Frank’s Case Book

It is so disheartening to witness the sad desperateness of unrequited love. That is what makes Democratic candidate John Kerry’s obsessive and obsequious need for European approval so unrealistic and forlornly delusional.

When did the Europeans exhibit the greatest affection for the United States in the last few years? It did so immediately after 3000 people were killed at the World Trade Center buildings in New York, the Pentagon, and on a lonely field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Mixed in with genuine sympathy and compassion on the part of many Europeans was a little too much smugness on the part of European elites. There was a little too much sang freud that perhaps America had received its just retribution and overdue comeuppance for its arrogant and self-important foreign policy, particularly its support of Israel. Contradictorily, there was also the suggestion in a French bestseller that the tragedy of September 11 was planned and executed by the US itself as a way to put Americans on war footing.

While certainly there are many Europeans who love and admire Americans on a person-to-person level, European political opinion will not be satisfied with the United States unless it unilaterally opens trade barriers to help the overburdened European social welfare state. European elites will not be satisfied unless Americans bear the burden of Western military spending and loss of life, used only at discretion and the forbearance of Europeans, like in Bosnia. European governments will be pleased so long as the unruly and uncultured Americans listen to their betters.

In a recent speech on Iraq, Kerry insisted that he would persuade Europeans to share the burden in Iraq. While some like the British and the Italians certainly have already contributed very substantially in resources and blood, Kerry is in a jilted lover’s fantasy if he sincerely believes that the French and Germans will ever donate enough troops or money to materially effect the situation in Iraq. It is possible that Kerry does not believe this, but is making the promise for political effect, so Kerry’s position reduces to excessive credulity or lack of credibility.

By degrading the legitimate preference for French and German support to self-abasement, Kerry is setting up the United States for the morning-after disillusionment. Americans best not permit the siren’s song of European love and approval to seduce Americans to overlook their congenital allegiance to the spread of liberty and democracy and the necessity to defend those interests.

A conversation deep in the bowels of Republican election headquarters August 2004…

Deep Font:  Mr. Rove, I received your request to come here.

Karl Rove:  Yes.  I’m glad you could make it here so quickly.  We have an assignment that should be a perfect match for your skills. We know that this fall the Democrats will discover how the President exploited his family connections to avoid military service in Vietnam and skipped out on what little duty in the National Guard was required of him.  What we need to do is to discredit such reports before they gain any traction.

Deep Font:  How can we do that?  We know that the major media have all their investigative reporters interviewing Bush’s old acquaintances and they will be scouring whatever records we have not managed to destroy.

Karl Rove:  Simple. We will give the media and their Democratic allies what they want.

Deep Font:  Did I hear you right?

Karl Rove:  Yes you did.  We will give them want they want, but not quite the way they want or expect it.  I want you to forge documents from the 1972 era that will feed unspoken speculation about Bush wanting to avoid a physical examination to keep his drug habit from becoming public.  I want the documents to suggest that Bush’s superiors were being pressured from above to give Bush sparkling evaluations.  I want these documents to be leaked to the media.

Deep Font:  I still don’t understand.  Wouldn’t such information damage the president’s re-election chances?

Karl Rove:  It could slightly, but only if the reports are allowed to linger and sink into the public consciousness.  This is where your particular expertise comes into play.  I want the documents to appear at first blush to be authentic, but under any serious scrutiny they should be transparent forgeries.  When the fact they are forgeries becomes apparent, the media will be discredited and anything they find subsequently will lack credibility.

Deep Font:  Yes I could do that.  I could use proportionally-spaced fonts and use modern line spacing.  Gosh, I could even use a smaller font for superscripts, things that would be hard to accomplish using the common typewriters of the era.  However, no reasonably skeptical reporter would fall for this.  Who would be so transparently partisan, so willing to believe that they have found evidence of a Bush scandal, that they would abandon natural journalistic skepticism?

Karl Rove:  I am surprised you have to ask.  The answer is CBS News and Dan Rather, of course.  The people at CBS are either too young or too anti-Bush to be properly skeptical.  Such memos would play right into there preconceived notions.  Some of the producers were not even born in 1972.  They probably would not recognize the documents as forgeries if we told them they were private e-mails or cell-phone records from 1972.

