I was challenged to do my own version of Sorenson’s hypothetical acceptance speech. Here’s my (quickly drafted) version:
My fellow Democrats: Thank you – I think – for the opportunity to represent our party in the upcoming contest to decide what the next chapter in our shared will look like.
This campaign will be one of the hardest and most expensive ever. It is the political equivalent of putting a man on the moon, and like that effort will rely on everyone from the janitor who sweeps the floor to the generals who set strategy. I’m happy and proud to have been selected here, and congratulate my Democratic opponents, and reach out to them humbly for their guidance, assistance, and work in the coming months.This is a campaign that must reach out to all Americans, because the future we want to lead this country toward is a future for everyone – Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives, all of us. We may disagree on the small stuff – important stuff to be sure, but small in the overall scheme of things. But we must agree on the need for America – for these United States – to be the city on the hill for those of us who live in it – ALL of us that live in it – as well as a beacon of hope and example for the rest of the world.
The country deserves to understand where my opponent and I hope to lead it.
I want to try and clearly set out where my opponent and his party and this party and I differ and where we agree, because I’m comfortable that when people taste our cooking, they will choose to sit down and eat with us.
To that end, I have arranged to buy six 60-minute blocks of time on Sunday nights on CNN and Fox. I want to propose to my opponent that we use them to debate – one on one, with no moderators, journalists, or people to frame our discussion – on topics each of us chooses. I’ll choose three, and invite my opponent to pick three, and they will be the themes of each discussion.
My three will be:
* Securing the United States – military and diplomatic policy for a dangerous world.
* Securing a Middle-Class Future – responding to the narrowing availability of a traditional middle-class life for the average American.
* Securing Our Health – making decisions on how we will provide healthcare in the coming decade.
And I’m just dying to know what my opponent will pick.
It’s not like I’ve been silent on where I stand on the issues of the day. I wouldn’t be standing here is many of you hadn’t heard what I have to say and if it hadn’t meant something to you.
But let me recap, just so that there are no questions.
In my view of the world, we face three major challenges which the United States must lead the rest of the world in solving.
The first, and most acute, is the rise of transnational movements – the largest of which is based in a form of radical Islam – which intend to weaken and overthrow existing governments in much of the world.
The second, and closest to home here in the US, is the hollowing of the economic future for the middle-class. Globalization, technology, and regulatory change have combined to create a ‘perfect storm’ in which many families are drowning.
The last is the continued burden economic growth throughout the world places on the natural systems on which we all depend for life.
Pushing solutions forward on all three of those problems will be the strategic center of my Presidency. We may not solve them, but I will commit that we’ll work damn hard on them and that we’ll leave things better than we found them.
Liberals are often accused of being soft on crime or soft on terror because we are concerned about the conditions that cause people to turn to crime or to terrorism. It’s a mistake to believe that, and to dismiss looking at causes.
The issue, in both cases is that we have to stop growing criminals and terrorists just as much as we have to be very good at catching and where necessary killing them. Think of it as a supply-side solution. And one where alliances and cooperation are absolutely vital.
There are a number of things we need to do and this is not a speech on terrorism policy. But let me make two points, clearly and separately, so no one misses them.
I’m very concerned about nuclear attacks – especially one that can’t be readily traced back – on U.S. soil, or on the soil of one of our Western allies.
Let me be very clear. There are two states today who have unregulated nuclear programs, and have engaged in efforts which might lead to a terror group obtaining a nuclear weapon.
North Korea and Iran.
I want to make it clear that any detonation or attempt to detonate a nuclear weapon on the soil of the US or any NATO or SEATO ally which involves a weapon whose origin we cannot readily trace will be considered to have come from North Korea or Iran. This is potentially an existential matter for the leadership of those countries.
We would welcome clear and total cooperation by those countries in understanding their nuclear programs, and understanding who – if anyone – they have shared nuclear weapons technology with. And obviously that cooperation would change our policies.
I intend to send emissaries to sit and talk with the leaders of both countries and see what we can do to stop the slow slide toward confrontation that we seem to be on today.
Many countries have an interest in limiting transnational terrorism. Many countries have seen it as a tool to extend the reach of their power. I would talk to both, and see what we can do to convince them to help solve the problem, rather than be a part of it.
Today, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is the most well-publicized point of friction in the world today. I am unqualifiedly in support of a U.S. guaranty of the survival of Israel and the Israeli people. Period. Full stop. But…Israel is going to have to do some things to earn that guaranty.
Settlements in the West Bank made sense when Israel was worried about tank columns from Jordan. That’s not a concern any more, and the bulk of the settlements should be handed over to Palestine. The right of free access to the holy places in Jerusalem must be guaranteed to all faiths.
The misery of the Palestinian people is well-known. But we have spent billions and the EU and Arab nations have spent billions, and the Palestinian people have been robbed, time and again, by thugs with guns who have stolen their money, their hope, and their future. The United States will commit to fair and secure borders for Palestine, and to continued assistance for the Palestinian people. But Palestine is going to have to do some things to earn that commitment and that assistance.
Let’s start with two:
The education system in Palestine will be taken over and supervised by a new agency, supervised by the Quartet. No longer will Palestinian children be raised believing that hate and murder are the only future they can aspire to.
The books for the State of Palestine will be absolutely and totally transparent. No longer will we support a state that pays militias with suitcases full of cash, and where duffels of cash somehow wind up in secret banks in the names of rulers and their families.
These are concrete steps that we can and will take on our own. Once these are under way, we believe that the time wil be right for the governments of Israel and Palestine to sit down and start what will be a long and difficult talk. It’s a talk we think – given the right conditions – can and will work.
Talking will work in some cases, but it won’t work everywhere.
For those places, we need a bigger, more capable military.
We don’t need as many air superiority fighters as we do covert operatives; we don’t need as many nuclear warheads as we do civil affairs troops; we don’t need a military as focused to fight China or Russia (although we need to maintain capabilities there and capabilities to ramp aggressively and fast) as we do need a military that can fight guerillas and terrorists, protect local governments while they introduce stability, and do it without wearing the troops into the ground.
I want to remind the world that my objective is peace. I understand that peace may not give us everything we want, and I’m prepared to lead the American people toward accepting that.
I want America to be working alongside other countries, and for our goal to be the best ally that any nation could have.
But I also want to remind the other nations whose interests may not align with that they need to compromise too. And for people worldwide to realize that cheap Anti-Americanism isn’t free.
And to remind those who think they have a free hand to attack us because we are a helpless giant: We are the furthest thing from a helpless giant today, and that we will be even further from there at the end of my Presidency. We are a giant who is hard to make angry, and that is as it should be. Because you won’t like it when we get angry.
Speaking of things that make me personally angry, America has led the way for much of the world in economic and class mobility – until recently.
When I started my campaign, I asked a simple question: “What have we done for the single mom with two kids – the one who works in an office in a big city and makes $40,000 a year? What have we done for the family in a small town that makes $30,000 a year?” How do me make the basics of the American dream – a white picket fence and a better future for our kids – available to people who don’t have advanced degrees or trust funds?
There are a lot of things we should be doing.
We need to make sure that she doesn’t pay as much in childcare as she earns from her job.
We need to make sure that a child’s illness or accident won’t make that mom homeless.
We need to make sure that the school she sends her kids to prepares them to take a real shot at getting into Harvard.
We need to make sure that she has the tools available to her – continuing education, professional development – to compete for her boss’ job if she wants to.
That family needs to know that their retirement fund isn’t going to get closed down if the factory does.
They need to be in communities connected to the Internet so that their kids can have the opportunity to compete for ‘insourced’ jobs in information work.
Their local schools need to prepare their kids for those kinds of jobs.
They need a farm policy that doesn’t tip the tables in favor of huge industrial agriculture – one that really bypasses the local towns and hollows out farm states.
They all need an economy that makes it easier, rather than harder for small business and entrepreneurs. The cost of regulation can be split in two – the cost of doing what the regulation requires, and the cost of complying with the paperwork. I have no problem with regulation that advances the public good. I have a huge problem with regulation where the paperwork to prove you comply is more complex than doing what is needed to comply, and that is going to change.
Many of the regulations we talk about are aimed at improving the environment, so let me talk about that.
Improving the environment – or better, not destroying it more – is a matter of life and death for many people on this planet. Environmental degradation is killing people in China and in Africa, it is shortening lifespans in the U.S. and Europe, and the risks and burdens it presents are simply unacceptable.
Kyoto was well-intentioned, but deeply flawed.
We need to take steps to reduce our carbon footprint and to do it in a way that lessens our dependence on imported energy.
Much of this can be done with efficiency. Even painless efficiency – if every SUV sold since 200 had been replaced with a minivan, we would have saved 3% of our national energy budget. At what sacrifice? Ask yourself – what would it really cost to have had soccer parents driving their kids in minivans instead of Suburbans or Expeditions?
But not all of it can.
We need to be the world leader in increasing our dollar of GDP per BTU used – in improving the efficiency of our economy. This doesn’t mean we have to all live in sod huts and burn buffalo chips.
It means that we can’t be wasteful. We have to price energy according to its real cost, and move as much efficiency into the system as we can. Yes, gas and diesel are expensive at the pump. But by raising the taxes on them, we can pressure the producers – moving the dollars you spend into new roads, transit, and infrastructure rather than cash to support terrorism.
It means that we need to make sure that what we have, works. I will impose a Federal requirement that all states implement biannual inspections, and that starting in four years, cars – and trucks – that are gross polluters will not be allowed to drive out of the inspection station. Nearly half the pollution comes from 10 percent of the vehicles. Let’s get them off the road and clear the air.
But there’s more to it than that. We have built a massively centralized series of systems that are becoming so complex that they are extraordinarily vulnerable to human error or happenstance as well as deliberate acts of sabotage.
Under my Presidency, we will begin to move as much as we can to the edges of the network; moving generation closer to consumption, reducing the scale of utility plants and taking advantage of the latest technology to leapfrog our existing utility networks. We have to do this, in no small part because the networks are aging and we are facing a huge national investment in infrastructure regardless of what we do.
All politicians say that they are going to “build a 21st century country.” Well, we’re going to spend money building that country in concrete, steel, copper and glass fiber.
A stronger, safer country where opportunity isn’t just something that the majority gets to watch on television and where there will be power for the lights and clean water to drink and air that doesn’t put you in the hospital.
Those have been Democratic accomplishments through the 20th Century, and we can make them Democratic accomplishments for the 21st.
Nice job, A.L. I can agree with perhaps 3/4 of your platform, which puts you way ahead of any actual Dem candidate. Or Repub candidate.
Of course, as an independent, I don’t vote in the primary. And my checkbook balance doesn’t qualify me for a skybox sear, either. I like your platform because it barely panders to the party’s base… but this may not be the ticket for the months leading up to the National Convention.
How would this address go over with the SEIU–the trial lawyers–the NAACP–the NEA–DKos–La Raza–Hollywood–Silicon Valley? Will they man phones, open wallets, and stage MeetUps?
Or will they turn to “the real Ted Sorenson”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009691.php instead?
Are there any American conservatives / Republicans at _Winds of Change_ who would be prepared to write a similar off-the-cuff “speech” from a Republican point of view?
Not bad…not bad at all………I’d point to the part about propagandizing the education of Palistinians as being a weak link. The Palistinians can clearly see the Zionists for what they are and will discount your “education” as being the one sided BS that it is; and this will, saddly, weaken an otherwise worthwhile effort. That being said, as long as the truth is presented objectively and more positive approaches are developed, there might be some good here. I am also looking for Israel’s resposibility in realizing your vision….did I miss it…you metioned something, but not sure of its shape or form..maybe need to be more precise…maybe hold the $billions we hand them at risk for performance?
Also, healthcare insurance……this is very much a personal responsibility issue. Life style choices – like being a grease eating obese couch potato pig – account for around 50% of our health services costs. Generally, it is a small (1% to 2% of the risk pool) number of the insured that account for 40% to 50% of the incurred costs; this by any cut of the data. No body wants to touch this reality…I’m wondering if you would.
Bottom line (and I’d never imagine myself saying this)….on that platform (with reasonable responses to my caveats) I’d vote for you.
Armed Liberal: “And I’m just dying to know what my opponent will pick.”
Armed Liberal, I’m not American, but do I disagree with you severely enough and on enough issues to be “your opponent” for this purpose?
I’m pretty sure you could beat me in an election, because my ideas on what is desirable are not those that Americans want to hear about at the moment.
1. Jihad: why it threatens us, and what to do about it.
I want to say we must stop paying jizya! and also get out of the nation building business (in any other country than America), and fight the global jihad war properly, that is with a view to defending ourselves and our non-Muslim allies, not with a view to the global crusade to end all tyranny everywhere and forever wildly outlined in George W. Bush’s second inauguration speech.
But the problem is that Americans have already heard promises that there would be no more “nation-building” and the American armed forces would be employed as a war-fighting organization. George W. Bush was elected on that promise.
Also, to stop paying the Danegeld will invite a political storm. We have to do it, but history shows that once appeasement payments begin, the political momentum to continue them is strong.
2. Restoring the authority of the Constitution.
In order to restore the practical rule of the American Constitution, I would promise to pack the courts with as many judges as I could find who agree with the philosophy of the original understanding of the constitution, as shown by the opinions written by Justice Clarence Thomas.
And consistent with restoring the American constitution, I would promise enforcement and push for law reform on the “too hard” issues that have corrupted the practical interpretation of the constitution, making it practically a dead letter.
Besides of course getting rid of Roe vs. Wade, I would want judges to get rid of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which makes hash of the First Amendment; and personally I would address the crazy situation where the American President ignores his duty as the enforcer of the nation’s laws when it comes to border security; and I would use the bully pulpit to press the legislature to reform practices of redistricting and incumbency protection that have made the accountability of the ruling class much less than it ought to be.
I would also press for an amendment to the constitution to overthrow Kelo, that is, when government takes property, it must be to use it for a public purpose, not to bestow it on someone who is wealthier and will pay more taxes, as long as they have a plan.
There’s an immense mass of reform that has to be taken on for no other reason than to restore to power and dignity a democratic constitution long overgrown with abuses. You will not fix this without someone being willing to use the bully pulpit year in, year out, striving for the return of the rule of law; and with a chief executive who allows scandals like the effective collapse of the border to persist.
George W. Bush has done a good job of packing the courts, but he signed McCain-Feingold knowing it was unconstitutional, he had an unnecessary fight over Harriet Miers (an underqualified crony with no visible commitment to the correct judicial philosophy), he has favored another crony (Alberto Gonzales) whose record in every way is about as bad as possible, and mainly he has declined to enforce the border. (And this goes together with the catastrophic non-reform of America’s harsh and malfunctioning legal immigration system, something else that would have to be part of my agenda of law reform.)
Again, I don’t think Americans want to hear: “I promise to do what George W. Bush promised to do, in upholding the law as much as in using the armed forces properly, but the difference is, by George I’ll do it!” Once you’ve run on promises X, Y and Z, and won and then made people very unhappy, it’s tough to run on the same promises again, even if X, Y and Z really need to be done.
3. American nation-building.
I’d promise to do everything under the constitution and while fighting a defensive global war against its sharia-promoting jihadist enemies to promote America as a single, united nation, based on assimilation, not salad bar multiculturalism. That is: out of many, one nation.
