Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Clean Up The Mess

by digby

I’ve always thought that in order to really put a monkeywrench into the modern GOP’s political machine it was important to take out prime movers Rove, Delay, Reed and Norquist. The CIA leak scandal has wounded (perhaps mortally) Karl Rove. Ronnie Earle has weakened Delay in preparation for the coup de grace Abramoff scandal that may just take down him, Reed, Norquist and a bunch of others in short shrift.

It doesn’t mean that the machine will be irreparably broken, but it won’t work as smoothly as it did with the original parts. Those men have unique gifts that they honed over a long period of time to create a very efficient political mechanism. It may not be that any one of them going down would make the difference, but all of them going down at virtually the same time certainly does.

They do not look good. Here’s the latest on Grover:

The knives are falling all around him, but Grover Norquist — antitax crusader, Republican lobbyist, and Weston native — insists they won’t fall on him.

A Norquist friend and former colleague, Jack Abramoff, is under criminal investigation for his lobbying activities, some of which involved the same Native American tribe on Norquist’s client roster. The noose on Abramoff appeared to have tightened Monday when his former business partner, Michael Scanlon, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to bribe public officials and to defraud Indian tribes.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters the next morning, Norquist behaved as if this was all nuisance background noise, as he mostly held forth on the state of the ongoing war between the political left and right.

Finally, when pressed on the investigations, he was curt and unapologetic. ”We worked with the Choctaw Indians. We did a book, and I was hoping to do more outreach with Native Americans,” said Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. ”Jack, I’m sure he advised the Choctaws. But the Choctaws worked with ATR and they’re happy with ATR.”

Last year, a Senate committee investigating allegations that Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes obtained e-mail traffic from ATR, but Norquist says he had not been contacted by government prosecutors in the Abramoff case. Now the conservative activist is on the warpath against Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is leading the Senate investigation.

After ATR turned over its e-mails, Norquist charged, McCain tried to ”steal our donor list.”

”He subpoenaed our donor records and we said no,” Norquist said. ”He took a shot at me and it didn’t work and it embarrassed him.”

Norquist then accused McCain and Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, of discrimination by targeting lobbyists who worked for Native American tribes. Abramoff and his partners collected $82 million in fees from Indian tribes and their casinos over four years.

”The implication is that it’s money laundering to raise money from Native Americans, and spend it,” Norquist said.

. . . And senator’s camp fires back

An early favorite in the 2008 presidential race, McCain is in a delicate position with political conservatives, who have held a grudge against him since he ran in 2000 against George W. Bush.

While McCain has been trying to smooth ruffled feathers on the right, his investigation into the Abramoff scandal, which he has called ”a complex and tangled web . . . a story alarming in its depth and breadth of potential wrongdoing,” reinforces the bad blood with Norquist and his political allies. Apparently, McCain could not care less.

When we asked the senator’s staff for a comment on Norquist’s fusillade against McCain, his chief of staff, Mark Salter, had a lot to say. ”In Norquist’s world, the truth is for suckers. And it’s as pointless to respond to him as it would be to respond to some street-corner schizophrenic,” Salter responded.

”There is nothing remotely accurate about his recollection of the committee’s dealings with him,” he added. ”Nor, obviously, is his charge of discrimination credible, considering that it is made against someone who has a long and well-known record of respect for the tribes by someone who excuses ripping them off.”

Grover’s natural instinct is to viciously counter-attack. It’s what he does. McCain is having none of it and with a weakened political machine, McCain has much less to fear by ignoring them.

I do not want John McCain to be the next president. But I think that he might be if he keeps this up. His greatest appeal to crossover Dems and independents is that he isn’t afraid of these assholes like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay. When you hear George Will sniffing about the “criminalization of politics” over bribery scandals and leaking of classified information, when you see a guy like John Warner embarrasingly attempt to dance on the head of a pin as he did this morning on Press The Meat, defending the indefensible, McCain looks damned good. Even to regular Democrats whose fondest wish is to see these arrogant scumbags have to eat their words.