Deep Font:  If the media are that credulous, isn’t it possible that the forgery will not be realized until after the election?

Karl Rove:  Yes, that could be a problem.  I’ll just have our digital black shirts use blogs on the Internet to publicize those features of the documents that make them obvious forgeries.  With Fox News and the Weekly Standard, knowledge of the forgeries will trickle into the main stream media.  Once they smell blood in the water, the mainstream media are like sharks and will go after their own.  They will quickly validate to the non-Conservative community that the documents are forgeries.  Indeed, if I am not mistaken, CBS will stand behind the story long after it is painfully obvious that the documents are not authentic.  No, I am being to optimistic.  Not even Dan Rather has been that blinded by zeal.

Deep Font:  I can easily arrange for the documents. All I need is a word processor and to photo copy the originals a dozen times.  Well I hope it works.  You know, sometimes these ideas blow up in your face.  Remember, when we funneled money to the Howard Dean campaign and he thought they were Internet contributions.  What a chump.  Well, he didn’t win the nomination.

Karl Rove: Yes, you’re right.  I expected Dean to self-destruct after, not before, he secured the nomination.  We went ballistic way too soon. However, when he did explode, he tainted the Democratic field with a Left-wing, anti war stench.  We ultimately did almost as well getting John Kerry to run against. The Bushs are pretty good at beating Massachusetts Liberals in national elections.  We would have had a harder time against Joe Lieberman. Dean whipped the Democrats into such a frenzy, that they never would have nominated a genuinely thoughtful candidate.

Even if I do say so myself, I did outdo myself with back-door funding of Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11.  Democratic partisans ate it up like gummy bears in kindergarten class.  Mom and Pop Middle America are now convinced that the Democrats have lost their collective minds.  It could not have worked better.

Deep Font:  What do you want me to do with Osama?

Karl Rove:  Keep him on ice in case Bush looses the debates with Kerry.  We may need him yet.

“Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter [for terrorism in Iraq].” — Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Perhaps the most powerful and persuasive polemicists are those who have not only crossed but leapt across the ideological divide. Norman Podhoretz is just such a person. He was part of a cohort of New York intellectuals, born in the first half of the last century, who gave rise to the likes of Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag. These were radicals who embraced Socialism, were sympathetic to Soviet Communism, and perceived little moral distance between the United States and Fascists in Europe. Somewhere in the 1960s, Podhoretz, on the basis of US efforts at post-war European reconstruction, Soviet repression, and the material success of the US economy began to appreciate the force for liberty and success the United States represented. As a consequence, he became one of the founders of the “Neoconservative” movement.

These Conservatives appreciate the role government sometimes play in ameliorating extreme fluctuations of a robust capitalist economy. You will not find these “new” Conservatives still upset at Franklin D.Roosevelt’s Social Security. Yet Neoconservatives are blessed with the congenital Conservative intuition that personal freedom is linked to the personal resources people control, and they retain the certain knowledge that the United States has a positive obligation to nurture freedom and democracy across the world.

Now that we have entered into the second generation of Neoconservatives, perhaps the movement should be thought of as a separate branch rather than new sprig off the main trunk of Conservatism. Neoconservatives believe that American intervention in the world is not only salutary, but necessary, while “paleoconservatives” believe that the United States is too good to involve itself intrigues of the old world. Pat Buchanan is perhaps the most vocal of current paleoconservatives.

Podhoretz has long been a writer of political philosophy and at age thirty became the editor of Commentary, one of the most influential political journals. This month, in Commentary, Podhoretz lays out a cogent and persuasive case for the Bush Doctrine: the fundamental notion that American economic and physical security are best protected when the Zeitgeist favors politically free and economically open societies. At its heart, the Bush Doctrine holds that the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism is rooted in the lack of these values in countries ruled either by thugs or Islamic theocracies or both.