And this of course is where I’d lose the conservatives, because I don’t just think promoting one nation means patriotic education, official standing for the English language, lots of happy, speedily included and properly indoctrinated legal immigrants, and doing away with institutionalized incitements to divisiveness such as racial quotas (under whatever cover). I also think it means diminishing inequality of outcomes (not only of opportunities) so that everybody in the poorest and wealthiest parts of the country has a way of life similar enough that they feel like one people.
I think “No Child Left Behind” was right, on all sorts of levels. That’s where you have to begin.
And I think the chances of anyone running for American President in 2008 on a promise to be in effect a third term for President George W. Bush are as slim as possible.
George W. Bush still looks like a near-great American President to me. He is personally upright. His tax reform was wise and it worked (and it ought to be perpetuated). He has been a faithful pro-lifer, if an almost silent one. (Thank you for the “snowflakes” moment, George!) His desire to reform Social Security so that it would be more secure in the face of looming demographic changes was well founded. His response to 11 September, 2001 was fatally misconceived, but still swift and vigorous enough to maul Al Qaeda and to prevent major follow-up jihad attacks in America till now.
But America is completely done with this kind of government. Public tolerance for his agenda, or for a similar agenda with what look to me to be a few vital changes, is a train that has left the station.
The key difference between AL and Sorenson is that Sorenson’s speech is that of a man who comes with his head bowed, and AL’s speech is that of a man with his head held high. _That_ is what the Democratic Party has lacked for too long.
In sum: one nation, a nation of laws, and woe to its enemies.
I think you have got a real problem in a nation as much founded on a few documents as America is when a gap widens between a civics class view of how the country works legally and a practical reality that wealth and power matter overwhelmingly and law applies far more to the weak than the strong.
When an earmark is added to a bill that has been passed, and government agencies honor that as though it was the law, because on dare not offend such powerful men and women as Senators and Congress-critters are, that is the triumph of power over law.
I think a chief executive who was elected to build up the nation (singular, one nation), beat down its enemies (not treat the nation as a means to an end, the end being some global good such as universal liberty), and mainly uphold the law (for the good of all, not just the wealthy and powerful) could do an immense amount of good if he followed though.
Lotsa luck getting support for an agenda like that of course. But that is partly my point: the national culture should change, and someone should use the bully pulpit to try to change it.
#5 from A Steve: “The key difference between AL and Sorenson is that Sorenson’s speech is that of a man who comes with his head bowed, and AL’s speech is that of a man with his head held high.”
That’s a big difference, and all to Armed Liberal’s credit.
A lot of Sorensen’s imagined speech was backhanded slurs on the previous administration.
His “us vs. them” is domestic, and he invites foreigners to be judges in his case against his domestic enemies.
When you run down your country’s moral standing, when you characterize its motives in international relations negatively, this degrades you too, or at best it makes any favor you get from international tribunals conditional on the opinions of foreign tribunals. If in future you don’t do what they like, they can take their moral tolerance for the repentant away and damn you too, and with greater force because you, representing America, have already admitted that America is a rogue state, it is imperialist, it has been rapacious and so on. You just wanted an exception that all this was only to apply to your domestic enemies, and not to you. But you can’t wash yourself clean by blackening your country.
Sorenson doesn’t understand that to foreigners invited to be judges, you are all Americans.
Armed Liberal would never make a mistake like this. I don’t agree with his view of who his fellow Americans are, but within that view, he’s consistent: Armed Liberal’s “us” is “us Americans” (and in some contexts friends and allies). And he will never sell out this “us” out to make a private peace with “international opinion” at his country’s expense.
A country run by people who think like Armed Liberal is a safe ally. It will continue to be public-spirited and forward looking, it will continue to be morally serious (looking for results not meaningless plaudits), and mainly it will continue to be cohesive. It will still count as a proper state, rather than as a pile of resources that factions fight over; and the power of that state may be employed for the benefit of other states that are serious partners to the nation, not just patrons of whichever faction rules. Genuine alliance, not bribery and flattery, will be your best credential in dealing with a state like that, no matter which party is in charge of which branch of the government at the time.
A country run by people eager to damn morally the nation’s past enterprises (and implicitly its foreign partners in such enterprises??) in order to get international absolution for themselves and consolidate international condemnation for their domestic enemies is in a decadent state and can’t be trusted as a partner. Unless you are providing inducements to America’s political factions under the counter, and unless you are eager to condemn America and its deeds (other than backing off on whatever American faction joins with you in condemning all the others), you don’t naturally come to the head of the queue for American favor. And that’s bad.
AL, think you! My own priorities would be somewhat different but only as a difference in *priority*, not a disagreement.
I felt you went into far too much detail. Much of what you said would do better in a website than an acceptance speech. In a 3 minute speech you should express one central idea with a little bit of surrounding background. In a 5 minute speech you should express one central idea with a little bit of surrounding background. In a 10 minute speech you should speak for 5 minutes and quit.
Better to touch on a laundry list of items so that people who’re looking for their item will know you put it on the list. But the central idea is that you have character and resolve and stamina and you’ll do a good job for each voter. That’s the central point and the details are there only to back that up, and those details can’t be too detailed in a speech. Sorenson did far better at that, though his ideas weren’t very good.
But you have a blog post and not an acceptance speech, and you don’t need to accept the limitations of a speech. What you’ve done is good for itself, even if it makes an awful speech.
I thought your plan had delightful subtleties. For example, when you made three big points the third one was Health Care. But when you explained in more detail, the third one turned into environmental issues! Beautiful! People hardly ever acknowledge that personal health is an environmental issue. Like, you can live in a cesspool and pay for antibiotics and such to cure your illnesses, but it would be better and cheaper not to live in a cesspool in the first place.
Also your plan for palestine was wonderfully subtle. You’d move in close to a hundred thousand american schoolteachers to palestine. They’d learn arabic, which would later provide us with lots of translators. They’d live with palestinians. Suffer the daily or hourly sonic booms from israeli warplanes. Every time a palestinian child got killed by an israeli strike his american teacher would notice, along with the injured. The teachers would get searched at israeli checkpoints twice or four times a day. They’d get *radicalised*. They’d report back what they saw. Some of them would get killed in israeli attacks. Israel would have to scale back their interactions with palestine, leading to a far better chance for peace.
And then the idea that the palestinian government would be transparent! Once we figured out how to make the palestinian government transparent, we’d have a precedent that showed us how to make the *american* government transparent. It just doesn’t get better than this.
One minor quibble:
I am unqualifiedly in support of a U.S. guaranty of the survival of Israel and the Israeli people. Period. Full stop. But…
Unqualified. Period. Full stop. But. You’re contradicting yourself here. If you want the zionist vote you need to take away that But. There’s no middle ground for the zionist lobby. Either you’re for israel or you’re against israel. That but says you’re against israel. You have to persuade them you don’t mean it, or lose their support.
About US wars, you have some internal contradictions that might not cause any trouble with voters, but that might lead to a serious swiftboating. The idea that we’d retaliate against both north korea and iran for any covert nuclear attack would be strongly supported by some and strongly opposed by others. It makes good theater, but what if it actually happens? What if it turns out to be one of the 6000+ spare russian nukes? There’s no more reason to think that’s done by NK or iran than anybody else, except we don’t like them. And any of iran’s enemies might want to do that and blame it on iran. Maybe nuke some common enemy and blame iran, two birds with one nuke…. This sort of policy is not likely to reassure our allies, but on the other hand it’s fine theater and you can tell the allies you don’t really mean it.
Unregulated nuclear programs? What about pakistan? Israel? USA? We’re all unregulated. Of course, none of us would give nukes to terrorists. But then, neither would iran or NK. Give a terrorist a nuke and what will he do with it? Whatever he thinks best. He sets it off at his own chosen time and place and — unless you’re israel, the one known nuclear power that’s never done a monitored test, or iran giving away an untested nuke, the terrorist’s nuke has your signature on it. This is so crazy even Bush wouldn’t do it. The one plausible source for terrorist nukes now is russia. And I don’t know what we’ve actually done to stop that, what we’ve done might be so workable that nothing else is needed. It’s secret. Still, making a bold stupid plan is good theater and probably a republican candidate wouldn’t manage to call you on it.
I liked your stand about talking to countries that support terrorism. It might help if you promised not to support terrorism yourself, as Bush is supporting terrorism today in iran. But that would be limiting yourself. Why take any option off the table? We’ll support terrorism when it enhances our national interest. Promising the USA wouldn’t support terrorism would probably lose you votes.
In that light, saying we need more covert operatives is both true and impolite. The rest of the world sees our covert guys as people who spread disinformation and do sabotage and assassinations etc — as people who work directly against their interests. Whatever we say about our noble purposes, our covert guys are working for us and against everybody who somehow gets in their way. Since some foreigners pay careful attention to what our leading politicians say they want, it might be better to just not mention the covert guys. Our covert operatives would probably like it better that way too.
I like your economic ideas right down the line. Some of what you want looks very hard to do, but it’s all worth trying for. I don’t see much that could lead to effective criticism, except for one thing. Imagine this divorced mother with two children trying to live on $30,000 a year. You remove the fuel subsidies and her gasoline goes to $4.50/gallon, her winter heating bill goes to $300/month, and she can’t afford air conditioning at all. Then she takes her old polluting car in for inspection and they don’t let her drive it out again. She has a problem. You said you’d do something for her. You were clear about some of the things you’d do against her but you said nothing about mitigating the effects on her. But again, this is probably not something a GOP opponent would figure out how to use against you. Any alternative he could suggest would make him look worse.
All in all, wonderfully will done!
You know, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when people use “Zionist” outside the context of 19th or early 20th century history.
Israeli Jews (and Israeli Arabs) are citizens of Israel, hence Israelis.
avedis & J Thomas seem to disagree…which places you on the other side of a large divide from me.
A.L.
AL, “zionist” makes sense in 2008 USA in terms of single-issue voters and such. Would you prefer some other name for “zionist lobby”? I wouldn’t particularly mind using another name unless it tended toward confusion.
In that context israelis citizens are likely not to be zionists. Many israelis are not even US citizens.
US zionists are much less monolithic than they were in the 1970’s. It was successfully argued that israel itself has a tremendous diversity of political opinions, and so it’s possible to disagree on some points and still be zionist. So today there are some zionists who do not give unqualified support for increased west bank settlements etc.
AL, zionist ideology is alive and well. Both the term and the issue are salient.
At its heart, zionism is a religious fantasy based on the ridiculous tenets that 1. the Jews are god’s special chosen people and 2. that god gave Israel and Palestine specifically to the Jews to be theirs and theirs alone for ever and ever.
If the zionist fantasy remained in the realm of mental masturbation I suppose no one would have problem with it.
Unfortunately, however, this belief system has justified much myopic brutality on the part of Jews/Israelis including the 1948 war and all the way through the more recent siezure and continuing development of the west bank.
It is also used to justify treatment of Arab citizens of Israel as second class citizens; prohibiting voting rights, etc.
I don’t think their is much chance for positive progress in mid east relationships while one side refuses to budge because they think that their actions are based on a god given right. Therefore, I say that zionism is a problem today.
I would also point out to you that I disagree with your speech in its unqualified 100% support of Israel. I would move to a pay for performance model; with Israel needing to concede certain points; say the west bank and full rights to all citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Unitl Israel begins behaving like a first world democracy they are as much an albatross for us as they are a friend.
#11 from avedis: “Unitl Israel begins behaving like a first world democracy they are as much an albatross for us as they are a friend.”
Way I remember it, albatross was a ship’s good luck, till some idiot killed it.
Avedis, you do not have the slightest idea what Zionism is. The Zionism that arose in the 19th century was a secular movement composed of Jews who had tried to assimilate to European life for decades – bending over backwards to be good Germans, good Frenchmen, good subjects of the Czar, etc. They turned to Zionism when they despaired of ever being treated as anything more than alien Jews. In Russia, the murder of the reformer Alexander II by terrorists was a key impetus, because the liberties he had granted to Jews were taken away by his successor.
Religious Jews have been historically ambivalent towards Zionism. The Zionists probably had more socialists than rabbis in their ranks.
Using the term “chosen people” in this regard is considered offensive by many Jews; it is an old term of abuse used by anti-Semites.
I am being painfully brief so as not to derail things here, and I am being very nice to you because it’s my Uncle Sam’s birthday. I encourage you to educate yourself.
Avedis, I think it is not useful to call other people’s religious beliefs ridiculous. It’s their belief, as dear to them as yours are to you.
Jews, muslims, and christians all want their governments to fit the moral priniciples of their religions. And since those principles are mostly good it doesn’t have to be a problem. But there are some in all three religions that want their religious authorities to have undue influence on their governments. In democracies that’s just something we have to deal with.
It seems kind of reasonable at first sight to blame the whole problem on israel, because right now they have all the power and nothing can improve without their cooperation. But that isn’t really helpful. If the israelis were weaker and the arabs stronger, if they were balanced, there’s no guarantee that either side would budge. And if the shoe was on the other foot the israelis might get treated even worse than the palestinians are now. Figuring out who to blame doesn’t help. Except for the personal satisfaction.
Consider the problem of the american south. We fought a war to end slavery, and the result that most of the former slaves became sharecroppers without all that much improvement. (They weren’t whipped, they married by their own choice, they didn’t get sold down the river, those were improvements.) A hundred years later the civil rights movement didn’t really get the desired results either. It’s easy to blame racist whites but they have some legitimate concerns. Southern cities with black majorities who elect black-majority governments have trouble with open corruption. (This is a cultural thing, whites prefer hidden corruption. “Sure I voted for that zoning exemption, we discussed the issue in public meeting and it was clearly in the public interest. No, I didn’t take any bribes and I’m offended that you ask. Those business deals were entirely legitimate.”) The different cultures aren’t completely comfortable with each other. They don’t quite get along. If southern whites don’t trust blacks with power even now, with the black Baptist turn-the-other-cheek tradition, how could we expect better in israel?
Both of our attempts to deal with our southern problem came during times of fast economic growth. Every year there was much more to go around; people could see their own lives improving and still have plenty left over to share. But israel doesn’t have that. There are essentially no resources there, not even enough land or water. israel’s economy has been doing so-so based on hi-tech competition in the global market, but it’s crazy to bet your economy on staying ahead in that game. There simply is not enough to go around and economic benefits for palestinians have to be taken from israelis. When palestinians get more water, israelis get less.
Israelis have the power now so it’s natural to blame them for everything. But even with the best will in the world from israelis this would be a hard problem. Their fears only seem silly because they are in such total control. If they lost that control they’d be right to be afraid.
I would also point out to you that I disagree with your speech in its unqualified 100% support of Israel.
Note that he didn’t claim 100% support for israel. He offered 100% support for *survival* for israelis, and 100% support for survival for the israeli government.
So, suppose that he was President and he did, say, cut off all support for israel, perhaps extending to an embargo and no-fly zone over the whole country. And the israelis still didn’t do what he wanted, and after they were weakened sufficiently arab nations were ready to invade. Then he might act to prevent the invasion or fight it once it started, and he might give israel weapons to fight for themselves. And that would be compatible with what he said. 100% support for survival. Much less support for particular repressive policies.
There’s no place for threats against israel in an acceptance speech, not in the next few years. “100% support — but” is as close to an evenhanded stand as you could reasonably hope for. Maybe it goes too far.
This is a pretty lousy speach if it were to be given in the hope of attracking the support of the American people.
1) Regarding nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea. Threatening to go war over this issue is just so much bull shit. The American people will not support such an outright threat on the part of any administration because it is a false threat. We will just not support going to war over this issue.
This will lose you votes.
