Success in 2005: an Iranian View

Whether or not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the eye of the hurricane we call the War on Terror, you always want to keep an eye on Iranian writer Amir Taheri. He probably represents the voice of the suffering city people of Iran, the ones who want to come into the world, the democratic capitalist world that we Anglospherists have spread across the planet. Only they live under a regime that is at war with the democratic capitalism.

Taheri is encouraged by the year just past. And why not? “27 nations advanced towards greater freedom — an all-time record.”

And in the nations that an Iranian would be particularly interested in, after his own, he notes that both Afghanistan and Iraq staged a bunch of elections and constitution ratifications in 2005.

He is even encouraged by the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran.

I also regard the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new president of the Islamic Republic as good news. The reason is simple: Ahmadinejad has the courage, some might say recklessness, to cast aside the hypocritical mask worn by his two predecessors (both businessmen-mullahs) in a strategy of deception. He has eschewed taqiyah (dissimulation) and that, believe me, is welcome news. His presidency will force the people of Iran and the rest of the world either to come to terms with the Khomeinist revolution or to challenge it in a meaningful way.

Ahem. That is certainly an interesting way of putting it. But it makes an important point. Sooner or later, the rest of the world is going to have to confront the fact of an aggressive, expansionist Iran. Will we decide to confront it? Will we decide to contain it? Or will we decide to appease it? And what about the Iranian people themselves? Can we separate the Iranian regime from the Iranian people in the way that the peoples behind the iron curtain understood our policy during the Cold War?

A New Year: Why We Fight

Why not start out the new year with a good dose of Why We Fight from Roger Kimball at The New Criterion. In his article, he returns to the theme of James Burnham and his 1964 book The Suicide of the West.

Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.

Our modern Cassandra is the brilliant Mark Steyn. He has pointed out that Europe is on a path to suicide with its population crash.

It’s the demography, stupid... A society that has no children has no future.

The eerie thing is that the liberal ethos actually celebrates childlessness. It urges women to center their lives around career, a word derived from the French carrière, meaning race-track. It makes a sacrament out of abortion, and it frowns upon large families with three or more children.

The point is to build a society that “loves life.” That is not the same as loving pleasure. The measure of how much you love life is of what you are willing to die for, as in: I would die to save the lives of my children. As Burnham wrote,

Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history — And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational.

But who

is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments?

Liberals are rather horrified, one feels, by the dedication and spirit of our servicemen and servicewomen in the U.S. Armed Forces, who are willing to die for their country. Liberals have labored for a generation to delegitimize military service, and yet here comes a new generation obviously trained in the ethos of the modern army as devised by German General Hans von Seeckt. They are “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.”

It is an irony of history that the German General Staff built for the lead-from-the-top Nazis an army in which responsibility was delegated down as far as possible.

Meanwhile our American liberals, who bellow their devotion to freedom and civil liberties, are determined to control everything, down to the details of what Americans eat.

Why do we fight? Let me count the ways.

The Kids: Professors Worry About Right-Wing Students

What do the professors think about the lurch to the right in the past decades, and what do they think about their increasingly right-wing students who have responded to a

"concerted effort" by "Goebbelsian" masters of rhetoric that have turned the country to the right over the past generation or so.

Actually, some of the professors recognize that they have to change their ways, according to Reason’s Nick Gillespie reporting from the Modern Language Association convention.

Faced with a choice between a sort of bitter righteousness and increasing irrelevance on the one hand and engaging students with more fair-minded argumentation and open-ended discussion, some academics are choosing the latter.

No! It can’t be true! But here is Mark Bauerlein from Emory University:

"We need more and wider perspectives," represented in the classroom, he said. "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whit[t]aker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison."

What a concept. Actually, it is Step Two. What we conservatives would really like in college is to have a conservative thinker or two merely mentioned. The real scandal of the modern university is not that conservative ideas don’t get a fair hearing. It is not that conservatives ideas don’t even get discussed. It is that conservative thinkers don’t even get a mention.

It’s like those photos in Soviet encyclopedias in which the Bolshevik heroes kept getting airbrushed out as, one by one, they got purged.

The real victims of the liberal university are the girls. Since boys have long been marginalized and reviled by the liberal university they have turned away from liberal education. But girls, who thrive in the bums-on-seats and girls-are-victims model of education, have believed and followed the liberal line.

But when that liberal, career-oriented, pro-choice, educated woman ends up childless, as she often does, what’s the point?

Everyone Worries About Deficits

The federal deficit is terrible. The trade deficit is worse. How long can it go on? That is what we have been worrying about at least since 1970. And The Washington Times rehearses the experts’ worries about them.

We know where the federal deficit comes from. Politicians spending taxpayers’ money in response to the demands of taxpayers. And, of course, beyond the formal budget deficit and its accumulated national debt there is the unfunded debt, the promises made, principally for Medicare and Social Security, that are not reflected in the federal government’s headline budget numbers.

But what about the trade deficit? It has gone up when the dollar was high in the late 1990s and it has gone up when the dollar was low in the early Noughties. What is going on?

Maybe Arnold Kling has the answer. Productivity.
Here are the productivity numbers for the last half century.