These scandals are dealing a major blow to the corrupt GOP political machine, which is an unalloyed good thing. But it would be a shame if John McCain were the one who benefitted from it. He’s long cast himself as a crusading reformer and the time is ripe for one of those. The Dems ought not let themselves be left in the lurch on that message. Instead of the smarmy “together, we can do better,” we ought to be shouting “once again, the Democratic party is called on to do the patriotic thing and clean up the mess the corrupt Republican party has made with its free lunch policies and taxpayer rip-offs.”

If we don’t say it, McCain will win on personality alone.

Update: I do agree that McCain will have a hard time getting past the Christian Right in the primaries, but I fear that a whole lot of independents (and some Democrats) will make up for it. If the machine is weakened, it will be more difficult for it to shut him down in states with open primaries and even those that aren’t. I personally know Democrats who will register as Republicans to vote for him in the primary. Hardcore Dems like me will never vote for such a conservative politician, but to many people in this country, he is a very attractive candidate. I think he is, by far, our biggest political threat.

Update II: Laura Rozen discusses this NY Times article taking the temperature of the country on the Bush administration (decidely cold, frigid even) and the malaise among her Republican relatives. So far they can’t think of a single soul to vote for, McCain being seen a disloyal to the party.

My relatives, on the other hand, are warming to the flyboy. It’s a military thing. He served. He understands. He will beat the terrorists. Suddenly, Junior and Unka Dick’s lack of military service is meaningful.

Oh, and John Kerry is still a lying, lily livered coward, just like all the Democrats who want to offer therapy to the French terrorists.

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VI Day!!!!

by digby

Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. It wasn’t easy. Joseph Biden has tacitly admitted that the Bush administration has been right all along in its insistence that we pull out large numbers of troops in 2006.

As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go.

While it’s great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it’s going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch?

At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges.

Update: The really neat thing about this is that Rove has decided that Joe Biden should be the 2008 Democratic nominee. Feel the magic.

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Taking On Woodward

by digby

I have taken a rather strong stand in this Plame case that the elite beltway reporters involved lost sight of their primary mission, which is to inform the public. I’ve even (unpopularly) criticised Tim Russert for not adequately explaining his involvement, even if Patrick Fitzgerald asked him not to. I don’t think that reporters should not report things just because authorities ask them not to unless there is an immediate danger involved — even if our friend the straight-shootin’, Rove-killin’ prosecutor requests it.

I’m glad to read a real, live credible investigative journalist make these points clearly and unambiguously. Sydney Schanberg writes:

He openly says that protecting his sources is his highest priority. Here’s a response he gave to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for The Washington Post: “I apologized [to the executive editor, Leonard Downie] because I should have told him about this much sooner. I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That’s Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . . I hunkered down. I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.”

Again, something is missing. Reporters have lots of different thoughts and emotions when they come across an important story. In my life, and the lives of most reporters, “Job No. 1” is getting the story confirmed and into the paper quickly. Get it to the readers now, not two years from now, so they can assess it and act on it, if they choose. A second emotion: Get it to them before the competition gets wind of it.

I believe it’s fair for a reasonable person, without being inside Woodward’s head, to listen to his explanations and arrive at the notion that his main priorities are protecting his sources and protecting the exclusivity (and therefore marketability) of his next book. That wasn’t true when he and Bernstein were prying open the Watergate story. He didn’t have any book contracts then to muddle and infect the issue. In this instance, his explanations include no thoughts about writing an early story for his paper, no reservations about holding back information from the public.

No one is questioning Woodward’s reporting skills or his intelligence. And I don’t want to know the names of his sources. I believe in granting confidentiality when it’s the only way to get a story out—and in going to jail if that’s the consequence of refusing to identify a source or turn over notes. But when your modus operandi is to hold on to information instead of publishing it right away, then, in my opinion, you are not serving the public.