2) Regarding Israel and Palistine. What are you crazy? You want us to sieze the schoolbooks and replace the teachers in every village and town in Palistine. This is nuts. We are not going to dictate the educational curriculum of anyplace outside our own school districts boundaries right here at home. This makes you sound like a lunitic. It really does. The voters are going to see right away that you care more about jewish feelings in the middle east than you do about good teachers and textbooks right here at home.
And what exactly do you propose to teach the little arabs in your newly constituted educational system? Are you going to demand the same thing be taught in our schools?
This is such a totally loser proposition you should run from it as fast as you can.
And it is only after you’ve taken over the educational system that Israel and Palistine can sit down and talk. How long after?
But since your preconditions for talks is never going to happen you are effectively saying nothing will ever change by diplomatic means.
Upon further reflection, this should not only lose you votes but have you committed to an insane asylum.
3) Peace through military spending. This is pretty much expected rhetoric from any presidential candidate. Mostly meaningless and ignored by the voters.
This will not hurt you nor will it help you.
4) Middle class domestic agenda. You say what is expected to be said but are probably too long winded about it. Also you have no specificity with regard to universal health insurance and the outsourcing of jobs.
This will be a nuetral to all except for those who were actually listening and expected more.
5) Environmental. Yawn.
This will not be a big issue in the upcoming election.
6) The war on Iraq.
You ignored this entirely. This is the issue that is going to win the election for the Democratic candidate and lose it for the Republicas.
Ken:
It is difficult to discuss rhetoric and style without thread derailment. And I’m still having difficulty reaching you via any of the email addresses you have used for your posts here.
So, formally, acting in my (unpaid) capacity as a WoC Marshal, I ask you to please use the mailto: address link in the righthand sidebar to contact me.
I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I just want the chance to discuss some matters with you less publicly.
Thanks.
Ken, you say that his threat to iran and NK would lose him votes. But it might gain more votes than it lost. There’s a fraction of americans who really like that kind of thing. The question is whether he’d lose many of them on other issues, and whether he’d lose too many others on this issue. I suspect that a lot of americans would ignore it, and it would mostly affect the nutty republicans who might vote for him because of it, and the nutty democrats who might not vote for him because of it. Since he’d already have the nomination, and since the republican votes that would normally never go to democrats might be available this time around, it just might work. But I haven’t seen the numbers.
Your second point about palestinian education might be right, but he has such a delightfullly off-the-wall idea that people might go for it. This really is something we could give palestinians that offers long-term hope. They’ve been having a very hard time getting adequate education for their children, and we’d offer to provide it. Teaching math, science, biology, things that are being denied them now. Expand it to accounting, management, electronics, logistics, tactics — they’d lap it up. And providing teachers for all their children would mean bringing in about 1% extra foreigners to live with them. You could hardly do an airstrike in palestine without hitting a foreign grade-school teacher. I could certainly see the palestinians begging us not to throw them in that there briar patch.
Your fourth complaint about health care — he was going to debate health care on TV. He isn’t revealing his plan now, for his opponent to pick over for weeks or months before the debate, he’ll do it then. True he didn’t say much about how to help the middle-class stay middle-class, but at least he said it was a goal. The GOP acts like it isn’t any of their business; if our middle-class goes bankrupt then it just shows they aren’t competent and don’t deserve to do better. Handouts for giant corporations, none for stupid people.
The environment can become a big issue unless the media refuses to let it happen. Over half our cancers are estimated to come from environmental problems. It doesn’t take global warming to make this an issue, but the majority of the voters believe in GW now.
Your sixth point — it’s too soon to tell whether iraq will be any issue at all in the next election. We might likely be out of there by then. Chances are we’ll know whether it will be an issue by the nomination speech, but we don’t know now. I think there’s a fair chance that after Petraeus makes his report in September, Warner and some other republican senators will tell Bush either he announces we’re out of iraq before the election, or the senate will confirm his impeachment.
And if we’re scheduled to pull out, it’s going to be a dead letter. Possibly some GOP candidate might announce “I promise you, *I* won’t turn tail and run! After we invade iran I promise I’ll keep the army there until hades freezes over!”. But probably not.
Looking back, I think I’m saying this too strongly. People likely would regard the palestine-education idea as crazy, and it isn’t clear where we’d get the teachers etc. (But then, it’s the first really original idea any politician has offered for a long time, and nothing else has worked.) Threatening iran and NK is kind of crazy, though it might not lose him any support at all. And the whole thing is way too wordy for a speech. You do have some good points. I think you stated them too strongly and then I rebutted them too strongly.
I’d like to note that you have not addressed either of the two most serious problems for the liberal tradition in America. Social Security is the first; and the Federal pension/healthcare programs are the second. The costs of these are estimated to be “fifty-nine trillion”:http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=22498576&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fprintedition%2Fnews%2F20070529%2F1a_lede29.art.htm&partnerID=1660 in hidden debt, not currently budgeted.
The government’s response when asked about it was to oppose changes in accounting policies to account for those debts. Why? “The White House and the Congressional Budget Office oppose the change, arguing that the programs are not true liabilities because government can cancel or cut them.”
So here’s the stark truth as I see it: the government is stating baldly that it has no intention of paying those liabilities — but intends, and indeed will have, to “cancel or cut them.”
That will create massive problems for our country when it starts to occur. It will also be the dead end for the Reform Liberal tradition. No one is going to trust the government to handle their pension or Social Security or healthcare after the depth of their deceit becomes unavoidably clear.
Nor should they trust them now. It is already plain, and being articulated by the government itself, that these promises will not be honored. We need to begin privitizing American society now, so that the shock of the collapse of these promises — and, indeed, the collapse of any remaining faith in the government — will do less damage to the nation. The private sphere will survive when the government collapses — for who will work in its bureaucracies when they see how the promises made to their ancestors are kept?
If the reality is a much smaller government, refocused on the actual Constitutional business of government, it may be worth the price. But we should start preparing for that world, because it’s coming whether you want it or not.
Now: A general critique:
I have to admit I wouldn’t feel good about voting for a politician who promised to “work damn hard” on “solutions” that “would never solve” the problems. What I want out of government is a lot less meddling, not a lot more — especially in areas where we don’t fully understand the problems yet, or the kinds of problems don’t lend themselves to government-led solutions.
That’s a general critique. I don’t object (as do Libertarians or some conservatives) to using the government to influence the nature of the economy, for example, in order to create a society we would prefer to the one the market will create. For example, I think a policy designed to boost individual ownership of small business and family farms would be of great social value to America. Nothing against corporations; it’s just that people are freer, as Jefferson noted in praising ‘yeomen farmers,’ when they own their own means of production.
But if we can’t actually solve a problem, let’s leave it alone. No meddling in the affairs of the People unless we can both name a specific policy we want to enact, and show that it has a reasonable chance of success for resolving the actual problem it addresses — and won’t create nasty unintended effects.
The desire to “fix” things that can’t be fixed, or that we don’t really know how to fix, is the single worst impulse of liberal politicians today. It creates an endless nest of binding rules and regulations, laws and agencies, taxes and tape, until whole areas of human freedom are lost — and the problem never got fixed anyway.
More specific critiques:
Good points on the DPRK and Iran. Concurr.
Re: Palestine and Israel, see above on the subject of impossible problems and the unsuitability of US gov’t meddling in them. For God’s sake, let’s not involve ourselves any further in this business. Israel’s government may have to involve itself with this particular problem-without-solution, but we don’t. “The United States has tried to make good faith efforts in the past to help negotiate a solution,” we should say, “but we must admit that they have failed. It is time for Israel and Palestine to resolve their differences between themselves, or using such other moderators as they agree to prefer. While we will not stand by for an invasion of either territory by a third party, this dispute must be resolved by the involved parties alone.”
As for military restructuring, I think I’ve written enough about that in the past to avoid needing to speak to it further here.
Now, your big economic question: “How do me make the basics of the American dream – a white picket fence and a better future for our kids – available to people who don’t have advanced degrees or trust funds?”
I said above that I think the #1 thing we need to do is encourage the development of small business and family farms. That means a wholesale restructuring of farm aid policies; it also means rethinking government contracting, and perhaps accepting paying more for services and goods rather than going for lowest bidder status. Economies of scale aren’t always available to small businesses, but we’d prefer a nation with more of them anyway.
There are other things of this type we can do. We can subsidize education for useful trades (more at the state than the federal level, as states have different needs and are not well served by a one-size-fits-all policy). We can create tax benefits for small businesses v. larger corporations; heck, we could simply forgo taxing small businesses and family farms at all, at least at first.
The number one thing we need to do is dramatically cut back on the regulation of such businesses. We need to make it easy to set one up, so you don’t need a lawyer and an accountant to make and sell furniture out of your wood shop.
We need to exempt small businesses from some ADA regulations, so that you can open a restaurant out of your kitchen without having to rebuild your house to accomodate wheelchairs. I knew a nice Korean couple in China who had a business whereby you could come by at supper, and eat what they were cooking for a small price. Or, for more, they’d make something special for you. That’s the sort of thing anyone can do — some extra income for a retired couple, perhaps — except for the regulations out the ear.
Etc.
Another thing we could do (which speaks to your desire to build America in copper, steel, etc) is reestablish the CCC. Public improvements can be made by young people who are learning a trade at the same time. They have to subject themselves to orders and contracts (one of the CCC’s things was that you didn’t get the money you earned — it went to your family. We might have to set up a ‘trust fund’ type account that you pay into, but can’t draw out of except for education until you’re 35). In return, they learn how to do something very well, for free; and they get the satisfaction of building something impressive (ever driven the Blue Ridge Parkway?).
Education will benefit most from being privatized. We need to start ending public education. It can’t be done all at once, but we can start shifting a percentage of our expenses every year to helping establish new private schools (another small business!) and establishing voucher programs. We should aim to eliminate public schools, with their attendant bureaucracies and public-sector unions, within fifteen years.
You want your mother making $30,000 to have a shot at Harvard? I’d suggest you aim higher, myself, but if that’s what you want… let her pick the school that is right for child and his particular talents. Harvard already doesn’t require families making under $60,000 to pay tuition, so if we can handle educating the individual child to his best advantage, he should have a pretty good shot.
Or he could go to a real school, like West Point. The service academies are exempted from the critique of public education, as they are better than any other public education. They are better because they train the whole man (or woman): they train the mind and they strengthen the body, they improve his personal willpower and discipline so that he can excel, but also inculcate a sense of the debt that we owe to our nation and its traditions. This is what American education should want to produce.
As for your environmental policies, I have a few comments.
1) You want to get the worst polluters off the road. This conflicts with your desire to help the poor, unless you plan to buy them a car: most of the worst polluters are the oldest vehicles, which are barely kept running because that is what the owner can afford.
2) You want to decentralize to help us against terror attacks. This I agree with entirely, and not merely for terrorist reasons; but again, you need cars for that. I am a great believer in light rail systems — Virginia’s VRE was a wonderful way to commute, when I had to get into DC. But you can’t run a railroad everywhere. Most of America is going to drive where it needs to go.
That “most” of America is also the poorest part of America — the money is in the cities. So, again, unless you’re going to buy new fuel-efficient pickups for the rural poor, you’re hitting a conflict.
3) Building new plants is a great idea. Moving power generation closer to where it’s being generated is a great idea.
4) We should encourage better air quality and other environmental benefits through tax breaks rather than new regulations and oversight agencies. We should always endeavor to avoid regulation, and keep taxes as low as at all possible; so let us do so here.
Getting on this late, but I just need to know where I could stand and applaud. Seriously, I agree with alot of this. Some people have made objections to exactly how these plans would work in reality, (which is more than fair) but I think you’re headed in the right direction.
You’ve presented America as both open talons and as the open hand. (ken: Note that he’s threatening war only after the intial strike, which would become inevitable). I also like that you’re engaging the 2-state problem. I wish this administration had engaged that problem more instead of just discussing it.
I also think that you should drive home environmentalism through savings to the american people. Creating more energy efficient utilities/services/connections could save each person hundreds to thousands per year. Especially with traditional resources becoming inflated, new technology should be seen as the solution (not worse than the problem).
I also agree that the two biggest problems right now are health care (and coming soon) social security. But handling these problems in elections (esp. SS) is politically tricky. Still, most people who go bankrupt do so because of healthcare costs, which is a massive drain on the economy. We need to find a better way to maintain health in this country, (maybe a tax rebate for taking preventative health measures?) that prevents illness before it becomes expensive, and simultaneously strengthen the system against implosion in crisis situations.
#18 from Grim: I’d like to note that you have not addressed either of the two most serious problems for the liberal tradition in America. Social Security is the first; and the Federal pension/healthcare programs are the second.”
George W. Bush won a second term of office with a huge popular vote, and had a mostly Republican appointed Supreme Court and solid majorities in the federal legislature to back him up. And, he had demonstrated huge coat-tails in 2002, and it was reasonable to think that now it would be the legislature’s turn to support him. Better yet, in an act of immense political courage and uprightness, he had campaigned for a mandate to fix Social Security, not going for a meaningless feel-good lonely super-majority, such as Ronald Reagan won, but risking his margin of victory and even his second term and the war with it to get some substantial issues up there. On his election victory night, after his supporters had been cheated of their victory celebration (again) he claimed his mandate, the reward of all the good work he had done. Reform of Social Security it was.
And there the matter ended, because the late, unlamented Republican federal legislative majority did not support him.
They thought it was all about them – nothing other than their own continued enjoyment of incumbency seemed to matter to that do-nothing legislature.
And because they did not support him, he could not produce the promised results. And he was in no position to help them again. And in 2006, a tidal wave of blue washed away the sand-castles of a Republican legislative majority that had been too selfish even to look after itself effectively.
Conditions cannot be as favorable again as they were on the re-election of George W. Bush. That was the maximum, the “perfect storm”. You will not get another president that determined and with everything set up just right to do the job.
And that was not nearly good enough.
Therefore events will take their course.
There is no point in a presidential candidate talking up this issue.
Re: The Middle East
After the Neo-Con Fiasco of the past few years, one would think that these sort of bombastic, delusional and self involved and self absorbed foreign policy rants would get a rest. Apparently not.
Our involvement in the Middle East over the past 231 years has been a disaster save for the commercial ties, by this I mean Oil. All of our religious and quasi-religious (Read the present administrations policy of democratizing the Middle East as an example)plans we have promulgated, including AL’s
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The United States will commit to fair and secure borders for Palestine, and to continued assistance for the Palestinian people. But Palestine is going to have to do some things to earn that commitment and that assistance.
AND
The education system in Palestine will be taken over and supervised by a new agency, supervised by the Quartet. No longer will Palestinian children be raised believing that hate and murder are the only future they can aspire to.
The books for the State of Palestine will be absolutely and totally transparent. No longer will we support a state that pays militias with suitcases full of cash, and where duffels of cash somehow wind up in secret banks in the names of rulers and their families.
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are ridiculous at face value.
Idea # 1, Fair Borders, is exactly what the conflict has always been about. No one has been able to come up with a plan for fair borders yet. I see no reason why AL’s Fair Borders are any different than anybody else’s. Will we enforce this fairness with troops? There have been peace keepers in the Middle east repeatedly since 1948, none have kept the peace.
Before I leave this point, one has to think about whether, even if the Palestinians and Israelis would agree to this that we would defend them against other threats, like the dream of a greater Syria and attacks by Islamicist forces and states who would regard the surrender of any Islamic land to infidels as both apostasy and treason.