The key to this understanding is to recognize, that World War IV has now been thrust upon us. The first two world wars involved pitched battles between massive armed forces. World War III, what is commonly called the Cold War, was different. Soon after the close of World War II, it became apparent that Stalin considered the demilitarization of the US as a sign that US involvement in world affairs was a momentary phenomenon brought on by the unique events of World War II. We would soon retire behind our oceans and retreat to traditional isolationism. Hence, Stalin saw little impediment to Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It was the other underestimated president, President Truman, that in response enunciated the Truman Doctrine. This doctrine held that the US should by various means: political, economic, and, if necessary, military contain the spread of Soviet domination. This policy worked best when the US nurtured fledgling democracies rather than making temporary alliances with non-Communist, yet authoritarian regimes.

With fits and starts from Korea, to Vietnam, to South America, presidents of both parties adhered to this containment strategy. However, containment was drifting into accommodation until President Ronald Reagan seized the rhetorical offensive and assured us “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” This moral certitude, coupled with the intention to achieve a military dominance over the Soviet Union could not keep up with, was sufficient to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Like the WWIII, World War IV against Islamic Fascism is likely to be a long struggle employing economic, political, and military means. In an age where weapons of mass destruction are too conveniently available the stakes are very large.

The US was slow in coming to an appreciation that World War IV had begun even while we were still in the last stages of World War III. Indeed, the tensions of that war obscured the events that pointed to the growing terrorist threat. As far back as the 1970s, during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, offshoots of the Palestine Liberation Organization murdered American diplomats in Lebanon and the Sudan. During the Carter Administration, Islamic Fundamentalist under Ayatolla Khomeini seized 52 hostages in the US Embassy in the capital of Iran. Even the stalwart Ronald Reagan withdrew American troops from Beirut, Lebanon — troops placed there as a buffer to protect the PLO from the Israelies — with no effective response to the killing of 241 marines asleep in their barracks. Though the first President Bush forced Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to retreat from its invasion of Kuwait, the unwillingness to topple Saddam, fairly or unfairly, convinced Islamic fundamentalists that the West was too decadent and casualty adverse to seriously pursue their adversaries to the end.

The pace picked up in the 1990s as the US and US interests were attacked by Al Qaeda in Somila, at the World Trade Center in 1993, and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The USS Cole lost 17 sailors in a suicide attack while refueling in Yemeni. It was not until the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, that the US came realize that threat was grave and not a sporadic law enforcement issue.

Podhoretz argues that the previous weak responses convinced Al Qaeda that there would be few long-lasting consequences to any attack. “The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren — or to do so effectively whenever we tried — reinforced his conviction that werae a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted large parts of the world by sword.” This was a miscalculation on his part.

To set forth political framework for this struggle, the Bush Doctrine has emerged. Though the specifics may be altered with time, the framework is a thoughtful basis for pursing this fourth world war. While Podhoretz is anxious that we may not muster the will to purse the doctrine over the decades it will require, he does outline the four pillars of the policy: morality, sources, preemption, and accountability.

1. The first pillar is recognition of the crucial applicability of moral considerations in foreign policy. For the foreign policy “realists,” stability is guiding principle. Moral considerations obscure the delicate balancing require to maintain the status quo. While it is clear that there are times that one must deal with and perhaps eve accept unsavory and despotic regimes, it must be recognized that there is a real moral cost for such decisions. The cost is that the delayed and deferred legitimate claims of the governed can nurture the resentments that feed Islamic terrorism.
2. The second pillar is the assertion that the cause of terrorism is not poverty, but political repression as evidenced by the prosperous background of may terrorists. Draining the repressive swamps in which terrorism breeds requires the fresh drying winds of liberty and democracy.
3. During World War III, we relied on deterrence. The assumption was that no state would launch an attack against the United States for fear of nuclear retaliation. However, in a world where small, suicidal groups, only loosely associated with states, can cause large numbers civilian casualties, deterrence has lost its saliency. There is no one to retaliate against. Preventing such attack, through preemption becomes an option.
4. The fourth pillar is one of state accountability for allowing or encouraging terrorism. Such states are as culpable as the terrorists themselves. This extends to the PLO. Bush was the first president to explicitly call for an independent Palestinian state, yet only state that eschews corruption and terrorism and embraces democratic ideals . As Bush explained in 2002, “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the Unites States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorist and dismantle their infrastructure.”

