberty and also
transform the culture according to their moral vision.
This
points to a possible truce, but also suggests continued conflict will remain
inevitable. Both sides of the culture war can agree to maximum tolerance of the
other side. “Showing a bit of respect for cultural values with which you
disagree is not a bad thing,” Barney Frank said in 2004. “Don’t call people
bigots and fools just because you disagree with them.”
At the
same time, people were more willing to be tolerant as they also came to believe
that gay marriage, for instance, wasn’t such a bad thing on the merits. To
protect their own religious liberty, social conservatives will have to keep
making the positive case for their values—values that are in some cases derided
as bigotry. It’s no coincidence that Frank made his plea for cultural respect
back when opponents of gay marriage were still winning.
But
that doesn’t mean social conservatives can’t take Frank’s advice. A good start
would be to recognize that the Judeo-Christian ethic, in sexual mores and so
much else, is no longer intuitive to a great many Americans. Heavy-handed
appeals, be they theological or (in the case of Phil Robertson) scatological,
are likely to fall flat. Don’t call people heathens or fools (or worse) just
because you disagree with them.
While
specific social debates come and go, the culture wars will never end. But
neither will the reality that the combatants must live together.
How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party.”
By Ian Haney López. Salon, December 22, 2013.
Haney López:
The
Republican Party today, in its voters and in its elected officials, is almost
all white. But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, in the decades immediately
before 1964, neither party was racially identified in the eyes of the American
public. Even as the Democratic Party on the national level increasingly
embraced civil rights, partly as a way to capture the growing political power
of blacks who had migrated to Northern cities, Southern Democrats—like George
Wallace— remained staunch defenders of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, among Republicans,
the racial antipathies of the rightwing found little favor among many party
leaders. To take an important example, Brown and its desegregation imperative were
backed by Republicans: Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the opinion, was a
Republican, and the first troops ordered into the South in 1957 to protect
black students attempting to integrate a white school were sent there by the
Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard
Nixon. Reflecting the roughly equal commitment of both parties to racial
progress, even as late as 1962, the public perceived Republicans and Democrats
to be similarly committed to racial justice. In that year, when asked which
party “is more likely to see that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and
housing,” 22.7 percent of the public said Democrats and 21.3 percent said
Republicans, while over half could perceive no difference between the two.
The 1964
presidential election marked the beginning of the realignment we live with
today. Where in 1962 both parties were perceived as equally, if tepidly,
supportive of civil rights, two years later 60 percent of the public identified
Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so
identified the Republican Party. What happened?
Groundwork
for the shift was laid in the run-up to the 1964 election by rightwing elements
in the Republican Party, which gained momentum from the loss of the
then-moderate Nixon to John F. Kennedy in 1960. This faction of the party had
never stopped warring against the New Deal. Its standard bearer was Barry
Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and heir to a department store fortune. His
pampered upbringing and wealth notwithstanding, Goldwater affected a cowboy’s
rough-and-tumble persona in his dress and speech, casting himself as a walking
embodiment of the Marlboro Man’s disdain for the nanny state. Goldwater and the
reactionary stalwarts who rallied to him saw the Democratic Party as a mortal
threat to the nation: domestically, because of the corrupting influence of a
powerful central government deeply involved in regulating the marketplace and
using taxes to reallocate wealth downward, and abroad in its willingness to
compromise with communist countries instead of going to war against them.
Goldwater himself, though, was no racial throwback. For instance, in 1957 and
again in 1960 he voted in favor of federal civil rights legislation. By 1961,
however, Goldwater and his partisans had become convinced that the key to
electoral success lay in gaining ground in the South, and that in turn required
appealing to racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black
support. As Goldwater drawled, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc
in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
This
racial plan riled more moderate members of the Republican establishment, such
as New York senator Jacob Javits, who in the fall of 1963 may have been the
first to refer to a “Southern Strategy” in the context of repudiating it. By
then, however, the right wing of the party had won out. As the conservative
journalist Robert Novak reported after attending a meeting of the Republican
National Committee in Denver during the summer of 1963: “A good many, perhaps a
majority of the party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be
mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White
Man’s Party. ‘Remember,’ one astute party worker said quietly . . . ‘this isn’t
South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this country.’ ” The
rise of a racially-identified GOP is not a tale of latent bigotry in that
party. It is instead a story centered on the strategic decision to use racism
to become “the White Man’s Party.”
The War on Christians. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, December 27, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.
What the Middle East would be like without Christians. By Christa Case Bryant. The Christian Science Monitor, December 22, 2013.
Gerson:
In some
parts of the world, Herod’s massacre of the innocents is a living tradition. On
Christmas Day in Iraq, 37 people were killed in bomb attacks in Christian
districts of Baghdad. Radical Islamists mark — and stain — the season with
brutality and intolerance.
The
violence, of course, is not restricted by the calendar. In recent months, we’ve
seen Coptic Christians gunned down in Cairo and churches burned. Thousands of
Syrian Christians have fled to Turkey. “Where we live,” said one refugee, “10
churches have been burned down. . . . When
the local priest was executed, we decided to leave.”
Across
North Africa and the greater Middle East, anti-Christian pressure has grown
during the past few decades, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. This
persecution has gained recent attention from the archbishop of Canterbury and
the pope. “We won’t resign ourselves,” says Pope Francis, “to a Middle East
without Christians.”