Idea # 2. Well, Any educational system imposed on the Palestinians by the Quartet will be seen as nothing but propaganda and the brainwashing of Palestinian children. It will, no doubt, be challenged as anti Islamic, which will make it Dead on Arrival.
As for the Zionist and anti Zionist rants:
The only way the Israeli alliance makes any sense is on a strategic level. Israel exists as a base for projecting American power in the Middle East. Aside from Turkey, no other option exists. Israel is closer to the important points in the Area, the Suez canal and the Straits of Hormuz. This is also the reason that Israel has the most up to date American weaponry. It makes it possible for rapid force projection. We don’t need any other excuse for supporting Israel.
If you think that the Israeli tail wags the American dog, think again. If it were in the interests of the United States power elite, anti-Israeli sentiment could be whipped up over night. AL’s post and the comments that follow completely underestimate the cynicism under which strategic planning operates.
I am neither pro-Israeli nor Anti-Israeli and I agree that Israel owes its existence to the U.S. My problem when people portray the U.S. as being the tool of the the Israelis (Zionists), while the opposite is true. It is Israel who dances to the tune of the U.S., make no mistake of that. The Americans are not some innocent dupes here, so why try to whitewash them.
Funniest thing I’ve read today. What makes it funnier is it’s not satire or parody.
AL, SEATO went away about 30 years ago. Of course, it’s possible that was just a red herring to confuse potential nuclear terrorists into inaction. It make take them years to figure out if they’re attacking their own country or not.
But, man, attacking North Korea or Iran if we can’t figure out where the nuclear attack or attempted attack came from is…well, priceless. I have an old Volvo with a faulty air pump–maybe I’ll throw a stone through my neighbor’s front window to see if that fixes the problem.
Israel-Palestine? Well, you’ve offered Israel plenty of carrot with no stick. And Palestine gets all stick without even accurately addressing their concerns. Frankly, a two state solution won’t work without addressing the right of return.
#22 from Jadegold at 7:26 pm on Jul 05, 2007
Frankly, a two state solution won’t work without addressing the right of return.
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I agree with this but would go further by saying less.
Frankly, a two state solution won’t work.
Sorry to be absent – promised to keep off the computer yesterday and working like crazy today…
A few fast responses to interesting points.
avedis – “Zionist” as a term carries some baggae with it; kind of like “oppressive patriarchy” it presumes a certain worldview (and tends to reveal a certain worldview on the part of the writer). I place a priority on supporting Israel’s existence for one simple reason; if the Arabs wanted peace, there would (on some terms) be peace; if the Israelis wanted the Arabs dead, they’d be dead. If you reversed that, the statement would be counterfactual. That – in my mind – makes the Israelis the good guys.
The fact that they are a democracy, have a rule of law, and have built their people into prosperity is another set of good reasons. We may just have to agree to disagree on that one.
J Thomas – sorry, didn’t mean we’d drop 10,000 teachers into Palestine to be used as hostages, but that instead of the UN financing textbooks and curriculum that teaches Palestinian kids how to hate and kill, we’d finance textbooks that would teach them math and engineering. Apologies for not clearing that up sooner.
I don’t see a real solution to the Israel-Palestine problem for a generation; we’ve got a cohort of 20-year olds who have been raised from birth to hate and kill Jews; until they are old and a new generation with different values comes up, not much will change.
Re Iran and NK; it’s simple – we have to figure out a way to manage the threat of a smuggled nuke. We know what most nukes come from – i.e. I’d bet that the Russians and US, France, Pakistan and Britain have exchanged ‘recipes’ for fissionable material so that we can track back fallout from a test or detonation (if they haven’t they should do so tomorrow). If it isn’t baked to one of those recipes – where did it come from?
Right now, there are two likely sources – and holding both of them culpable until they open their nuclear programs is a simple and I think effective way of making sure that they think seriously about opening their programs.
Grim – I didn’t address fiscal policy because it’s a chunk I didn’t get around to. From my POV, there are a few things I’d do right away.
1) Encourage all states to impose a small sales tax or increase their sales tax slightly. Let the states pay 100% of the employee and employer payroll taxes for employees at or below a set income to the feds directly; let them pay all the employee portion up to a higher threshold. The goal is for the amounts to balance – states would be better off because people who work off the books pay sales tax, but not payroll tax; it’s raise for low-income workers, and an incentive for companies to hire low-wage workers.
2) Lift the income cap on payroll taxes until the Social Security trust find is in balance.
3) Line item veto of budget items
4) Disclose all level of government employee pension & health care liability
There’s more, but that will do…on to your other points.
You want to shrink government and privatize schools, etc. That’s OK – you’re a conservative, and that’s legit. I think there’s a bigger role for government – hence “liberal”…*grin*. That’s a debate worth having, and why we should have two parties who differ on the subject.
You might not feel good about politicians who say they will “make progress” on issues – but I want to change the frame and start acknowledging that we don’t “solve” problems – we reshape them, or move them down the road, or trade them for other problems.
I’m glad you like the CCC idea – I’d like to see that and the WPA both come back. And I share your ideas on government procurement and the benefit of a little less efficiency.
David B – do you want to coordinate w/Grim on the “fantasy Republican” response?
Jadegold – I’m shocked, just shocked that we disagree. If you’ve got a better idea for managing the “smuggled nuke” issue – short of bombing NoKorea or Iran – I’d love to hear it. we’d all love to, I’ll bet.
That’s all for now…
A.L.
It’d be odd for a Southern Democrat and an Australian to write the Republican platform. On the other hand, by all evidence they seem to need any help they can get.
_”Frankly, a two state solution won’t work without addressing the right of return.”_
You just said a mouthful. Lets be honest with ourselves for a brief moment: The right of return is a poison pill designed to destroy the state of Israel. End of story. How do i know? Because the Palestinian leadership has publicly said so. Thats good enough for me.
Wars happen, people get displaced, sometimes they dont get to go home. There are several hundred thousand jews displaced from Arabs lands after Israel’s founding that certainly arent getting any recompensation.
Palestinians are all welcome back. To the Palestinian state. Flooding Israel with Palestinians is simply a non-starter, nonserious, and a waste of time. Israel has already agreed in principle to recompensate refugees with cash. Again- which party has offered serious concessions and which has tried to poison the process?
Does this make me a (dum dum dum) Zionist for stating this simple truth? I dont think so. It makes me a realist. Every other post war negotiation in history has called on the losing party to make the most concessions. The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations may be the only one where the winning party is called upon to make _all_ concessions… even though the Arabs started the fighting.
A deal could be inked tomorrow based on the Green Line and cash compensation for right of return. But the Palestinians wont take it, because ultimately their leaders and their financers in Iran and Saudi Arabia have no interest in a long term peace. We all know this, yet we all continue to pretend some deal is just a couple of Israeli concessions away.
Its absurd.
J Thomas – sorry, didn’t mean we’d drop 10,000 teachers into Palestine to be used as hostages, but that instead of the UN financing textbooks and curriculum that teaches Palestinian kids how to hate and kill, we’d finance textbooks that would teach them math and engineering.
Oh. Too bad.
This isn’t off topic, so bear with me a little. I remember a Christopher Anvil science fiction novel, I think the title was The Dukes of Desire. The heroes have found a world that has one city on it, a giant slum run as a welfare state, with robocops doing an utterly inadequate job of policing. And the heroes have invented a special electronic device that affects people’s feelings. They want to use the device to turn things around.
So they look at the apathetic slumdwellers and they beam “desire for achievement” at them. The people perk up and start trying to kill the mechs. They beam “respect for authority” at them and the people organise behind leaders who coordinate their attacks against mechs. They beam them with “desire to learn” and people get all enthusiastic about learning better how to kill mechs. The beaten-down slumdwellers want to kill robocops and everything they do gets turned in that direction.
If your beliefs about palestinians are correct (I don’t really think they are), if you teach them math and engineering they’ll try to use math and engineering to attack israel. Giving them textbooks that *work* instead of textbooks that waste their time, in that case is not helpful.
But here’s what I think it really is. Israel is a fairly small place, and while they haven’t lost a whole lot of people to palestinian violence, it’s so small that pretty much everybody there knows somebody who died that way. People tend to have around a thousand other people they think of as close acquaintances, and around 10,000 that they “know”. So it doesn’t take a whole lot of casualties over 10 years for every israeli to know somebody who died that way.
Well, the palestinian population is smaller and their casualties are larger. It’s about 10 times as intense for them. If you’re palestinian you can expect to lose somebody to the israelis that you know, about every year or less, and somebody closer about every 10 years. It isn’t kids hating israelis because their schoolteachers teach them to hate israelis. It’s kids hating israelis because the israelis kill people they know. And if we can get 20 years when the israelis kill them a lot less, that effect will be diluted.
#27 from J Thomas at 10:56 pm on Jul 05, 2007
Great Post although I don’t think it will slake the thirst of Americans, both left and right, for solving other people’s problems, no matter how little they know about the people, their history and their culture. The Missionary Point of View that is woven throughout our national character and our foreign policy appears to be too strong.
Supporting Israel is in our short term strategic interest. Exporting our ideas on what the Palestinians should be taught in school is not. Why not let the Arabs and Israelis solve their own problems and involve ourselves only when our short term interests are involved, especially in an area which is so volatile.
Exporting an American political “Bible” to the Middle East, whether you call it that or a “re-education” program for Palestinians children is patently absurd, arrogant and condescending. That attitude towards the Arabs hasn’t worked in the past, what makes one think that it will work now and in the future.
OK, for whatever reason a two-state solution is a nonstarter.
And a one-state solution is also a nonstarter.
So in the short run, there is no solution. Peace is a nonstarter.
However, in the longer run we may manage a solution. I call it
The Zero-State Solution.
When the time comes that it’s plain to everybody the status quo can’t continue, then we let the rest of the world (perhaps including the USA) impose a solution. They take the whole thing and give it to the UN. No israeli state, no palestinian state, no mixed state. No state at all. The UN moves their UN headquarters to jerusalem. They promise free access to each religion’s religious sites. Maybe they can persuade the hindus and buddhists and bahai and such to move in some religious sites too, the more the merrier.
The UN could take all the land that the state of israel had kept for itself and reserve it for UN expansion and such. Pay off everybody who has documentation that they owned the land before the israelis confiscated it. Maybe pay off a few israeli landowners who kept their land out of the ILA. Then they rent out unneeded land to whoever wants it, probably with preference to israelis and palestinians.
The UN can administer the whole thing. No governments, so no governments to make war on each other, argue about borders, mess up water distribution, do covert ops, etc.
Anybody who’s disgruntled about it all can argue with the UN, which can’t run out on their obligation without abandoning their headquarters.
General hilarity ensues.
Lets be honest with ourselves for a brief moment: The right of return is a poison pill designed to destroy the state of Israel.
Baloney. Again, the issue is to *address* the right of return–that doesn’t necessarily have to be the solution. It is possible to address this problem in another way, possibly reparations.
If we’re truly being honest, there are ways to satisfy the right of return issue.
Jadegold – I’m shocked, just shocked that we disagree. If you’ve got a better idea for managing the “smuggled nuke” issue – short of bombing NoKorea or Iran – I’d love to hear it. we’d all love to, I’ll bet.
Think, AL. If you lose your wallet–you look for it in places where you actually were. You don’t go somewhere where the light is better and it’s air-conditioned because it’s easier to look there. Hey, if I’m one of these stateless terrorists, I’d consider it a bonus to touch off a nuke and have the US go after Iran or North Korea; fewer resources coming after me.
The way you go after the “smuggled nuke” issue is the way you fight nuclear proliferation: by old-fashioned police work, inspections, incentives, etc. The way you don’t is to start threatening nascent nuclear powers that you’re going to attack them—chances are this will provoke an opposite reaction from the one you expect.
“_And if we can get 20 years when the israelis kill them a lot less, that effect will be diluted._”
Unfortunately the majority of Palestinians killed are actively trying to kill Israelis. So in order to do that a lot more Israelis get killed and you are right back where you started.
_”If we’re truly being honest, there are ways to satisfy the right of return issue.”_
There certainly are. But the Palestinians have _never_ indicated they would accept anything less than a true right of return. Of course there are logical ways to solve this entire conflict, but if one side has no real interest in anything less than the destruction of the other, negotiations are a waste of so much breath.
#24 from Armed Liberal: “David B – do you want to coordinate w/Grim on the “fantasy Republican” response?”
Sure.
If you don’t think it’s too badly off topic, we could start discussing it here, in the context of what you said and the need for Republicans to have an answer to this.
#25 from Grim: “It’d be odd for a Southern Democrat and an Australian to write the Republican platform. On the other hand, by all evidence they seem to need any help they can get.”
True.
I agree with Peggy Noonan: the Republican Party now is headless. George W. Bush has thrown away Ronald Reagan’s coalition as though it was his property and he was entitled to. He, and other top Republicans like the odious Trent Lott, seen to think that the base of the Republican Party consists of stupid people whose hearts are in the wrong place.
That implies a political crisis) as seen in the illegal immigration struggle) and fundamental rebuilding – much more bottom-up rebuilding than the Democrats need to do.
The party aristocracy will not do this – and if they did they’d do it wrong, but they simply will not rethink and rebuild. We see this in their lack of reading on jihad. We see this in their slowness in getting internet savvy. They won’t read, they won’t think, you can’t make them, and if you’re so smart why aren’t you incumbent like them? That’s their attitude.
Any serious rethinking will have to come from outside the charmed circle of the “best” people. Anybody can pitch in and help with this. Even us.
Who was that Australian recently who I vaguely recall was found to be an illegal immigrant working for one of the major parties? I guess I’m one up on him, because due to the wonder of the Internet, I can do my part here without violating my principle of promoting legality. 🙂
First, let’s see how much were are on the same page on fundamentals.
I start with faith and confidence in the goodness and powers of the American people, the wisdom of their founding fathers (including and especially the author of the second foundation, Abraham Lincoln) the fundamental correctness of their system of law as enshrined in the American Constitution (though not always as courts have applied it: out, damned Roe!), and their future. The American are strong and clever (good engineers), they breed enough to replace themselves (ignoring the major problem of the vanishing white), they’ve got socially useful religious traditions (Christianity limited by strong requirements for non-establishment and freedom of speech, with a dash of fix-the-world Judaism), they have good neighbors (compare Mexicans and Americans to Palestinians and Israelis), they have a natural network of informal allies (the Anglosphere) – and so on.
So my attitude to fundamental, serious pessimism about America is to dismiss it. Just let the system work and it’ll be fine. And my attitude to _fundamental_ reform is, America’s fundamentals aren’t broken, so don’t fix them.
You know the joke about the young multi-millionaire who owed his success to applying a formula? His daddy gave him millions of dollars and said: “Son, this is yours, don’t lose it.” When it comes to liberty, and the conditions of prosperity and national strength, America is that lucky young man and the Constitution is the most valuable item in his legacy.
Most people in most countries will never come close to achieving the freedoms that in America come gift-wrapped in the founding documents of the state. Better yet, these freedoms are not _bestowed_, they are _recognized_ by the state as coming from God. That couldn’t be better.
So, since you live in a lucky country, your first concern should be to stay lucky.
The Republican Party as an instrument for the preservation of American national greatness is not nearly in the happy position of America itself. I have always been and still am skeptical that “red state” demographics guarantee conservatives a growing edge in national politics. I think that the party has lost its way.