Yep. it wasn’t just Woodward, it was all these guys, except for Cooper and Royce and Phelps who wrote in real time what they knew. Pincus and Kessler wrote some of what they knew, but at least they wrote something. Woodward, Miller, Russert, Mitchell and who knows how many others offered opinions, grilled others or sat on relevant information for years. I just don’t see how that can be journalism.

Schanberg says something that I think is relevant to the Plame case, for you plamaniacs who are jonesing:

And also, in my experience, important conversations about important stories do not fade quite the way Woodward intimates they do when he says he doesn’t recall whether Libby or Card brought up Wilson’s wife. Reporters almost always remember such things.

This has bugged me from the first. Woodward doesn’t remember if Libby or Card brought up Wilson’s wife or if he brought it up with them. But that’s not the problem. He does remember having “Joe Wilson’s wife” written on a series of questions when he spoke to them. This is a huge gift to Libby’s defense.

The indictment shows that Libby learned of and discussed Plame’s identity from a bunch of people other than Woodward, so it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the case. But they can put Woodward on the stand and grill him about whether he might have told Libby about Plame’s wife and muddy the waters. If it can be believed that Woodward ever brought up Plame to Libby, it bolsters his “dazed and confused” defense.

I continue to wonder if Woodward didn’t bring up his involvement just for that purpose.

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An Observation From Highpockets

by digby

For reasons I don’t fully understand, there is something about “leaders,” especially self-appointed leaders, and most especially those who are drawn to intensive participation in organizations, that tends toward liberalism. We see this in politics all the time, of course: it is one thing to vote for conservatism, something else entirely to get it from our elected leaders.

All of which makes me especially thankful, this year, for democracy, limited government and free enterprise: the best measures yet devised to protect us from our leaders.

I’m seeing a lot of this lately. Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren’t true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It’s a lot like communism that way.

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Burning Witches

by digby

As regular readers know, I have been exercised about the fact that some people believe that torture is no longer taboo — that we are normalizing the concept in our minds in anticipation of the government legalizing it. Some have called me shockingly naive for not knowing that we have always tortured and abused and that this is nothing new, but I think this misses my point. It is true that our nation has always engaged in bad acts, I am well aware of that. But this is something new. We have high level people in our government attempting to create a legal torture regime on the basis of a new constitutional finding that the executive branch is unfettered by the rule of law in a time of war — our current “war” conveniently having no obvious end. For a long, long time now, if our government tortured and abused, it at least had the decency to hide it.

If you want proof that torture is still not publicly acceptable in our culture, you need look no farther than the 90-7 vote in the senate. A whole lot of big shots, including tough guy red-state Republicans, don’t want to be associated with supporting torture. They know damned well that it is beyond the pale. (For now.)

If we allow this to become normalized, I don’t think it will stop at suspected terrorists — eventually people will ask why we should have all these laws and prohibitions in the case of non-terrorist, but equally heinous, crimes. How do you tell the family of a victim of a suspected gang killing that the suspected perpetrators have a right to lawyers and a right not to incriminate themselves? Is their pain less than the pain of terrorism victims? Why shouldn’t these “worst of the worst” be tortured by the police or the FBI to find out what they know? After all, more people could die if they aren’t forced to give up their home boys.

The reason that people do not demand this now is because we have long required a public adherence to the rule of law — and we have instinctively understood that authorities sometimes make mistakes, are corrupt or inept. Due process is required to mitigate those human failings. Yet, innocent people are still caught up in the system even with all these processes. Imagine what would happen if we didn’t have them?

Once you introduce torture into the equation, justified by the fact that these are people alleged to be “the worst of the worst” you are letting go of the idea that innocent people are sometimes incarcerated, and that it matters that we don’t treat innocent people barbarously, even if we are inclined by primitive notions of revenge to treat guilty people that way. We know that non-terrorists have been caught up in the net and have been tortured and abused. Even more horrifyingly, we know that even innocent, mentally ill people have been tortured and abused. (I don’t think you can go any lower than that — maybe children, but they did that too.)

