November 14, 2004

• “We’re gonna’ hold their feet to the fire . . . That’s what democracy is all about.”

  
  

  George W. Bush

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

  November 14, 2004

  
  

  EDITORIAL

  
  

  Saving ‘Saving Private Ryan’

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  o one ever accused broadcast executives of being profiles in courage. But the pre-emptive timidity of a score of them was a sorry spectacle last Thursday when they decided not to show “Saving Private Ryan” on Veterans Day because they were afraid of the Federal Communications Commission. Station executives were openly fearful that the movie’s realism in depicting the carnage and vulgarity of war might offend that newly righteous bureaucracy, whose blue nose was bent out of shape by the flash of Janet Jackson’s breast during the last Super Bowl and, later, by Bono’s casual airing of an obscenity assuredly in use among soldiers in Iraq.

  
  

  The incident might seem minor – the vast majority of ABC network stations chose to run the film – except that the executives’ timorousness is a sign of the effects of the government’s growing willingness to intrude excessively into American culture. Before the Janet Jackson and Bono episodes, the F.C.C. took the position that context mattered – unscripted profanity at a public event like a music awards program or accidental glimpses of flesh would be excused, while deliberate and regular abuse of the public airwaves would not.

  
  

  “Saving Private Ryan” was shown without the F.C.C.’s objection on network television the past two years. But the agency’s shifting and arbitrary standards left executives at stations in Dallas, Atlanta and dozens of other cities wondering what the rules are and fearing for their licenses.

  
  

  Pressure groups and organized campaigns complaining in the name of public morality have been a constant in the nation’s political culture since the witch trials of Salem. Government officials should resist the temptation of joining the fray on either side. Some stations asked the F.C.C. to formally approve the airing of “Saving Private Ryan,” and the agency properly resisted becoming an overt censor. Now the F.C.C. should move the standard back to where it was – a position of common sense.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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  November 14, 2004

  
  

  OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

  
  

  Barren Ground for Democracy

  
  

  By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  ndersen Air Force Base, Guam

  
  

  Whether one views the war in Iraq as a noble effort in democratization or a brutal exercise in imperialism, there can be little doubt that it has proved the proverbial “bridge too far” for those who planned and, like myself, supported it. While much has been made of the strategic missteps the Bush administration has made since the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled, it seems likely that even the best-executed occupation would have been a daunting prospect.

  
  

  What we are witnessing is a legacy of history and geography – factors often denied by both liberal and conservative interventionists – catching up with America. Had our political leaders considered such factors, I suspect, they might have avoided some of the disasters of the occupation. These factors should also give President Bush pause as he plans to “spread freedom” in his second term. To see all this clearly, one must look at the campaign in the Persian Gulf region not as an isolated effort but as the culmination of a decade-long effort to bring the vast lands of the defunct Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Asia into the modern world and the Western orbit.

  
  

  After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from developing free parliamentary systems on their own.

  
  

  But the idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved more problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe.

  
  

  Unsurprisingly, upon Communism’s collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

  
  

  Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate.

  
  

  In addition, the Balkans are affixed to Central Europe, and were thus a natural extension of it as NATO expanded eastward. Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries.

  
  

  Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990′s, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as “determinism” and “essentialism” – academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq – and Liberia, for that matter.

  
  

  That line of thinking provided the moral impetus for military actions in 1995 in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo: interventions that reclaimed the former Yugoslavia into the Western orbit. But the people who ordered and carried out those interventions, liberal Democrats in general, were canny. While they agreed with the idealists’ moral claims, they realized that it was the feasibility of the military side of the equation that made the interventions ultimately worth doing. Yes, they also favored democracy in places like Liberia, but they were wise enough not to risk the lives of Americans in such endeavors. They intuited that a modest degree of fatalism was required in the conduct of international affairs, even if they were clever enough not to publish the fact.

  
  

  By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives – the most fervent of Wilsonians – simply took that liberal idealist argument of the 1990′s to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

  
  

  But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India – to make it more like England – were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces.

  
  

  The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

  
  

  In that vein, it seems inevitable that the coming four years will be a time of consolidation for America rather than of expansion; for it may take that long to bring Iraq to a level of stability equivalent to that of the post-conflict Balkans. Only after Iraq is secure will it be possible for our diplomats to work credibly on behalf of democracy throughout the Middle East.

  
  

  As for our overstretched military, increasingly it will have to work unobtrusively through native surrogates in the hunt for terrorists: for as the histories of Rome, France and Britain all reveal, the successful projection of power is less about direct action than about the training and subsequent use of indigenous troops.