Period Average Productivity Growth 1955-1960 2.03 1960-1965 2.79 1965-1970 2.09 1970-1975 2.31 1975-1980 1.55 1980-1985 1.38 1985-1990 1.65 1990-1995 1.59 1995-2000 2.28 2000-2005 3.39

The table shows a pretty staggering increase in productivity over the past ten years. What caused it? Who knows, for sure, and Kling insists that we refrain from giving credit or blame for any particular president or economic policy.

William W. Lewis in his book The Power of Productivity thinks he does have an answer. He credits the relatively free economy of the United States that allows intense, fair competition over most product markets. And he emphasizes the importance of retail. Retail, sparked by Wal-Mart accounted for half the gain in productivity in the 1990s. Has that continued into the Noughties?

Maybe the productivity numbers help us understand the continuing saga of the twin deficits. Maybe a nation that is increasing the productivity of its workers (or whose workers are increasing their productivity) at 3.39 percent per year can afford deficits as far as the eye can see. Maybe the way we should look at the deficits is that foreign investors can’t get their hands on U.S. financial assets fast enough.

Or maybe it is a two-way street. Maybe the productive workers of the United States want to buy cheap goods, from wherever they are made, and the rest of the world wants the stability and security of US financial instruments as a store of value.

The Dear Old MSM in Their Liberal Bubble

Conservatives love to twit the mainstream media for their bias and their insularity. And now that we really have a voice in the national debate we can afford to be more generous to our adversaries, and humorously represent them as jolly old dinosaurs “asking each other what’s happened to all the tasty fronds,” as Jonah Goldberg does.

He can’t help chuckling as three old dinosaurs, Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw agree with each other about the shocking state of the nation.

These three giants of television journalism tut-tutted about one government failure after another, from the Katrina response to the government’s inability to provide health care for everybody to our dismayingly low taxes. Brokaw agreed with Koppel, Koppel agreed with Brokaw. Russert nodded as one newsman repeated what the other one just said.

But of course, things are in a parlous state, if you are a liberal MSM dinosaur. Things just aren’t the same as in the good old days when what the TV news said was accepted as objective news and there was no way you could escape the liberal bubble.

The trouble is that the liberal bubble leads the MSM not just into tut-tutting, but into seriously flawed journalism, as Michael Barone points out in critiquing The New York Times “Dec. 16 story reporting the National Security Agency intercepts of telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States. The Times didn’t bother telling its readers this practice is far from new and is entirely legal.”

Let’s put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America’s enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America’s enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.

In the old days, the Times could get away with this, because there would never be a chance for the conservative case to see the light of day. But not any more. Within a day or two of the Dec 16 Times story, conservatives had posted on the web examples of Democratic presidents—not just the evil Bush—invoking the power to do warrantless intercepts of foreign powers, and the MSM has been on defense ever since.

Muslims Don't Read Western Media

Should we forget the Bush strategy of using cold hard steel to push back the Islamist terrorists or can we win the war on terror by winning hearts and minds?

According to Daniel Pipes, winning hearts and minds isn’t going to do the job. Muslims the world over prefer to read only Muslim media and thus are impervious to western outreach through the media.

Many indications suggest that Muslims favor tuning in to or reading media prepared by their coreligionists, trusting these more than what comes from non-Muslims.

As an example of this Pipes offers the murder in 1994 of a Jewish boy, Ari Halberstam, on the Brooklyn Bridge by Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant who killed Halberstam in revenge for the killing of 29 Muslims in a mosque in Hebron by Israeli Baruch Goldstein. It didn’t matter that the Israeli government had strongly condemned Goldstein’s attack. The Muslim media that Baz read never reported the Israeli condemnation. Instead they had encouraged revenge against an agent of the Israeli will.

Of course, everyone lives in a bubble. President Bush lives in a bubble, according to Newsweek. And liberals live in a bubble, according to Thomas Lifson.

One of the reasons people choose to live in a bubble is to stay focused on their goal. President Bush is focused on the war on terror. Liberals are focused on working towards a progressive millennium. Muslims are focused upon bringing Islam to the whole world.

All this focus is great. Unless it distracts you from noticing that you are heading into disaster. To avoid this fate it is best to keep a weather eye on what the other guys are saying and writing.

Now We Can Fight Back

It used to be there was little we could do if The New York Times put a lump of coal into the nation’s Xmas stocking. And it was hard to fight against Democrats when they undermined the cold war during and after Vietnam.

But now we have the conservative blogosphere and we have commentators like Michael Barone who writes an article—drawing on the conservative counterblasts to the NYT NSA screed of Dec 16—to point out that the courts have always recognized the president’s power to intercept foreign communications for intelligence purposes.

The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America’s enemies abroad.

And now we have Amir Taheri reminding us, against the elite push to declare the war on terror a failure, just how much has been achieved in the last four years since the shock of 9/11. In Afghanistan and Iraq the

democratic forces may fail because of their mistakes, or be defeated by Islamist and secular despotic opponents. But they also have a chance to win. And that — as seen from the United States, which should be supportive of democratic forces everywhere — is certainly a success.

The United States, Taheri writes, cannot change its foreign policy on an instant. And let us be under no illusion:

The spread of democracy is good for American safety and security, not to mention trade and economic interests. And it is also good for nations that wish to enter the mainstream of global life.

The lesson of the Bush years is that there are democratic forces out there longing to get a chance in the benighted dictatorships of the world. All they are saying is give us a chance.