Americans are problem-solvers and they like problem-solvers. Even though it may be true that often the government does best by doing less, I think Americans will always be biased to the guy running for a position in government who says: “I’ve got a solution, let’s do this!”
Through apparent futility in war, protracted deadlock on key social issues, and a needless failure of his intended reforms in the two terms of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has more or less lost the mandate of the effective do-something party. (Which is not to say that Democrats have picked up – prior to the rise of Armed Liberal of course. 🙂 The recent Republican “victory” on illegal immigration was won by gladiators like Jeff Sessions and Jim DeMint. Yes, it’s valuable to block bad things, so well done. But the Grand Old Party has to get back to positively accomplishing good things, specifically it has to accomplish good things for the three vital elements of the Reagan coalition, which must be restored.
Grim:
1. What do you think Republican security conservatives most need?
2. What do you think shrink-the-government free enterprise conservatives most need?
3. What do you think Christians, pro-lifers and social conservatives most need?
4. What do you think is the issue the system most needs? What is the top issue that’s like preventive maintenance on sewers: it’s really, really got to be done, regardless of whether there’s a charged-up constituency for it?
(I’ve said it’s legality, with Justice Clarence Thomas as my guide to what that is. I think American needs to get back to working a lot more like a civics class says it does, and a lot less like the “earmark” system, the pro-bill side of the illegal immigration debate and the jurisprudence of the “living constitution” demonstrates that it does. I think you need a state of laws, not a system where in effect the law is to do what the powerful and wealthy say, or you’ll be sorry.)
5. What do you think independents and persuadable Democrats most need from the Republican Party? What do you think would count as the Republicans solving something for once?
6. What do you see in what Armed Liberal said that we should mercilessly steal, or regard as an offer that’s so hot that we have to make some kind of rival offer?
Re: point 6: I see you’ve already addressed that in a lot of ways, but I’m trying to pick out your top priority in each category that I think is important.
But the Palestinians have never indicated they would accept anything less than a true right of return.
What’s been offered in this regard? Nothing. It’s really hard to judge what a reaction might be when the circumstance has never been presented.
Unless, of course, you have a magic crystal ball.
The manner in which the palestinians insure that they won’t accept any compromise of the “right to return” is by assassinating any Palestinian who might suggest such a compromise.
Jadegold – you’ll be shocked that I actually agree w.you on reparations.
Re nukes: we’ll disagree a lot. It takes a big, visible infrastructure to make the stuff you need to make bombs. You can’t hide it (correction: you can’t hide that it exists; you can play a shell game and hide the physical location).
So I don’t stress about Zimbabwe making nukes. Or even Yemen or Somalia.
There are only a few places where the technology exists, and if one goes off that isn’t attributable to one of the known powers, it’s close enough to impossible for it to have come from anywhere else that as a policy issue, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Having nukes is a strong regional card for NoKorea and Iran, but geopolitically, it doesn’t mean much. If we got nuked and the bomb had a Tehran return address on it, I’d guess that regardless of who occupied the White House (except Jimmy Ccarter) things in Iran would be hot, bright, and glassy. So posessing nukes doesn’t do much except make regional conflict more challenging.
Back to you.
A.L.
_Again, the issue is to address the right of return–that doesn’t necessarily have to be the solution. It is possible to address this problem in another way, possibly reparations._
Let’s see that was first suggested by Israel about 60 years ago? What exactly does Israel have to gain from any negotiations with the Palestinian leadership at this point? They can’t give peace, what else would Israel want?
And I will take the “right of return” seriously when its international advocates recognize the principle themselves. For the U.S. that would mean giving Canadian tories and Confederate sympathizers a right to return to their homes they left or were expelled from as incidents of war. I don’t want to imagine what the Native Americans would be owed.
All right, David, if you want to give it a go, I’ll join you.
On your fundamentals:
I agree that the American people are fundamentally good, insofar as humans can be good. You will recall “The Smell of Death,” in which I considered what some of the limits on inner goodness might be. Still, judged as humans, they’re well-intentioned, and want to live in a country that “does the right thing.”
The underlying freedoms of the American Constitution are solid. The system for administering them is, as I see it, broken (see “Time for a Change,” another piece on the topic). Serious Constitutional adjustments are needed to bring the government back into something like what the Founders actually intended for it to be.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean by crediting Lincoln with ‘the second foundation’ of America. It’s true that Lincoln’s example and rhetoric were and are stirring; and it’s true that the Civil War would have been lost without his guidance. However, Lincoln himself did not do much to change the operation of the Constitutional system. The Reconstruction Amendments, 13th-15th, are to be credited to later actors. It is principally the 14th Amendment that is responsible for the structural changes in the US government, which were severe enough to be rightly considered a second foundation.
I am not a fan of the 14th Amendment, and think that a successful settlement of America’s internal social differences will require that it be amended to reduce the power of the Federal courts. It is precisely the abilities of the 14th that make SCOTUS decisions so needlessly explosive: because they are impositions on all jurisdictions, it is a matter of extreme political rancor when we have to nominate a new Justice. In fact, I would say this has become the central issue of our elections — people who are totally furious at the Republican party will vote for them anyway in 2008, precisely to avoid the risk of the SCOTUS drifting left. A huge amount of our political fundraising and activism is driven by concerns about the court.
I think we need to change that, to return to something closer to the original founding, if we are to have an America that can really be for all Americans. The American social contract was meant to allow for multiple solutions to contentious issues — Bostonian Puritans, Southern rumrunners, and “Rogue’s Island’s” freethinkers. Now every contentious question demands a one-size-fits-all solution from SCOTUS. There either will or will not be a protected right to abortion; there either will or will not be prayer allowed in schools; and so forth. So much of the heat that is keeping us from working together and viewing other Americans as allies and brothers first is coming from the concentration of power in the SCOTUS and other Federal courts.
There are other systemic concerns I have, which are cause for a certain amount of real pessimism about the American _government_. About the American people, I am broadly optimistic. They’re good lads, mostly; watch too much TV, but mostly they’re all right.
I think your story about the young millionaire is precisely right. The number one thing we ought to do is to focus on preserving our heritage of freedom, and not frittering it away (see my objection, above, to AL’s proposal for endless “working on” this and that impossible problem, to the tune of constant new regulations in every sphere of life).
I do agree that Americans like to see the government doing things, for fundamentally cultural rather than well-considered reasons. They hate idlers, and they hate people who seem not to be earning their money or benefits; Congressmen have money and other benefits; therefore, they’d better at least appear to be doing something worthwhile to earn it.
That said, Americans also do know that we have tons of useless, pointless, and outright harmful laws and regulations. A Congress that was predicated on passing laws to repeal laws of that sort — to hunting them out from constituent advice and getting rid of them — would be a Congress I could even get excited about. “Let’s clear the way for you to build the life you want,” would be a good slogan. You could easily do ten thousand 30-second ads that would resonate:
_Sue: “Hey, you’re a good cook, Jill. Why not open a bakery?”_
_Jill: “That’s a great idea!”_
_Flash through ten scenes of clerks denying her things, enforcing regulations, trying to explain the regulations, etc._
_Sue: “You look down. What happened?”_
_Jill: “So much for my bakery. It’s gotten to where you can’t do anything in this country.”_
_That’s not freedom. Vote for Joe Republican, and start living your dreams!_
I’ll handle your “six questions” separately.
1. Security conservatives are, at this point, mostly concerned about security at home. Above all, they want the border secured — and really secured. They want the TSA to be professional and courteous, quick and yet thorough. Right now we’re in an isolationist moment, as security conservatives feel like Iraq means the end of any chance of fighting terrorism overseas — so they want to make sure the locks on the doors work.
That may change if things improve in Iraq before the election. Speaking as a military analyst, I expect them to do so — though there is no certainty about it, to be sure. Still, even if things are going far better in Iraq next year, there will be no more Iraq-style adventures in the near future. The next president will, absent a massive provocation, be limited to Clinton-style air war at most.
2. The number one issue for shrink-the-government types is tax reform. There’s a “Fair Tax” book that is making the rounds — I see it everywhere. I don’t mean, “in bookstores everywhere.” I mean, you go to people’s houses, it’s on the coffee table. I haven’t read it myself, so I don’t know if the plan holds water or not — but I know a whole lot of people are thinking about it.
If the plan’s any good, it would make sense to endorse it. If it isn’t, it would make sense to get the guys who are behind it off to one side, negotiate a compromise they could support, and become the candidate of tax reform.
3. Pro-lifers are separate from others, in that they are defined by their issue. They will vote Republican for SCOTUS reasons; aside from the occasional meet-and-greet to talk about their issue, they need no further attention.
Movement Christians are hard for me. I hardly ever set foot in a church, to be honest; I have a great respect for religion, and indeed for Christianity, but I have little use for sermons and prefer to sort it out on my own. Nothing at all against people who find a great deal of joy in having a community of believers to belong to; it’s just not for me, at least not so far. As a result, I don’t know what conversations they’re having, so I can’t give much of a sense of what their top issues are.
Social conservatives are #1 on immigration right now. Much like security conservatives, they want to make sure the locks work on the doors; but they have the added concern of the culture being overrun, as mass immigration leads to millions of new citizens (children born here, in any event) who may not be fully assimilated and yet able to wield tremendous ballot-box power. There are several solutions to this; the one I favor is to remove forever the path to citizenship from anyone who came here illegally, and to repeal birthright citizenship so that only lawfully naturalized immigrants or the children of American citizens would become American citizens (this is, of course, how almost all nations do it already).
But you still have to secure the border. Fortunately, per #1, you were going to do that anyway.
4. I think we need to hold a Constitutional convention along the lines discussed “in the comments to this post”:http://www.grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html#2711036591941023879 and the “Time for a Change” post already mentioned. There are several nuts and bolts issues about the function of the government we need to think about.
If I had to pick just one, it would be the SCOTUS/14th issue I mentioned above. America would be a quieter, happier place if the people on the other side of the Red/Blue divide weren’t always having to fear that one SCOTUS ruling would put the heathens on the other side in charge of some cherished aspect of their life.
I don’t want to control people; I am happy for California, for example, to have universal health care if the governor wants it and can arrange it within their means. I just don’t want it here. That’s what America was meant to be, a place for all of us. I want that back. I’m tired of fighting Americans, whom I really want to be happy and to have the lives they want to live — just not at my expense, if you please.
5. You could get a lot of Democrats with the immigration issue — I mean union men, chiefly, but also poor Democrats from the western states who are competing for jobs. It’s a wedge issue, and if the Republicans could “solve” it, they’d win big.
On the other hand, as I mentioned above, my own preferred solution includes permitting mass immigration to continue — I think the greater immediate threat is a collapse of the Mexican state, which would cause far larger problems. The influx of hard cash from illegals in America is one of the legs holding up a wobbly Mexican table.
We do have to address the demographic / cultural concerns, but I think we benefit from keeping Mexico propped up in this way. At least, given that the option is a failed state on our southern border, it’s the lesser of two evils.
6. The health care issue is a problem. People have been talking about it so long — and aging Baby Boomers, who either neglected to provide for their retirements properly or are just greedy enough to take ‘free’ health care from younger people trying to raise families, are so large a voting bloc — that something has to be done. There’s just this huge number of people who are hot to suck up the health care industry into the state’s clutches, and others who are scared and don’t know what to think, and others who have just heard it talked about so long they’ve become convinced.
What we need to do is the hardest of things — we need to educate the public about those budgetary deceptions I mentioned earlier. We need to let them know that the government already can’t pay, and has not intention to pay, for their Social Security and Medicare at anything like its promised levels. We need retiring Federal pensioneers (and current workers) to understand that they have been sold a fraud. They have been promised assets that will vaporize when they need them most.
Once the scale of the fraud is clear, I don’t think the taste for socialized medicine will be so strong. We need to push for those accounting changes I mentioned above, so the scale of the real Federal debt is clear. We need to talk about how hard the benefits cuts and tax increases are going to be already.
We need to make clear that all those rosy promises that came with money sucked out of your every paycheck — they were all lies.
We need people to understand that the government cannot be trusted with the security of their families. That is a duty you cannot lay down, because there is no one out there who can be trusted to take it up. You cannot trust the government to take it for you; you must not trust them to seize it.
Sorry to end on a negative note — that’s just how the questions fell out. But there we are.
“And if we can get 20 years when the israelis kill them a lot less, that effect will be diluted.”
Unfortunately the majority of Palestinians killed are actively trying to kill Israelis.
Sure, and look how it goes. A dozen 10-year-olds throw rocks at an israeli checkpoint, and the israelis ignore them, and ignore them, and ignore them, and then they shoot 3 or 4 of them. 1 or 2 of them die. So 10 years later that’s 10 palestinians who were there when their 10-year-old friend died, and maybe 100 who knew him (since 10-year-olds don’t know as many people as older people do) and 10,000 who knew the family. Of course their parents teach kids that israelis are dangerous, but you have to watch kids every minute….
I’m not saying anybody’s at fault. It’s a positive feedback cycle. They kill each other because they’ve been killing each other, and the people who want to argue about who’s justified can argue it back to 1948 and then back to disagreements in the 1920’s and 1890’s and tit-for-tat among people who’re all dead now. We can’t expect israelis to stop killing palestinians until after palestinians stop wanting to kill israelis, and we can’t expect palestininans to stop wanting to kill israelis until after israelis stop killing them.
So in order to do that a lot more Israelis get killed and you are right back where you started.
I’m not saying how to end it. I’m saying something that needs to happen for it to end. I don’t know how to make it happen.
The theory I was raised with says it could end when one or both sides converts to christianity and turns the other cheek. 😉
Re: #38 from Grim: great post.
Grim: “I’m not sure precisely what you mean by crediting Lincoln with ‘the second foundation’ of America.”
I’ll answer you, and ask for the site marshals’ indulgence in going off topic to do so.
I think the union broke over slavery, and Abraham Lincoln re-founded it as an indissoluble union without slavery. That is what I mean by a second foundation.
Abraham Lincoln held to the principle of the non-extension of slavery without resort to war as long as he could, and when the Union was sundered anyway he did as much as he could have to win the war.
When the war was headed for victory, there was an obvious legal question: were the Confederates traitors, with obvious implications for how the defeated should be treated, or were they as they said fighting for a different country, which since that other country had been conquered and annexed also had implications. Abraham Lincoln had the right idea: get the states back into their right relations with the Union, and never mind the law till everybody could look back and speculate in academic innocence what the legal relations of the states of the Confederacy and its defenders to the union had once been.
If you go from a state of affairs where law is practically impossible to apply, or would be counterproductive if you did try to apply it, to a proper state with legal foundations, and as far as possible with a sense of nationhood shared by all, then I think you are a national founder.
I give the same status to Montuhotep II, founder of the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, and to Caesar Augustus of Rome.
Grim: “It’s true that Lincoln’s example and rhetoric were and are stirring; and it’s true that the Civil War would have been lost without his guidance. However, Lincoln himself did not do much to change the operation of the Constitutional system. The Reconstruction Amendments, 13th-15th, are to be credited to later actors.”
I credit them to Lincoln, since as I remember he strongly supported at least the 13th, and they would all have been impossible without success in war. I also credit him with an unwritten amendment prohibiting secession.
1. What do you think Republican security conservatives most need?
I think about $500 billion a year ought to do it, spent competently.
2. What do you think shrink-the-government free enterprise conservatives most need?
A functional libertarian party. Not so much right-libertarian or left-libertarian but center-libertarian, that pulls from both of the decrepit parties.