There are important moral and human rights arguments to be made against torture of anyone, guilty or innocent. I believe that it makes an entire society, an entire culture, immoral. But the most immoral act of all immoral acts is to torture an innocent person. And since nobody is omniscient, to torture a person with no due process, no right to confront accusers, no way of proving their innocence, it is guaranteed that we are doing this under our torture regime. As I said, we know that we are.

One might assume that there is no one on the planet who thinks that torturing innocent people is right. Certainly, it’s going to be hard to find intelligent educated people who believe that it is a moral good to do so. But not impossible. As it turns out there is a moral argument for torturing innocent people:

From Orrin Judd:

You might want to go back and brush up on your history, witchcraft was quite popular, even within the Church, for an awfully long time. In fact, it’s back today in the form of Wicca. In its denial of the basis of Western Civilization it is so transgressive that it deserved to be and was persecuted. People who deny there were witches because they don’t like how the religious treated them are akin to the Left denying there were Communists because they don’t like that Americans reviled them. Jews too were justifiably, though unnecessarily, persecuted for their beliefs and inability to conform to social norms. The great injustice was the persecution of the conversos in Spain, who were sincere converts to Christianity.

Of course, anti-Semitism only became exterminationist once you mixed in Darwinism and racial theory, by which it is necessary to kill any group outside your own discrete gene pool.

There are of course variations within any group, but folks conform to type more than less.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 01:49 PM

I think he understands something I failed to understand about this argument. This isn’t about terrorism. It isn’t about national security. It isn’t about the rule of law or enlightenment values. It’s about conforming to social norms. That puts the whole thing in perspective, doesn’t it? What I call “innocent” isn’t innocent at all. Just being a practicing Muslim makes one guilty.

It’s nice to know that we shouldn’t be persecuting those who have converted to Christianity (or properly protestantised Islam, which translates into an embrace of Western Civilization.) The good news is that “protestantising” (forcing Western conformity on) the billion Muslims out there will be a cakewalk:

You can have a number of voices so long as everyone has just one hymnal. That’s the essence of the protestantism that the End of History requires. It’ll be easy enough to Reform Islam, just as we did Catholicism, Judaism, and the rest.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 10:56 AM

And here I thought the whole “End of History” thing had been laughed out of town by the events of 9/11. Apparently History has only been postponed. Protestantism is still on the march, “reforming” witches and Muslims alike. And if it takes a little waterboarding or burning at the stake to get the job done, so be it. These people have to understand that we’re going to end History one bloody non-conformist bastard at a time if we have to.

I have to hand it to Orin Judd. Like Ann Coulter, who’s rhetoric is not nearly as elegant, he is at least willing to put his beliefs on the table and take responsibility for them. So was Ann, when she wrote:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Like the Spanish inquisitors and Salem witch burners before us, we owe it to the world to continue to End History by torturing and persecuting those trangressive non-conformists who deny “the basis of Western Civilization” as necessary. Indeed, we can’t help ourselves. It’s our destiny.

But I have to say that Orrin is very mistaken to think that exterminationism only came into existence once Darwinism and racial theory emerged. As good Protestants, ‘reformed” and unreformed Catholics and Jews know, that is something that has been going on for a very, very long time. Dig it:

1 Samuel 15

15:1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD.

15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

15:4 And Saul gathered the people together, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.

15:5 And Saul came to a city of Amalek, and laid wait in the valley.

15:6 And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.

15:7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.

There’s more. Saul spared the Amakalite king and some good sheep and oxen, sorely disappointing God. Samuel promptly kills them himself, on God’s orders. Ain’t nothin’ new ’bout genocide. Sometimes it’s God’s work.

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Priming The Pump For The Masters

by digby

Can we please put a merciful end to he “black friday” kabuki, in which retailers put out rediculous promotions to entice customers to stand in line for hours to “buy” things at below profit so they can report that sales are very brisk this year (only to find out that sales and profits were flat or down some time later?) All day long the news stations were interviewing shoppers in the malls and Wal-Marts as if they had made a trek to Lourdes for the cure and all the anchors dutifully reported that everyone was reporting huge crowds. They were even shilling for specific items, trying to “find” the next Tickle Me Elmo. It is mildly entertaining to watch idiots trample each other for a piece of useless junk, but I only need to see it once. 22 times was overkill.