The
most passionate advocate has been Prince Charles — an often underestimated,
consistently thoughtful figure. “For 20 years,” he said in a recent speech, “I
have tried to build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel
ignorance and misunderstanding. The point though, surely, is that we have now
reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by
those with a vested interest in doing so.”
The
growth of this persecution is sometimes used as a club against the very idea of
democracy promotion. Middle East democracy, the argument goes, often results in
oppressive Sunni religious ascendancy. Majority rule will bring the harsh
imposition of the majority faith.
But
this is the criticism of a caricature. Democracy promotion — as embraced by the
National Democratic Institute or the International Republican Institute or
Freedom House — is about human liberty protected by democratic institutions.
Securing institutional respect for minority rights is particularly difficult in
transitioning societies, as we’ve recently seen. But clinging to
authoritarianism further hollows out civil society, making the results even
more chaotic and dangerous when a dictator falls. And even marginally more
favorable dictators can’t be propped up forever, as we’ve also recently
witnessed. So it matters greatly whether America and other democracies can help
pluralism survive and shape the emerging political order.
This is
a priority for both humanitarian and strategic reasons. As William Inboden of
the University of Texas notes, there is a robust correlation between religious
persecution and national security threats. “Including World War II,” argues
Inboden, “every major war the United States has fought over the past 70 years
has been against an enemy that also severely violated religious freedom.” The
reverse is equally true. “There is not a single nation in the world,” he says,
“that both respects religious freedom and poses a security threat to the United
States.”
There
are a number of possible explanations for this strong correlation. The most
compelling is that religious freedom involves the full and final
internalization of democratic values — the right to be a heretic or infidel. It
requires the state to recognize the existence of binding loyalties that reach
beyond the state’s official views.
It took
many centuries for Christendom to achieve this thick form of pluralism. Whether
the Islamic world can move toward its own, culturally distinctive version of
this democratic virtue is now one of the largest geopolitical questions of the
21st century.
Some
argue that Muslim theology — emphasizing fidelity to its conception of divine
law — makes this unlikely (or impossible). Others point to past centuries when
Muslim majorities and rulers coexisted with large Arab-Christian populations —
a thin form of pluralism in which Christians were second-class citizens but not
subject to violent intolerance. Every major religious faith contains elements
of tribal exclusivity and teachings of respect for the other. The emergence of
social pluralism depends on emphasizing the latter above the former.
Promoting
democratic institutions is no easy task in the midst of revolution and civil
war. But even limited levers — stronger condemnation of abuses, conditioning
aid on the protection of minorities, supporting moderate forces in the region —
are worth employing when the stakes are so high. America, however, seems
strangely disengaged. “One of America’s oddest failures in recent years,” argue
Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “is its inability to
draw any global lessons from its unique success in dealing with religion at
home. It is a mystery why a country so rooted in pluralism has made so little
of religious freedom.”
A
recovery of that emphasis might begin with a simple commitment: not to resign
ourselves to a Middle East without Christians.
How the U.S. Triumph in South Sudan Came Undone. By Colum Lynch. Foreign Policy, December 26, 2013. Also here.
The
White House bet on guerrilla fighters changing their warring ways. Turns out it
was a bad bet.
Drill Down. By Keith Johnson. Foreign Policy, December 23, 2013. Also here.
Lynch:
Earlier
this month, Riek Machar, South Sudan’s first vice president, returned to what
he knows best, leading an armed insurgency being fought by members of his Nuer
tribe. In recent days, the fighting has escalated sharply, engulfing several of
the country's 10 provinces, and bringing the young nation to the brink of civil
war.
The
stakes are high for the United States, as fighting threatens to upend one of
the most important foreign policy initiatives of the last two decades in
sub-Saharan Africa – one that unified Republicans, Democrats, African
Americans, human rights advocates, and Christians. On Saturday, four U.S.
troops were wounded when their V-22 Osprey came under fire during an aborted
operation to evacuate U.S. nationals from the town of Bor. An additional 150
Marines have been sent to the region to prep for possible future evacuations.
It’s an
extraordinary and painful development, given America’s major role in securing
independence for South Sudan. But the toughest part for Americans to swallow may
be that it’s the U.S.-backed leaders of South Sudan – the supposed good guys –
that are responsible for plunging the country into chaos and threatening to
wreck America's signature achievement in the region.
“A
whole generation of U.S. leaders that are invested in the success of South
Sudan are heartbroken; I’m heartbroken about what going on there, especially
because you don’t see the hand of Khartoum in this,” said [U.S. diplomat]
Cameron Hudson. “I think it’s going to be very [difficult] to get the genie
back in to the bottle. These guys are good at fighting and they are comfortable
doing it.”
Johnson:
But
turning that oil promise into reality faces plenty of daunting challenges, as
underscored by the violence in South Sudan over the last week. Security looms
largest, because it is a precondition both to develop the oil itself and also
to build the pipelines, roads, and rail lines the region needs to make energy
development a reality. But cronyism, weak laws, poor governance, corruption,
and domestic politics can combine to scuttle hopes of a quick energy-fired
economic bonanza.
“There
is a myth that many oil companies and policy makers subscribe to, which is that
economic interests will trump everything else. What gets discounted, is that in
some places in Africa, there is a different calculus. Tribal animosities,
personal animosities, political grudges
all those weigh a lot heavier, and there are a lot of people willing to
cut off their noses to spite their faces,” said the Atlantic Council’s J. Peter
Pham.