3. What do you think Christians, pro-lifers and social conservatives most need?
What they *need* is the chance to live by their moral codes without getting imposed on by people whose codes are different. What they’ll *take* given the slightest opportunity is any chance to impose their moral codes on others whose codes are different.
4. What do you think is the issue the system most needs? What is the top issue that’s like preventive maintenance on sewers: it’s really, really got to be done, regardless of whether there’s a charged-up constituency for it?
Cheap energy. Without that we’re poor and most of our other choices are limited. With that a many of our problems are palliated. It’s the top issue but if I had a guaranteed solution I’d find a company doing it and invest in it.
5. What do you think independents and persuadable Democrats most need from the Republican Party? What do you think would count as the Republicans solving something for once?
For the GOP to molt like an insect into a center-libertarian party.
[Post deleted at the request of its author. –NM]
The righteous indignation over the idea of educating the Palestinians is very funny. But then, the whole Noble Savage thing always was just a joke that got out of hand. What’s not so funny is that Palestinian terror has gained worldwide respect precisely because of its brutality and intractability, which tells you something about some of the people who claim to love peace and justice.
But AL’s educational prescription, I have to say, sounds a little desperate. The problem is not with the teachers, it’s with the parents: Hamas and Hisb’allah. So long as they are running the household, we owe the Palestinians less than nothing.
So here’s the Middle East platform I’ll vote for: We will stand by our friends, period, and we will make our enemies wish they were on a different planet. We will welcome the friendship of all parties who respect the rule of law and the rights of man, and we will not backstab a friend just because an enemy asks us to. In the case of the Palestinians, it is long past time for them to ante up, before a single demand of theirs deserves consideration.
This is not an even-handed approach. Even-handed approaches are not diplomacy, they are stupidity. In that part of the world, stupidity costs lives.
Here’s Hugh Hewitt’s opinion on priorities (link): The GOP base demands (1) victory in the war, (2) border security, and (3) aggressive support of the president’s judicial nominees. Loyalty on taxes matters of course, as does real commitment on spending reform, but the minority party cannot do much on these last two fronts, whereas they have a huge amount of say on the war and the other policy issues for which Democrats are planning u-turns from the policies of 2001-2006.
Point one became a problem in my view when the aim of the war changed from getting rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein and removing or verifying the removal of his weapons programs (something we could do) to building the Iraqi nation into a thriving Muslim liberal democracy (which is something only Iraqis could have done, had they been strongly enough inclined to do so in sufficient numbers).
#42 from J Thomas:
bq. 4. What do you think is the issue the system most needs? What is the top issue that’s like preventive maintenance on sewers: it’s really, really got to be done, regardless of whether there’s a charged-up constituency for it?
“Cheap energy. Without that we’re poor and most of our other choices are limited. With that a many of our problems are palliated. It’s the top issue but if I had a guaranteed solution I’d find a company doing it and invest in it.”
Again, this is bold and bang on the money if it is technically doable. Save the environment and starve the oil-fueled global jihad machine – what’s not to love about that, if it’s doable? The problem is: is it doable?
Steven Den Beste used to post regularly and to my eye convincingly that this isn’t technically doable, and we’re going to be stuck with oil for a good while longer.
This is why I suggest an imaginary Republican reply speech should not set cheap oil substitutes or victory in Iraq as national goals.
#44 from Glen Wishard at 11:52 am on Jul 06, 2007
“So here’s the Middle East platform I’ll vote for: We will stand by our friends, period, and we will make our enemies wish they were on a different planet. We will welcome the friendship of all parties who respect the rule of law and the rights of man, and we will not backstab a friend just because an enemy asks us to. In the case of the Palestinians, it is long past time for them to ante up, before a single demand of theirs deserves consideration.”
************************************************************************
How about simply standing up for those people in the area that serve our interests? The Israelis have done very well for themselves in this regard over the past 60 years. No foreign policy can work on a basis of
“We will welcome the friendship of all parties who respect the rule of law and the rights of man, and we will not backstab a friend just because an enemy asks us to.”
************************************************************************
The world does not operate on the rule of law, especially the rule of western law. There is a reason that foreign policy should be cynical. There are no friends or enemies, there are only convergent and divergent self interests.
Steven Den Beste used to post regularly and to my eye convincingly that this isn’t technically doable, and we’re going to be stuck with oil for a good while longer.
This is why I suggest an imaginary Republican reply speech should not set cheap oil substitutes or victory in Iraq as national goals.
Here’s my problem with depending on oil for a good while longer. It’s that we can’t afford it.
On average, oil prices are not going down. Ever. We can attribute that to peak oil, or global cartels, or whatever. But prices are going up and they’ll go down some and then up more, never down as much as last time and each time up more.
Even if we were winning the export war, that would pinch us. As it is, china could hurt us badly if they choose. If they’re willing to write off their investment in the US economy, we could wind up with domestic oil producers wanting to export oil for hard currency.
We can’t support a large middle class on expensive oil. If we want a prosperous nation we have to get cheap energy. It isn’t a question of “can we do it” it’s a question of “can we survive as a first world nation”.
If we follow that goal and it doesn’t break even in 4 years, that’s OK. We can get by with breakeven in 12 years and market saturation in 20 years. 12 years is 6 House election cycles. Announce some sort of progress every 2 years. If we fall behind and don’t have much progress that’s reason to redouble our efforts.
Because if we don’t succeed we’re going to wind up with a society with with mostly peasants and a few plutocrats.
This is a campaign that republicans could grab onto — and if republicans don’t do it, it’s *tailor-made* for democrats.
_There is a reason that foreign policy should be cynical. There are no friends or enemies, there are only convergent and divergent self interests._
Convergent and divergent self interests are precisely what create friends and enemies in the first place. It’s the difference between short term and long term thinking.
On a personal level we stick with our friends even when they are short term drains because they will be long term benefits.
The same thing applies on an international level as well, it often makes sense to aid an ally even against self-interest in the short term in expectation of long term benefits.
In the same vein, the best predictor of future intent is past activity. A nation that has treated friends well in the past, particularly against self interest, is one that can be trusted to honor its agreements into the future. And vice versa, a nation that has ignored or ditched allies in the past will likely do so again.
This very web of entwined long range debts and favors owed and history of trust (and the flip side of insults and betrayals) is precisely what we call friends (those with long range convergent interests and a past history web of favors/debts and trust) and enemies (divergent or neutral interests and a past history of conflict and betrayal).
Foreign policy isn’t stateless (pun intended), history is important. Your statement contradicts itself.
Indeed, due to the high level of uncertainty inherent in the future, I’d say you get far better results allying with your friends and carrying that forward than you do attempting to crystal ball out the nebulous future ‘long term benefits’ to yourself and trying to ally on that basis.
How about simply standing up for those people in the area that serve our interests? The Israelis have done very well for themselves in this regard over the past 60 years.
The USA can’t just go by our own short-term interests. Our people wouldn’t stand for it.
So for example, we would be far far better off if the israelis were all US citizens living here. Materially, they would be better off too — nobody goes to israel because they can’t make as much money in the USA.
If we wanted military bases in the area, jordan would work far better, particularly if the land that’s currently israel was part of jordan. Jordan is a US client state as it is, but we have to be careful about US troops there because of the israel problem, just as we have to be careful about US troops in israel.
There’s nothing that special about israeli military technology. Their best people trained in the USA. We’d be at least as well off if they were here instead of there.
There’s *nothing* that benefits the USA about israelis in israel as opposed to israelis in the USA.
But for all its disadvantages for us and for them, israel is there and the USA is going to give nearly-unqualified support for whatever they choose to do. If you were a US politician it would not serve your interests to propose that the USA stand up only for the people who serve our interests.
It’s a non-starter for a campaign plank this year. The media would tell everybody you’re an android. “… he has an icebox for a heart, and a computer for a brain…”
I wish it were possible to see Jordan as a possible base, but it has a more deeply rooted Salafi/Wahhabi influence than Iraq itself. The case of Raed el Banna; the Jordanian attorney who blew himself in Hilla, and Zarquawi are instructive; as was Maqdisi, his mentor from Salt. Ironic, that the Hashemites, are losing the battle to the Wahhabs; as they did 80+ years when they yielded control of the Shrines, and Arabia itself to the Sauds.It is those sorts of influences that make it clear a Fatah state can prevail in the midst of Muslim brotherhood instruments like Hamas & the PIJ. On
the question of the toxic character of Palestinian education; there must
be some alternative to toxic Nasserist Baathist natiuonalism and Hambali
WAhhabi fundamentalism; that could be introduced. Don’t count on the Quartet to do it though; they don’t have the conviction of even the means
to carry it out.
#48 from Treefrog at 7:47 pm on Jul 06, 2007
“On a personal level we stick with our friends even when they are short term drains because they will be long term benefits.”
Nations are not people and they do not necessarily have to behave like individuals to insure their survival. In fact, behaving that way can be lethal to a state.
“Convergent and divergent self interests are precisely what create friends and enemies in the first place. It’s the difference between short term and long term thinking.”
Precisely, but the processes and results are different for states and individuals. For instance, Japan and Gemany are our “friends” because they were forced to be by their defeat in WWII. The served our purposes in that each became a base for projecting massive force into Europe and the Far East.
There is nothing wrong with that.
“In the same vein, the best predictor of future intent is past activity. A nation that has treated friends well in the past, particularly against self interest, is one that can be trusted to honor its agreements into the future. And vice versa, a nation that has ignored or ditched allies in the past will likely do so again.”
I don’t think that a successful foreign policy ever works against self interest. I also think that the idea that counties, including the U.S. honor agreements for any longer than they serve their purposes. to do anything else would be suicidal.
There is nothing wrong with that either.
Your “friends” in foreign affairs are not the same as personal friends and it is not only counterproductive but wrongheaded to make that connection. For instance, should we have supported France, Britain and Israel in their takeover of the Suez Canal in 1956? We had larger self interest at stake vis a vis our relations with the Saudis and the invasion also let the Soviets off the hook for their invasion of Hungary that had helped us politically throughout the world. The allies move made the West look equal to the Soviets in their distain for international law and their brutality in flaunting it.
Israel had served well as a client state. There is nothing wrong with that.
“The USA can’t just go by our own short-term interests. Our people wouldn’t stand for it.”
I don’t know where you come up with this. We work in our short term interests all the time. The whole political system is based on short term fixes for problems. As far as our people not standing for it, look at the political process, almost no one even offers any answers other than short term answers to political problems, if they offer solutions at all.
“So for example, we would be far far better off if the israelis were all US citizens living here. Materially, they would be better off too — nobody goes to Israel because they can’t make as much money in the USA.”
I don’t follow you here. If you are commenting on a convergence self interest being satisfied by the Israelis moving to the U.S. this is a false and absurd analogy. Neither the U.S. or The Israelis perceive this to be in either’s self interest.
For instance, should we have supported France, Britain and Israel in their takeover of the Suez Canal in 1956? We had larger self interest at stake vis a vis our relations with the Saudis and the invasion also let the Soviets off the hook for their invasion of Hungary that had helped us politically throughout the world. The allies move made the West look equal to the Soviets in their distain for international law and their brutality in flaunting it.
Let’s consider why it would matter about “letting the USSR off the hook” or “look equal to the Soviets in their distain for international law”.
Would other nations change the way they responded to us, based on these moral issues? Wouldn’t they act according to their self-interest in each case? How does it change their self-interest if we let the israelis keep the sinai against the dictates of international law? The ones whose self-interest is to insult israel would insult israel, but not really do anything about it. The same as if israel didn’t keep the sinai. As happened around 10 years later when israel did keep the sinai.
I’m not arguing that you’re wrong to say it was important for us to support international law and look good to the world. I’m arguing that at least superficially this claim doesn’t fit with your claim that we do everything from sheer self-interest. (Apart from your argument about appeasing the saudis, where we took the opposite stand 10+ years later.) I can imagine ways to reconcile these, but how do you reconcile them?
“The USA can’t just go by our own short-term interests. Our people wouldn’t stand for it.”
I don’t know where you come up with this. We work in our short term interests all the time.
But not about israel. Israeli interests are directly opposed to US interests in the short term and the long term, and we promote israeli interests consistently. (Or at least what some of us think are israeli interests.)
“So for example, we would be far far better off if the israelis were all US citizens living here. Materially, they would be better off too — nobody goes to Israel because they can’t make as much money in the USA.”
I don’t follow you here. If you are commenting on a convergence self interest being satisfied by the Israelis moving to the U.S. this is a false and absurd analogy. Neither the U.S. or The Israelis perceive this to be in either’s self interest.
Consider it. Would israelis be economicly better off in the USA? Definitely. Would they be militarily better off in the USA? No question. Would they have better and closer trade partners? Absolutely. Would their palestinian problem be much less? Certainly.
The only way they’d be worse off is that a lot of them want to be there more than they want to be here.
If israel needed us to accept millions of refugees would we do it? Without hesitation. But we won’t make the offer because they don’t want us to. When we got the russians to allow many jews to leave the USSR, we accepted only a tiny trickle of them because israel wanted them. Many russian jews who wanted to go to the USA went to israel instead, because it was what they could get. Because israel wanted more jews.
But think about it — would we benefit from millions of well-educated technically-competent veterans? Move all israel’s industries here? They already import most of their raw materials — israel is not particularly well-endowed that way. Israeli industries would be more profitable here than they are in israel, and we’d benefit by having them here.
The only way that israelis are better off in israel instead of in the USA is they get the personal satisfaction of living in israel. The only way the USA is better off with israelis living in israel instead of here is that israelis and zionists get the personal satisfaction of having israelis living in israel. US self-interest is not involved. But we give nearly-total support for it.
This shows by example that the USA does not always act in our national self-interest.
QED.
#53 from J Thomas at 6:37 pm on Jul 07, 2007
“I’m arguing that at least superficially this claim doesn’t fit with your claim that we do everything from sheer self-interest. (Apart from your argument about appeasing the saudis, where we took the opposite stand 10+ years later.) I can imagine ways to reconcile these, but how do you reconcile them?”
Circumstances and interests change over time. This is precisely why a foreign policy should be flexible and based, primarily, on short term interests. As far as appeasing the Saudis, I would rather call it giving them a fig leaf.
The Saudis and the rest of the states in the Middle East, it appears to me, have always acted on short term interests considering the state of ever shifting alliances in the region, both externally and internally.
We are getting a good example of that in our dealings in Iraq. The balance of power there is extremely delicate and all parties involved have had an unbroken history of exploiting power vacuums that goes back, literally, to the dawn of civilization and beyond.
#54 from J Thomas at 7:04 pm on Jul 07, 2007
Aside from the fact that a form of Zionism has been part of American Culture and Foreign policy for hundreds of years (An interesting book on the subject is Micheal B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy…America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present.), and going back to one of my original points, our interests are served by Israel, because the existence of Israel is based on the fact that Israel provides us with a base of operations in case of a major conflict in the Middle East. No other country in the area can guarantee us that.
The idea that Israel is leading America around by the nose here is ludicrous. Israel exists at the sufferance of the United States and the Israelis know that. It is also no coincidence that Israel gets the most modern of our weaponry before anyone else, because along with the weaponry goes the infrastructure to support it.
Do you think this is a coincidence? Do you think we supply these most modern weapons to the Israelis to defend themselves against Syria? or Hamas? or Hizbollah? Palestine is a prime piece of geopolitical Real Estate. Do you think our foreign policy establishment is blind of that?