Reporting that people are shopping is a blatant attempt to prime the pump for retailers. It’s not a news story, it’s advertising. The story is whether the sales were any greater than last year, or greater than expected or whatever. And they can’t know that for at least a little while. This is a made up news story with even less substance than the Runaway Bride, who did, after all actually run away.

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Mr Silver Lining

by digby

Hey everybody, welcome David Ignatius to planet earth:

The United States must begin to replenish this stock of support for America in the world. I would love to see the Bush administration take the lead, but its officials seem not to understand the problem. Even if they turned course, much of the world wouldn’t believe them. Sadly, when President Bush eloquently evokes our values, the world seems to tune out.

No kidding. But that because the Cheney administration “understands” the problem to be that we aren’t feared and loathed enough, not that we are feared and loathed too much. This is fundamental to understanding what they are doing. Bush is trotted out to spread Messianic platitudes about freedom to the red state rubes to make them feel all warm and toasty about our splendid little GWOT. But Cheney and Rummy and the rest of the cold war time warpers have no illusions or interest in being “understood” by anyone. They believe in the Friedman Doctrine:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

It’s awfully nice that the elite liberal pundits in this country are finally regaining their equilibrium after basking in the glow of that mighty bullhorn for the last four years but it’s pretty useless now, as even Ignatius seems to realize when he prescribes this:

So this task falls instead to the American public. It’s a job that involves traveling, sharing, living our values, encouraging our children to learn foreign languages and work and study abroad. In short, it means giving something back to the world.

Have you ever read a more irrelevant, starry-eyed piece of gooey treacle in your life? Oh yes you have, here:

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Turn that frown upside down, sunshine. Civil war is a drag and all, but it isn’t all bad! If Iraq can just learn to have patience over the next generation or two and Americans can learn a foreign language and give something back to the world, we can all come together and love one another —- eventually. Probably. Oh sure, there will be a great deal of death and destruction in the meantime because our president “doesn’t understand” the problem and turns everything he touches into chaos. But there’s no need to be pessimistic. Go on a trip and buy some souvenirs.(Snowglobes really send a strong message of cultural understanding. Collectible spoons scream of shared sacrifice.) Oh yeah, and be sure to love yer neighbor like you’d like to be loved yerself. It’s the key to persuading the world that we really aren’t the loathesome, cruel, imperialistic freakshow they now think we are. Eventually.

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Too Much W-ne

by digby

From Atlas Shrugs, centerfold of the Bathrobe Media Empire

G-d bless President Bush, holding himself out there for ridicule and vile hate so that we might be stay free. History will be kind to President Bush and hold him in the highest regard. He sees the future, he sees the realites, he sees the truth s we take so for granted.

Am-n

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Getting The M.R.S.

by digby

What Kevin says. I don’t know what to say about the LA Times op-ed page nowdays except, don’t bother. Yesterday, we had Jonah’s typically puerile blog post he calls it a column. (Some pouty mess about Dinos and Rinos running to the center. Maureen Dowd he ain’t.)

Today, David Gelertner reveals that the reason why kids today are so career obsessed instead of learning for learning’s sake is because rich, highly educated women used to get married and stay home with thier kids instead of working outside the home. (It’s true. They did. They also drank. A lot. Usually because thier only choices in life were to marry some thick-headed moron like Gelertner or work for him as his low paid “office wife.” )

There is one sense in which society has suffered by women having more opportunities, however. In the past, many of the smartest women in the country became teachers because they were not afforded opportunities to use their minds and skills in other fields. (Some very smart women also became nuns and ran big hospitals and schools, as well.) The public school system was probably the lucky recipient of some extraordinarily good teachers in greater numbers than we have today. After all, the schools could get some of the best minds in the country to work for low pay and no respect or chance of advancement. It was quite a good deal.