  
  

  Moreover, in a world where every field operation is subject to intense scrutiny by global news media, the only empire that can be broadly acceptable is one consisting of behind-the-scenes relationships. That, in turn, will require an increased emphasis on what academics and diplomats call “area expertise.” A good model can be found in “Wax and Gold,” a classic work of area studies about the Amhara people of Ethiopia written by the sociologist Donald N. Levine of the University of Chicago in 1965. Mr. Levine defined pragmatism as a respect for liberal progress not in a fixed, ideological sense, but in terms of “the cultural context” in which such progress takes place: each people and terrain according to its own pace of political development, in other words.

  
  

  While democracy can take root anywhere (look at Indonesia and Afghanistan), it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan we dismantled only a regime and not an entire bureaucratic apparatus of control like in Iraq; for in Afghanistan no such apparatus had existed. Over sizable swaths of the country there had been only warlords and tribal militias, with whom we had to work for many months before we began to co-opt them into a new legitimate authority: or, as the situation demanded, help that new authority to gradually ease them out. In Afghanistan following 9/11, we did what we had to do, and otherwise accepted the place as it was. The result has been change for the better.

  
  

  Pragmatism is not about looking away, but it is about humility in the face of long-standing historical and cultural forces. In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will lead to discipline rather than indifference.

  
  

  
  

  Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of “Balkan Ghosts” and “The Arabists.”

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

  November 14, 2004

  
  

  OP-ED COLUMNIST

  
  

  Slapping the Other Cheek

  
  

  By MAUREEN DOWD
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  ou’d think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like “love thy neighbor,” “turn the other cheek,” “good will toward men,” “blessed be the peacemakers” and “judge not lest you be judged.”

  
  

  Yet somehow I’m not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office.

  
  

  I’m getting more the feel of a vengeful mob – revved up by rectitude – running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.

  
  

  One fiery Southern senator actually accused a nice Catholic columnist of having horns coming up out of her head!

  
  

  Bob Jones III, president of the fundamentalist college of the same name, has written a letter to the president telling him that “Christ has allowed you to be his servant” so he could “leave an imprint for righteousness,” by appointing conservative judges and approving legislation “defined by biblical norm.”

  
  

  “In your re-election, God has graciously granted America – though she doesn’t deserve it – a reprieve from the agenda of paganism,” Mr. Jones wrote. “Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.” Way harsh.

  
  

  The Christian avengers and inquisitors, hearts hard as marble, are chasing poor 74-year-old Arlen Specter through the Capitol’s marble halls, determined to flagellate him and deny him his cherished goal of taking over the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  
  

  Not only are they irate at his fairly innocuous comment after the election that anti-Roe v. Wade judges would have a hard time getting through the Senate. They are also full of bloodthirsty feelings of revenge against the senator for championing stem cell research and for voting against Robert Bork – who denounces Mr. Specter as “a bit shifty” – 17 years ago.

  
  

  “He is a problem, and he must be derailed,” Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, told George Stephanopoulos.

  
  

  Sounding more like the head of a mob family than a ministry, Dr. Dobson told Mr. Stephanopoulos about a warning he issued a White House staffer after the election that the president and Republicans had better deliver on issues like abortion, gay marriage and conservative judges or “I believe they’ll pay a price in the next election.”

  
  

  Certainly Mr. Specter has done his part for the conservative cause. He accused Anita Hill of “flat-out perjury” for a minor inconsistency in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, that good Christian jurist who once had a taste for porn films.

  
  

  Some in the White House thought of giving Mr. Specter the post and then keeping him on a short leash. But the power puritans have no mercy. They say he’s a mealy-mouthed impediment to the crusade of evangelicals and conservative Catholic bishops – who delivered their vote with ruthless efficacy – to overturn Roe v. Wade.

  
  

  Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Dr. Dobson about his comment to The Daily Oklahoman that “Patrick Leahy is a ‘God’s people-hater.’ I don’t know if he hates God, but he hates God’s people,” noting that it was not a particularly Christian thing to say about the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. (Especially after that vulgar un-Christian thing Dick Cheney spat at Mr. Leahy last summer.)

  
  

  “George,” Dr. Dobson haughtily snapped back, “do you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about?” Why not? The TV host is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.

  
  

  Acting as though Mr. Bush’s decisions should be taken on faith, John Ashcroft lashed into judges for not giving Mr. Bush unbridled power in his war against terror.

  
  

  Speaking Friday before an adulatory Federalist Society, a group of conservative lawyers, Mr. Ashcroft echoed remarks he made to the Senate soon after 9/11 arguing that objecting to the president’s antiterror proposals could give “ammunition to America’s enemies.”

  
  

  He asserted that judges who interfere in or second guess the president’s constitutional authority to make decisions during war can jeopardize the “very security of our nation in a time of war.”

  
  

  And since the president has no end in sight to his war on terror, that makes him infallible ad infini- tum?

  
  

   

  
  

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