Here is a google search page talking about F-22 sales to foreign countries. Israel is at the head of the list.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+Israeli+f%2F22&btnG=Search
This is well above any need that the Israelis have for security but it is a no brainer move for the U.S. in terms of force projection.
Here is a google search page talking about F-22 sales to foreign countries. Israel is at the head of the list.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+Israeli+f%2F22&btnG=Search
This is well above any need that the Israelis have for security but it is a no brainer move for the U.S. in terms of force projection.
our interests are served by Israel, because the existence of Israel is based on the fact that Israel provides us with a base of operations in case of a major conflict in the Middle East. No other country in the area can guarantee us that.
What happened the last time we were involved in a major conflict in the middle east? We invaded iraq. What part did israel have in it? None whatsoever. We would have lost more in support from kuwait and saudi arabia than we could possibly gain from using bases in tiny israel.
What happened the time before that? We invaded occupied kuwait. What part did israel have in it? Saddam bombed israel and we persuaded the israelis not to respond. We didn’t use their bases at all. We would have lost more in support from syria, jordan, and saudi arabia than we could possibly gain from using bases in tiny israel.
We sent in a few troops into israel for “peacekeeping”. They guarded the airport the diplomats used and the buildings the diplomats met in, and not much more. The circumstances were that the israelis had put a ring of tanks around those buildings, with the cannon facing in, and various diplomats (including ours) felt threatened. So we sent our own soldiers in, and they encountered the israeli forces and had a few “pushing matches” where no one was killed, and we didn’t let the israelis intimidate us that much. Then the diplomats left and we didn’t pull our soldiers out right away, and eventually they got suicide-bombed. In retaliation we shelled the lebanese coast for awhile. What part did israel have in this operation? Nothing in our favor.
I suppose we could imagine that someday israel might provide us with the bases we need, when nobody else would. In the meantime we have had bases in iran, saudi arabia, kuwait, iraq, afghanistan, kyrgistan, etc. We’ve lost them at intervals and found others. Our potential bases in israel have never yet been any use to us, while our bases in other countries have been vital to our wars in the region.
Your claim does not hold up. It sounds good on first hearing but it is garbage.
I think your claim that zionism has had a place in US politics for a very long time is far more central.
I think your third paragraph refers to Lebanon instead of Israel?
Oops! Robin, yes, we sent a few troops into lebanon.
Jadegold – you’ll be shocked that I actually agree w.you on reparations.
I’m never shocked when this happens; I’m always correct, you see.
Re nukes: we’ll disagree a lot. It takes a big, visible infrastructure to make the stuff you need to make bombs. You can’t hide it (correction: you can’t hide that it exists; you can play a shell game and hide the physical location).
Again, this is misinterpreting the nature of the threat. To tell the truth, we’re not really too concerned about some group like AQ obtaining an all-up nuclear weapon. It would be immensely difficult for them to do so and there would be the problem of a delivery vehicle. Instead, what scares the beejeezus out of our counterterrorism folks is the ability of bad guys to lay their hands on radioactive material, waste and byproducts. Getting such material is relatively easy because some countries (read: the former USSR and others) do a poor job of accounting and controlling for such material. An RDD–or dirty bomb–is really what scares us from the standpoint a terrorist group would need little in terms of technological expertise, delivery mode, and resources to pull off such an attack.
Having nukes is a strong regional card for NoKorea and Iran, but geopolitically, it doesn’t mean much.
I have no idea what you’re trying to suggest here. Look, Iran and North Korea or whatever nuclear power understand full well they’re not going to win in a nuclear exchange. Their goal is to ensure the US understands ‘regime change’ or whatever nonsense the neocons are calling it won’t come without a price.
Ah, dirty bombs. These are way overrated. The big thing that causes counterterrorism guys to panic about them is the idea that the public will panic.
Here’s an urban legend my sister told me years ago when she was working for the feds in NYC. She of course told it as if it was real, as if the federal agent who told it to her knew what he was talking about: Somebody sent a message to the government claiming that they had a significant amount of plutonium. And if the government didn’t give them one billion dollars, they were going to dump it in the reservoir. They included proof that they had some plutonium. The people in charge of that sort of thing of course panicked. They couldn’t get a billion dollars all that easily even if they wanted to, and it was real unclear how to make the transfer work and so on. So they stalled. The bad guys communicated to them that unless they quit stalling right away it really was going in the reservoir. The feds couldn’t figure out what to do, and the deadline passed. They didn’t hear from the secret group again. And plutonium levels in NYC water went up by 40%.
Really and truly, imagine that somebody buys nuclear waste in russia and transports it here. It takes a lot to do much. It also takes a whole lot of conventional explosives. And the waste has a nuclear signature that will light things up unless it’s well-shielded, which requires a whole lot more shielding.
It just isn’t that big a deal, except for the panic. Distribute a whole lot of radioactive dust and property values go way down. Then it rains, and repeatedly rains, and you sandblast some buildings, and the place gets livable. The drains aren’t very healthy but that’s just one more thing for the sanitation workers to deal with. It’s bad for fishing. It’s bad for the bay and the ocean. But it just isn’t that big a deal.
The trouble is that homeland security done right is very very expensive and it takes a lot of boring work and there’s a question whether it’s worth it. Things like gasoline bombs and FAO trucks and tankers full of LNG and LOX are just not so destructive that it pays to prevent them. To justify the effort we have to find stories of actual mass destruction. But the stories just aren’t all that plausible. So we keep trying out new versions.
If they could get hold of radioactive waste already in place, now. Even if it wasn’t that much. And a moderate amount of explosive to disperse it. And an announcement that they set off a dirty bomb in a US city and everybody’s going to *die*. We’d lose far more people in the evacuation panic than from the radioactive waste, and it would be the best possible shot-in-the-arm for our floundering homeland security effort.
Jadegold –
I’m always correct, you see. …you wouldn’t be the first prog-blogger to make that mistake <g>
To tell the truth, we’re not really too concerned about some group like AQ obtaining an all-up nuclear weapon. It would be immensely difficult for them to do so and there would be the problem of a delivery vehicle.
You’re joking, right? It would be challenging for them to get one from Pakistan or India; relatively trivial to get one from NoKo or iran once the assembly line is up and running.
Delivery is via container ship, or any number of relatively riskless means of entry.
That difference in perception explains a lot of our policy difference, doesn’t it?
A.L.
#59 from J Thomas at 11:36 pm on Jul 07, 2007
If you think the absolutely crushing less than 30 day victories over a fifth rate armies like our two gulf wars are major conflicts, then we are not talking about the same thing.
“I suppose we could imagine that someday israel might provide us with the bases we need, when nobody else would.”
Not only could we we do imagine that, hence our special strategic relationship with Israel.
“In the meantime we have had bases in iran, saudi arabia, kuwait, iraq, afghanistan, kyrgistan, etc. We’ve lost them at intervals and found others.”
What others, the ones we subsequently lost? Your mentioning these “bases” only lends more credence to my statements. None of these places can be depended upon to provide us with bases. Israel can.
“Our potential bases in israel have never yet been any use to us, while our bases in other countries have been vital to our wars in the region.”
We have not needed to use Israeli bases. We will use them when it becomes necessary.
“Your claim does not hold up. It sounds good on first hearing but it is garbage.”
Was this really necessary. Are you interested in a discussion or defending your opinions? I gave you some good food for thought, you answer me by calling it garbage. Great way to expand your horizons.
bq. To tell the truth, we’re not really too concerned about some group like AQ obtaining an all-up nuclear weapon. It would be immensely difficult for them to do so and there would be the problem of a delivery vehicle.
You’re joking, right? It would be challenging for them to get one from Pakistan or India; relatively trivial to get one from NoKo or iran once the assembly line is up and running
What’s the rationale for this? The special relationship between al qaeda and iran and NK? Wouldn’t that apply more to pakistan?
Iran and NK are both so desperate for money that they’ll sell bombs that might get traced to them?
Iran and NK are both so disorganised that corrupt individuals might steal the bombs and sell them to AQ? I can sort of imagine that about NK. “I can get you a bomb. I want a million dollars and you must take me with you.”
It doesn’t look trivial to me. At the very least, when you sell a nuke you want to be completely sure the buyer won’t sell it to somebody who’d use it on you. We’ve been funding minority insurgent groups in iran. If we acquired an iranian nuke would we give it to one of them?
It just doesn’t make sense to me. But then, sometimes governments don’t make sense. I have an image of some 10-year-olds looking for guns. Most of the guns in the neighborhood are in gun safes, but it’s relatively trivial in two houses because there the parents just leave loaded guns lying around where 10-year-olds can filch them. It doesn’t make sense but it happens. Why do you suppose that iran and NK will be like that?
If you think the absolutely crushing less than 30 day victories over a fifth rate armies like our two gulf wars are major conflicts, then we are not talking about the same thing.
OK what are you talking about? All the arab nations put together plus russia and china? Our little scrapes with iraq are about as big as we’re likely to have in the area. The oil is running out, and that whole area isn’t worth much apart from that.
I’m trying to imagine something where nobody in the whole area will give us bases except israel. So we base a couple million soldiers in israel, plus airbases and ports, and ….
It seems very very implausible to me. We aren’t going to set up or use those bases until the last minute, because doing so would tend to *create* the situation where we have no friends but israel. Hmm. A woman who was doing simulations for a big contractor told me this story: She asked this army colonel how long it took to get a brigade moved to, say, kuwait. He said six months. She was of course surprised it took so long, since in any actual crisis we’re unlikely to have 6 months warning to move. Then in the lunchroom she met a marine MSgt and discussed it with him. Later she went back to the colonel and told him, “Master Sergeant Gaines says the marines can move a brigade in six weeks.” The colonel thought about it. “The marines, yes the marines can do that. But every vehicle they have leaks oil!”
So OK, israel is a rather small place. Presumably you won’t be moving in vital military supplies through Eilat. Haifa and Ashdod are OK for israel’s needs, but to supply the sort of US army that meets a threat far bigger than iraq? Israel’s railroads carry, what? 15 million tons/*year*?
This whole scenario looks extremely far-fetched to me. You assume we face a giant threat. We can’t use our mothballed bases in saudi arabia or our bases in kuwait or iraq, and we can’t use turkey or points north. We have to channel the whole invasion force through tiny israel. And to prepare for that threat we spend billions of dollars a year for decades for things that make it *likelier* we have no other allies in the middle east. We go through decades of security council vetoes and hassle of various sorts to prepare for this phantasm.
It looks to me like you started out with the conclusion that israel was vital to US geopolitical interests, and you worked backward to imagine a circumstance where that could be true. And this was the best you could do.
“Your claim does not hold up. It sounds good on first hearing but it is garbage.”
Was this really necessary.
I apologise. Very often I’m on the other end of this sort of thing. I’ll propose some rational solution to a significant problem, like suggesting that we move everybody in alabama elsewhere and move israel to alabama, or that we work out a deal with mexico where we annex mexico (which vastly shortens our southern border, and eliminates the biggest part of our illegal immigrant problem, and provides us mexico as a place to invest under US rules, etc) and other people tell me it’s garbage.
I should be more tolerant of your extremely peculiar idea. Just because it makes no sense in the context of 1967 through 2007 doesn’t mean it can’t become relevant someday. We might transform our military into something that doesn’t need so many supplies and can be transported faster. We might reduce our fuel consumption to the point that we could store sufficient fuel in israel without a stray match burning the whole country. We might find that israel’s immediate neighbors — lebanon, syria, jordan, egypt — might develop tremendous strategic importance to us. Or we might want to invade saudi arabia from israel, you never know.
But truly your idea reminds me of Captain Roadstrum’s mumucky mustard.
Crewman Bramble said, “Remember those twenty four cases of mumucky mustard we have? The ones that take up all the space on the main deck? We’ve had to sleep three deep and eat standing up. Often the crew has demanded we throw them out so we’ll have space for ourselves. Each time I have counseled no, we must keep them. Someday we will find something they are good for. Today I have found it! We will coat our hornet craft with mumucky mustard and we will foil the Megagaster birds!”
Oh, I just checked, That book is available online in spanish only. Lafferty probably won’t mind too much, he’s dead and I believe he’s childless.
“Space Chantey”:http://librosgratisweb.com/pdf/lafferty-raphael/salomas-del-espacio.pdf
If a Democrat actually gave such a speech I’d actually vote Democrat for the first time in my life. As it is I’d say there’s a better chance of a blizzard in hell.
You’re joking, right? It would be challenging for them to get one from Pakistan or India; relatively trivial to get one from NoKo or iran once the assembly line is up and running
Purely fantastic speculation. As JThomas points out, an Iran or No Korea would want to ensure their sale doesn’t come back to bite them–in terms of the weapon being used against them or the fact a nuclear bomb’s pedigree can be fairly readily traced.
Delivery is via container ship, or any number of relatively riskless means of entry.
I can scarcely think of more risky ways to get a nuke into the US. Conspiracy theories fail because too many people have to be in on the conspiracy. Similarly, the plot to get an all-up nuke into the US would require a great number of people to be in on the plot. Also, put yourself in the position of the terrorists; you’ve probably expended the limits of your resources (money, personnel, political and legal favors, etc)to procure this weapon. Now you’re going to hope that it’s transshipment via several nations–requiring several layers of complicity–goes without a hitch. Add to the mix, an all-up nuke will require some fairly high-level technological expertise to transport, arm and detonate. It’s not an empirical impossibility, of course, but one that has an extremely large liklihood of failure.
OTOH, an RDD is a fairly low tech solution with a higher likelihood of success. If it fails, your losses in terms of resources aren’t a backbreaker.
And let’s be clear about the objectives of terrorists.
They aren’t, as many neocons suggest, trying to take over the US or win a war with us. Instead, the objective is to cause us to alter our policies and provoke fear. An RDD would do this cheaper and with a greater chance of success.
And let’s be clear about the objectives of terrorists.
They aren’t, as many neocons suggest, trying to take over the US or win a war with us. Instead, the objective is to cause us to alter our policies and provoke fear. An RDD would do this cheaper and with a greater chance of success.
That’s an important point.
Terrorists tend to be people who are utterly outside any political process. Their views are ignored. Completely ignored. Anything they can do to show that they can’t be ignored is a step up for them.
When they “represent” a significant number of people who are disenfranchised, they will probably stop being terrorists when their people get recognition. The IRA never did a whole lot of violence but they did less when they became recognised politicians. Hisbullah stopped being violent when they joined the lebanese government. (That didn’t sound quite right. Hesbollah isn’t violent toward *lebanese*. They still mix it up a bit with the israelis who want to destroy them.)
But when terrorists have some political philsophy that can’t possibly get much support, the most they can hope for is that people have to notice them. Even if we change our policies in ways they don’t want, at least we aren’t ignoring them completely. If we decide that they’re *important* that’s better than they could hope for. So for example the Symbionese Liberation Army was overly charmed when the US media made them look important — they were fundamentally unimportant. They were a media event that occasionally shot at people.
So any terrorist attack that we overreacted to — anything that got us to really freak out — is better for them than something that does real significant damage. They can’t hope to do enough damage to “win”. At best they can “influence” us, and they’ll settle for not being ignored.
So we win by dramatising their insignificant attacks. A gasoline attack that kills 30 some people is bad for the people involved but it doesn’t hurt the country much at all. Make a big public deal about it and give them lots of attention. If we ignored the minor attacks, if we covered them up or we pointed out how little they mattered, then terrorists would try things like biological warfare — things that hurt us enough we couldn’t ignore them.
jadegold – a bomb’s pedigree can only readily be traced, as I understand it, if the reactors and enrichment chain are open to inspection so that samples can be taken of the material to be compared through spectroscopy (or similar). No inspected assembly line, no samples of material – no pedigree.