In Our Dreams

Yesterday on Matthews there was this little exchange between Tweety, Chuck Todd and Deborah Orrin:

ORIN: … I think we are close to starting to pull troops out. Talk to people at the White House and the Pentagon, they feel the Iraqis really are stepping up. And some of them, if you want to be conspiracy theorists, think this was all a Democratic game so that when we announce after the elections in December, that they are a success and when we start pulling troops out, Democrats can say see, we are responsible. We did it.

MATTHEWS: You think they are that smart?

TODD: You’re giving them a lot of credit.

In our dreams.

I think this withdrawal plan is the same phony drawdown that they’ve been talking about for the last year. They will do it to show “progress” before the 2006 election. but I’m with Atrios on this — I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that George W. Cheney is going to allow himself to be portrayed “cutting and running” by anyone, and if bombs are still going off in Iraq that’s exactly how it will look. The military is hurting and so it must lessen its presence and regroup. But we are not leaving there before 2008. From what I’m hearing today, they think the magic number is 100,000. troops. That means that we will have 99,999 troops there indefinitely. And they are going to keep getting blown up indefinitely.

I’ve written before about historian Bernard Lewis and his outsized influence on the thinking inside the Bush administration. He’s the guy who persuaded the erstwhile hardliners that they were correct to be tough, macho and manly — but they also needed to “democratize” the middle east. The arabs, you see, need our guidance, just as they’ve always needed somebody’s guidance:

Bernard Lewis often tells audiences about an encounter he once had in Jordan. The Princeton University historian, author of more than 20 books on Islam and the Middle East, says he was chatting with Arab friends in Amman when one of them trotted out an argument familiar in that part of the world.

“We have time, we can wait,” he quotes the Jordanian as saying. “We got rid of the Crusaders. We got rid of the Turks. We’ll get rid of the Jews.”

Hearing this claim “one too many times,” Mr. Lewis says, he politely shot back, “Excuse me, but you’ve got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of the Crusaders. The British got rid of the Turks. The Jews got rid of the British. I wonder who is coming here next.”

The vignette, recounted in the 87-year-old scholar’s native British accent, always garners laughs. Yet he tells it to underscore a serious point. Most Islamic countries have failed miserably at modernizing their societies, he contends, beckoning outsiders — this time, Americans — to intervene.

Call it the Lewis Doctrine. Though never debated in Congress or sanctified by presidential decree, Mr. Lewis’s diagnosis of the Muslim world’s malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years. The occupation of Iraq is putting the doctrine to the test.

For much of the second half of the last century, America viewed the Mideast and the rest of the world through a prism shaped by George Kennan, author of the doctrine of “containment.” In a celebrated 1947 article in Foreign Affairs focused on the Soviet Union, Mr. Kennan gave structure to U.S. policy in the Cold War. It placed the need to contain Soviet ambitions above all else.

Terrorism has replaced Moscow as the global foe. And now America, having outlasted the Soviets to become the sole superpower, no longer seeks to contain but to confront, defeat and transform. How successful it is at remolding Iraq and the rest of the Mideast could have a huge impact on what sort of superpower America will be for decades to come: bold and assertive — or inward, defensive and cut off.

As mentor and informal adviser to some top U.S. officials, Mr. Lewis has helped coax the White House to shed decades of thinking about Arab regimes and the use of military power. Gone is the notion that U.S. policy in the oil-rich region should promote stability above all, even if it means taking tyrants as friends. Also gone is the corollary notion that fostering democratic values in these lands risks destabilizing them. Instead, the Lewis Doctrine says fostering Mideast democracy is not only wise but imperative.

After Sept. 11, 2001, as policy makers fretted urgently about how to understand and deal with the new enemy, Mr. Lewis helped provide an answer. If his prescription is right, the U.S. may be able to blunt terrorism and stabilize a region that, as the chief exporter of oil, powers the industrial world and underpins the U.S.-led economic order. If it’s wrong, as his critics contend, America risks provoking sharper conflicts that spark more terrorism and undermine energy security.

