What is Our Mideast Strategy?

Democrats have been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.

Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq we can be pretty sure that they are pretty sure that we already have victory in Iraq, bar shouting. The document talks about three tracks to victory—the Political Track, the Security Track, and the Economic Track—which must be glaringly obvious to anyone that hasn’t been asleep for the last three years.

The remarks of General Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Defense University the day after the release of the stragegy document point all this up. He talks willingly about strategy in Iraq, referring his audience to the Iraq strategy document, but when asked why “four years after 9/11 we still don’t appear to have a comprehensive strategy to fight that global war” says of future strategy that

there’s a lot of this puzzle that we would need a classified forum to be able to talk about. You are correct that we are publicly and in most of our fora talking about the immediate center of gravity, but I can assure you that we also have an enormous amount of energy being put into the other, longer-term requirements of having a global capacity with our friends to be able to respond. And that’s about as good as I can do for you in an open forum.

It’s pretty obvious what that strategy is, but we just can’t talk about it because it probably involves long-term presence in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and covert activities in Iran. The point, after all, of invading Afghanistan and Iraq was to contain Iran to the east of Mesopotamia.

But what is our strategy with regards to Mark Steyn’s Eurabia? Good question, Senator. My guess would be that the plan is to remove our troops from Europe, so that the Euros wake up from their 60 year social-democratic dream and get with the program.

NYT Brides Stay Home with Babies

What do women want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.

Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick rundown in NRO so you don’t have to read the whole thing.

What is happening is that elite women, the kind of women who advertise their weddings in The New York Times “Sunday Styles” section, are choosing to staying home to raise their children. What do women want? “Not what they should.” You see,

The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”

We conservatives, who know that fashion moves from the top down, understand, with Linda Hirschman, that if the fashionable women in the New York Times Sunday Style section are staying home to have babies then the rest of American women can’t be far behind.

But let us return to Linda Hirschman. If the family is a “necessary part of life” shouldn’t it occupy some sort of central place in society, honored and fêted by everyone? One of the hardest things for society to do is to encourage people to stick to the necessary things and to stop going off at tangents and diverting themselves with the fun things, the pleasurable things, at the expense of the necessary things.

But of course, for feminist Linda Hirshman the important things are not the necessary things. What is important is for women to take their place in the political and business elite. If women opt out of the career track, then fewer of them will get to the top of the political and business elites. That means that the rulers will make decisions that benefit men. And women’s lives will be tarnished.

A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.

So, what does that have to do with a career in the business and political elite?

The problem with Hirschman’s religious agenda—and it is a religious agenda as pointed as the religious agenda of The Purpose-driven Life, is that it flies in the face of what women want, or more cogently, what women clearly do not want. The fact is that women aren’t as interested in the rat-race of “career” (which comes from the French word for racetrack). One of the Times Sunday Style brides,

a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at her workplace, which fired her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only money,” she mused.

That is the problem that the feminists will never solve. For many men, the race is everything. For many women, what’s the point?

Evangelicals are Different: They Give More Money

One of the reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a lot of Americans go to church and the ones that do give to their churches. The same thing applies in Britain. American evangelicals give away about 10 percent of their income, but British evangelicals are even more generous. They give away 12 percent of their income, according to Ruth Gledhill and Joanna Sugden. They give “nine times as much to charity as the average householder” in Britain. And of course, they have much less debt and three times the average level of household savings.

The survey, conducted for Kingdom Bank by Christian Research found that evangelical Christians in Britain

give 7.5 per cent of their income to the church, 3 per cent to Christian charities and 1.5 per cent to secular charities, averaging £3,000 [$5,000] a year per household. The Rev Vaughan Roberts, Rector of St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford, where hundreds of students attend Sunday services and give a total of £00,000 [$1 million] a year, said: “It is not surprising that those who have understood God’s gift of grace to them should be generous in return.”

But what happens to all that money? Not all of it goes for megachurch buildings and services. According to Richard Bewes, at his church ”we were giving 30 per cent of our income to outside mission work.”

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.