I presume that Pakistan, India, and Israel have pedigreed weapons, hence my lack of concern about their bombs.
Shipping a bomb here in a container – or the hold of a bulk carrier – would be relatively easy and take a conspiracy of very few individuals. Some harbors are well monitored, some less so. Some ships get scanned, most do not.
Owning and detonating a nuke in the US or the UK would be the ultimate ‘cred’ for any terrorist organization. There is competition within and among these organizations – see John Robb – and this would trump anything any other organization did. The organizational imperative to do something this spectacular is, in my view, one of the strongest reasons why they would make the effort.
A.L.
bq. There is competition within and among these organizations – see John Robb – and this would trump anything any other organization did. The organizational imperative to do something this spectacular is, in my view, one of the strongest reasons why they would make the effort.
And that imperative can be traced to, at least, the “fantasy ideology” as described by Lee Harris, and the “Allah has willed it” impact of any successful nuke detonation on kufr soil–“Look what God let us do! We must have the true faith! All you apostate slackers better take heed.”
Nort
PS: [Obligatory Fairness Doctrine content] Both of the elements I mention are not properties solely of the adversary; some would say that attempts at nationbuilding are part of a fantasy ideology, and would look to someone like Pat Robertson to say something about God punishing the US if or when bad things happen here. Me, I don’t know for sure about the former and don’t care much about the latter.
a bomb’s pedigree can only readily be traced, as I understand it, if the reactors and enrichment chain are open to inspection so that samples can be taken of the material to be compared through spectroscopy (or similar). No inspected assembly line, no samples of material – no pedigree.
Well, North Korea opened its reactors to the IAEA in the early 1990s. I’d also be very surprised-very,very surprised–if we didn’t have a sample of the detonations that took place in No Korea several years ago. Additionally, given the fact we ascertained North Korea sold Libya fissionable material some time ago–we probably have very good nuclear forensics data.
Similarly, Iran’s nuclear ‘fingerprinting’ is probably underway.
I presume that Pakistan, India, and Israel have pedigreed weapons, hence my lack of concern about their bombs.
You mean Israel has a weapon? They don’t admit it. Wonder where they got the material?
Shipping a bomb here in a container – or the hold of a bulk carrier – would be relatively easy and take a conspiracy of very few individuals. Some harbors are well monitored, some less so. Some ships get scanned, most do not.
Only in the movies.
Think of the people involved. Obviously, the people involved in the terrorist group and those from the state selling the weapon. Since nuclear weapons are high value items, it isn’t likely one shows up missing from inventory without a number of people knowing. Then you have the handlers; since the weapon is likely to weigh several hundred pounds or more–you’re going to have equipment operators who may well get a look at the weapon. There will be customs officials, shipping agents, and ship’s officers who will have to be paid off. The more borders crossed or port stops, the more folks you’ll need to grease. Let’s not forget–if one is mercenary enough to take a bribe to look the other way–one may be mercenary enough to find out why and sell that info to a higher bidder. Too many people and too many people outside the terrorist group.
Owning and detonating a nuke in the US or the UK would be the ultimate ‘cred’ for any terrorist organization.
Yeah and hitting the lottery would secure the financial future of my kids and their kids.
Instead of forking over my paycheck for lottery tickets, though, wouldn’t it make more sense to pursue somewhat safer vehicles for financial security?
Jadegold – well, you have more faith in the North Koreans, Iranians, and our intelligence services than I do…to the extent that we had verifiable samples of their fissionable material, my concerns (and hence need for the Godfather-like policy) get radically diminished.
You’re implying that the chain looks like:
Steal bomb
Team installs on ship
Ships officers are aware of value of cargo.
As opposed to – anonymous container gets loaded on deck of ship with hundreds of others. One inspector is bribed (or suborned) to seal and approve container. Manifest loads container in bottom center, with max shielding from flyby sensors (they exist). Container ship pulls into harbor – boom.
I’d say that you have more faith in governments and less in the abilities of terrorists than I do. Some of these things are verifiable – so it’d be fun to try and argue from facts rather than suppositions on either side.
Want to help dig for them?
bq. I presume that Pakistan, India, and Israel have pedigreed weapons, hence my lack of concern about their bombs.
You mean Israel has a weapon? They don’t admit it. Wonder where they got the material?
Since they don’t officially admit any of it, everything people say about it has a certan conspiracy-theory element. There was an israeli technician at Dimona who told what he knew, apparently for moral reasons, and the israelis sentenced him to solitary confinement for some years. That’s a degree of confirmation though they could possibly have been scamming — trying to make people think they had nukes when they didn’t. They didn’t have to lock their actor up, they could just let him follow his acting career for a few decades until they were ready to let outsiders interview him again. “Solitary confinement means you never have to answer the phone.”
As for where the material came from, the french gave/sold israel a reactor a little while before they sold iraq the Osiris reactor. Officially the Osiris reactor was supposed to be useless for making bombs but the israelis destroyed it anyway (killing a french technician or two). Maybe they knew how to use it to make nukes themselves, and thought the iraqis could figure it out too?
There were stories about nuclear material missing from US sites that were smuggled to israel, but I never heard a confirmation. Information about losses from US reactor or bomb programs was all classified.
I see no particular reason the israelis would reveal nuclear signatures to any foreigners. There might be US spies who could get it, or maybe not. I think our official position is that we trust israel never to cause any problems with nukes so we don’t need any verification.
….Then you have the handlers; since the weapon is likely to weigh several hundred pounds or more–you’re going to have equipment operators who may well get a look at the weapon. There will be customs officials, shipping agents, and ship’s officers who will have to be paid off. The more borders crossed or port stops, the more folks you’ll need to grease.
The theory about container-ships is that you put anything you want into a container and it never gets opened until it reaches its destination. So you don’t have to worry about customs officials etc in intermediate locations. I don’t know how well that actually holds up. I can vaguely imagine transporting people that way — you take cases of MREs and a portapotty, a still to recycle your water, and an air scrubber. Plus some good books. I don’t know whether that’s been done.
Of course, your radioactives in the container are sending out signals all the time. If somebody picks up the signal at all then they can figure out which container it is and be ready for the guy who picks it up. Do we have an adequate defense that way? I don’t know. If I was in charge of that and we did have a good screening system, I’d encourage stories that we didn’t. People who think they can get in that way are likely to try it since so many details look easy. If they think it won’t work then they’re likely to try something else, maybe something that would actually work. The fact that we’re discussing the topic in public is enough to prove we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Again, if I was doing it, I’d want every russian who has even theoretical access to russian nukes to know he gets a $3000 bonus if he can deliver a conspirator who wants to buy nukes. $3000 is a lot of money and it’s a whole lot safer than actually delivering a nuke, and he doesn’t have to worry about the russian secret police wondering where he got it. And at the same time, I’d have the russians send out teams to try to buy bombs. Every time a russian sergeant turns one in and gets his $3000 a lot more russians hear about that money source and that it actually works. Every time one actually delivers a nuke he gets to show the secret police just how he did it before they kill him. That would probably cut back on the number of nukes getting out from that source to less than 1% what it would be otherwise. And similar programs would work every place the native government’s willing to help.
Between catching people at that end plus catching bombs at our end, we’d have a pretty good chance. It isn’t like the russians or the north koreans are selling *hundreds* of bombs to terrorists. Say a terrorist group loses twenty teams trying to get a bomb and then they actually get one. So then they try to smuggle it to their preferred destination and they lose the bomb and the team that was transporting it (and the team they were going to meet, etc). They might start to get discouraged.
That’s the next obvious step, right? Somebody reports a bomb buyer and it isn’t one of your guys, so you sell them a fake bomb that has a radioactive signature similar to a real bomb. Then you watch them try to smuggle it, and find out how they do it. You see how well your HSA guys handle it, and finally if it gets through the terrorists set it off and nothing happens.
You can do all this stuff and it doesn’t cost tremendously more than the cheapskate terrorists spend.
You’re implying that the chain looks like:
Actually, the chains would look something like this:
1) Bomb is stolen or sold to bad guys–Again, a bomb is a high value object. If it is stolen, it will raise a great hue and cry. If it is sold by the state, there will be several outside of the terrorist organization who will understand what has happened to the bomb.
2) The bomb may be transported, over land, by truck or vehicle. The terrorist group may have to employ folks to transport, outside of ME, to deal with language differences and familiarity with locations. It depends if weapon was stolen or bought.
3)Container comes from someplace, it doesn’t materialize. Shipping agent and customs must be paid to look the other way. Container is loaded on ship where? If it comes from Iran or No Korea, you might as well paint said container with a huge red “X” marks the spot.
The fact is the container or crate would have to find its way to a neutral country where another set of shipping agents and customs officials will have to be bribed. You’ll also want to bribe the ships skipper and first officer to ensure there is no undue interest in your crate or container by the crew or dockworkers.
In reality, a container isn’t really anonymous. It’s not enough to say a container contains staplers from China, there also has to be documentation from the manufacturer in China saying they’ve shipped 200 gross of staplers on such a date via a certain shipper. This is where shipping agents–usually more than one–would create a phony provenance for the cargo.
Then there are customs officials. You’ll probably have to have one in your pocket in every country the ship visits or you risk one doing his job.
As I remarked earlier, bribes are risky because those with larceny in their hearts quite often are looking for bigger pay days.
Hmmm.
1) Bomb is built in Xistan, with the cooperation of the Xistanian gov’t and the Goomah-Goomah international front, which has close working alliances with Xistan. Xistan has no official nuclear program, so there are no samples of their fissile material extant.
2) Bomb and ‘package’ are placed in a 20′ container, which is routed to – say, Liberia, where container scanning is weak.
3) The Xistanian government intel agency assists the GGIF in providing false documentation for the shipment of ‘machine parts for refurbishing’.
4) a GGIF member who is employed as a customs agent seals the cargo, and is loaded – like a thousand other TEU that day – onto a ship headed for Seattle.
5) The customs manifest that shows up in advance of the ship docking shows as ‘machine parts for refurbishing’ from Nigeria – and the customs offical makes a note to sequester the container and check it because of drug and diamond smuggling from Nigeria.
6) Ship pulls into the SeaTac harbor…
I’d say my alternate chain of events is plausible enough that it’s worth considering.
I’ll also note that I roundfiled a post explaining what I would do the US with 50 men willing to die and $15 million in cash. It’d be pretty significant and the most sophisticated thing I’d need would be shaped charges and some pesticide.
A.L.
For that matter, they could make out a legitimate invoice for heavy machinery and load the container with the bomb in addition to the machinery. I’d bet it’d go right past customs even in the US, let alone third world countries. All those who know what a nuke looks like please raise your hand.
A big silvery globe with a nice red led readout ticking down it ain’t.
I’m more technically competent than any third world customs inspector and I couldn’t tell the difference between a nuke and some of the more obscure scientific instrumentation out there without a real close look and/or a geiger counter. Not something some overworked customs inspector has, and if they shield the core and make even trivial efforts to disguise the more salient features, it’d skate right through customs.
AL’s #77 looks plausible to me. First off, though, if Xistan wants to bomb Seattle, why should they let some GGIF terrorist group get involved? Would they be better off to develop their own network of agents who’re loyal to them? National agents mostly can’t be expected to commit suicide on command. But then, terrorists are undependable that way too. If we capture Xistan agents then we know who did it. But then, if we capture GIFF agents they might not try hard to keep Xistan out of it.
If it was me, I wouldn’t give a nuke to a bunch of terrorists hoping they’d do what I wanted with it. I’d have my own agents do it because I just wouldn’t trust a bunch of scummy terrorists that much. I might not trust my own agents that much either, and in that case I just wouldn’t do it.
So let’s say I’m running the Xistan government, and I’ve been building nukes but nobody’s noticed. And now I have nukes that I’ve never tested. Once I test one everybody will think I have them and they might even get some sort of nuclear signature from my test. Do I want to ship an untested nuke to the USA to blow up Seattle? It doesn’t really matter what the yield is because the point is to drive the americans crazy more than to do anything else. If I blow up the port facilities, or splash radioactive water over everything, or evaporate the whole town — doesn’t matter. I can’t actually damage the USA enough to matter. I can’t hope to get rid of a single US nuke by this stunt. But I can hit the hornet’s nest and really get them buzzing.
I send it to liberia and then to the USA. Before the customs guys can inspect it, it blows up. They can’t tell which container blew up — the evidence is vaporised. They have a whole lot of containers to study, mine is suspicious but there might be other suspicious ones. Maybe I can do better — switch containers. Pay off a liberian inspector to ignore what we take out of one and ignore what we put into another that has no paper trail to connect the two. Give him the impression it’s drugs or some normal smuggling — it’s cheaper and attracts less attention.
One weak point is the US might detect the emissions before it gets into the harbor. That’s a technical thing. Put detectors underwater at the harbor entrance and they can be bigger and more sensitive than ones you put into a copter. I don’t know how much we’ve done like that, and if I did I wouldn’t tell.
A second weak point is that most Xistans wouldn’t bother. What do they get out of it? It’s just like hitting a hornet nest with a stick. They’re going to come out and make life miserable for somebody, and if you aren’t careful they’ll come after you. What do you get out of it? You can’t threaten anybody — you’d have to admit who did it. You haven’t weakened the USA much. You take risks. You’re out a bomb. The USA is out a city. You get nothing much from it.
And that probably has a lot to do with why it hasn’t happened yet.
J Thomas, many terrorist groups are extensions of national intelligence apparatus, especially in the Middle East. For years various factions of the PLO were sortable into Syrian intel sponsored and Egyptian intel sponsored.
R Roberts, sure. Like the Contras were an extension of US intel, and the various pre-Taliban guys that we supported in afghanistan, etc. But there’s not one of them we’d trust with nukes.
J Thomas, your analogy does not work because the US does not have a strategic policy that would be carried out by the clandestine use of nuclear weapons.
R Roberts, imagine that the USA had a strategic policy that we could further with clandestine nuclear weapons.
Can you imagine us giving nukes to the Contras in that case? Can you imagine us giving nukes to Marcos? To our guerrilla proxies in afghanistan, back when we had guerrilla proxies? To the kurds under Saddam? To the russian mafia? (They were a big help to the CIA back in the day, but….)
It just works out that way. The people who have the ruthless decisiveness needed to be terrorist leaders are just automatically people you know better than to give nukes to.
If you have nukes, you keep them firmly under *your* control. You don’t give them to the IRA. You don’t even give them to the DAR or the Girl Scouts. If you give them to anybody whose primary loyalty isn’t to you, you’ve made a big mistake.
Terrorists like the PLO have a history of being used by for deniable indirect operations. For example, Syria had affiliated terrorists carry out operations against other arab nations to keep them firmly in the anti-Israel coalition. See the career of Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez aka Carlos the Jackal with the Syrian sponsored PFLP and the raid on OPEC HQ.
J Thomas, if I wanted a nuclear weapon used and I wanted to avoid direct retaliation as a result, there is a good chance that I would probably use a terrorist organization that I controlled or influenced at arms reach.
I almost hope that some terrorist organisation – overwhelmingly likely to be Islamic – manages to successfully smuggle a nuke into some American city and detonate it. I almost hope that, because of the consequences that I am pretty well certain would follow for the entire Islamic world.
Almost.