After the terror attacks, White House staffers disagreed about how to frame the enemy, says David Frum, who was a speechwriter for President Bush. One group believed Muslim anger was all a misunderstanding — that Muslims misperceived America as decadent and godless. Their solution: Launch a vast campaign to educate Muslims about America’s true virtue. Much of that effort, widely belittled in the press and overseas, was quietly abandoned.

A faction led by political strategist Karl Rove believed soul-searching over “why Muslims hate us” was misplaced, Mr. Frum says. Mr. Rove summoned Mr. Lewis to address some White House staffers, military aides and staff members of the National Security Council. The historian recited the modern failures of Arab and Muslim societies and argued that anti-Americanism stemmed from their own inadequacies, not America’s. Mr. Lewis also met privately with Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr. Frum says he soon noticed Mr. Bush carrying a marked-up article by Mr. Lewis among his briefing papers. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Says Mr. Frum: “Bernard comes with a very powerful explanation for why 9/11 happened. Once you understand it, the policy presents itself afterward.”

[…]

“The question people are asking is why they hate us. That’s the wrong question,” said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. “In a sense, they’ve been hating us for centuries, and it’s very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning.”

He continued: “More generally … you can’t be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us?”

For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced by his thinking, instilling respect or at least fear through force is essential for America’s security. In this formulation, the current era of American dominance, sometimes called “Pax Americana,” echoes elements of Pax Britannica, imposed by the British Empire Mr. Lewis served as a young intelligence officer after graduate school.

[…]

Eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with the Pentagon still smoldering, Mr. Lewis addressed the U.S. Defense Policy Board. Mr. Lewis and a friend, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi — now a member of the interim Iraqi Governing Council — argued for a military takeover of Iraq to avert still-worse terrorism in the future, says Mr. Perle, who then headed the policy board.

A few months later, in a private dinner with Dick Cheney at the vice president’s residence, Mr. Lewis explained why he was cautiously optimistic the U.S. could gradually build democracy in Iraq, say others who attended. Mr. Lewis also held forth on the dangers of appearing weak in the Muslim world, a lesson Mr. Cheney apparently took to heart. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” just before the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Cheney said: “I firmly believe, along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is one of the great students of that part of the world, that strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, toward calming things in that part of the world.”

The Lewis Doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy.

Do we have any reason on earth to believe that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsefeld and George W. Bush are prepared to abandon this thinking?

Let’s give them at least some credit for sincerity on one thing. They honestly believe that we have been perceived as weak by the rest of the world. They’ve always thought this. This isn’t a political calculation, they really believe it. They went into iraq with the idea that they had to show those hinky arabs that we are not going to be pushed around. When they say that everyone from Nixon on down behaved like cowards, they really mean it. This is their world view.

Norman Podhoretz even characterizes their god Reagan this way:

Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity.

It is a deep article of faith that the reason we were hit on 9/11 is because we failed to respond to the terrorists and others . Therefore, we must make them respect and fear us by being violent and dominating.

I am of the opinion that alienating our allies, exposing ourselves as having an intelligence community that can’t find water if they fall out of a boat and then screwing up Iraq in spectacular fashion, we have destroyed our mystique and have made this country less safe. We were much better off speaking softly and carrying the big stick than flailing around like a wounded, impotent Giant.

I see no reason to believe that these people see that. They believe that to “cut and run” is the equivalent of emasculating this country and that is what puts us at risk. George W. Bush is not bugging out.

Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lambasted the belief of some Mideast experts at the State Department and elsewhere that Arabs weren’t ready for democracy — that a “friendly tyrant” was the best the U.S. could hope for in Iraq. “That policy,” he quipped, “is called ‘pro-Arab.’ “

Others, like himself, believe Iraqis are heirs to a great civilization, one fully capable, “with some guidance,” of democratic rule, he said. “That policy,” he added with a rueful smile, “is called ‘imperialism.’ “

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