It was the United States that was decisive factor in the victories of the last three world wars. The United States has proved to be the single most important force in the spread of freedom, democracy, and posterity. The question is whether the United States will once again answer histories call. In the words, of Bush nomination acceptance speech:

“This moment in the life of our country will be remembered. Generations will know if we kept our faith and kept our word. Generations will know if we seized this moment, and used it to build a future of safety and peace. The freedom of many, and the future security of our Nation, now depend on us.”

During the recent presidential campaign it seems that every time someone asks Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry his position on any issue, he discovers a new way to steer the conversation to his Vietnam War record. Ask what is position was with respect to Iraq and you would find out he won a Silver Star in Vietnam. Ask what his position is on taxes and you would learn that Kerry also earned a Bronze Star. Question Kerry about his position on gay marriage and you would find out that he earned purple hearts “thrice.” OK, he really is not that compulsive, but his war record is a reoccurring theme in his campaign. Frankly, if that is part of your biography, a candidate would be foolish not to exploit it to the point of bringing along your “band of brothers” on campaign stops.

To show you how much things have reverse themselves, Clinton ran twice against honest-to-goodness war heroes: George H. W. Bush and Robert Dole. Democrats had no problem asserting that draft avoider Clinton was a qualified Commander-in-Chief and Republicans where anxious to gleefully point to the war experience of their candidates.

Now a number of veterans who at least served in the proximity of Kerry have publicly called into question just how heroic Kerry was. Given the distance in time and the fog of war and barring the revelation of contemporaneous evidence, it is probably not possible to ascertain with any degree of certainty the details of those years. Since Kerry was awarded the Bronze and Silver Star officially, the only reasonable conclusion is to take those events at their face failure and cede Kerry the glory attendant those awards. Valor in service is at least peripherally related to anticipated service as Commander-in-chief.

The fact that parties and candidates have been limited in campaign spending has encouraged the formation of independent groups and some of these will continue arguing about Kerry’s war record. One of the negative and very much predicted consequences of campaign finance reform is that these independent groups can take over a campaign. Depending on one’s level of cynicism, an independent group can act as a proxy saying negative things about an opponent that a candidate’s campaign would not want to take responsibility for, or it can muddy the themes a candidate the group is nominally in favor of wishes to use.

Much of the current animosity of some veterans groups against Kerry has less to do with his service than the exploitation of his service to suggest that there were wide spread atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam. Indeed, to make his point in 1971, Kerry admitted

“There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages.”

Despite his admissions, Kerry is not a war criminal. At the time of the statement, emotions were high, Kerry was young and he was probably swept up in the excessive Left-wing rhetoric of the era. The statement is more a negative reflection on his tendency to opportunism than it is reason to drag him before a tribunal at the Hague.

Whether out of political wisdom or honest concession to Kerry’s military honors, the Bush Administration has distanced itself from those who question Kerry’s actual war service. Given the fact that Bush was honorably discharged and did serve as a National Guard pilot, the principled action on Kerry’s part would have been to grant the same presumptive concessions on Bush’s record. Instead, he cynically suggested that, “Those of us who were in the military wonder how it is that someone who is supposedly serving on active duty…can miss a whole year of service without even explaining where it went.”

One wonders if Kerry and Bush’s policy positions remained as they are now, but their war records would have been reversed, whether the Left, who now embraces Kerry, would have refrained from accusing Bush of being a war criminal and unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief. One can be certain that Michael Moore would now be calling Bush a war criminal. He likely would have cut-and-pasted out-of-context video clips to produce a “documentary” purporting to depict a vicious Bush as a gun-totting soldier murdering innocent civilians. However, it is not certain whether “mainstream” Democrats would have distanced themselves from such remarks or such a filem or would have had a hardy chuckle and sheltered their embrace of mendacity by saying that Moore only engages in “satire.”

When the forefathers penned the Declaration of Independence, they wanted to set forth to the world the reasons for severing their ties to Britain. Specifically they wrote: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Many have attempted to exploit the deference granted to the wisdom of Founders and the phrase “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” as leverage to criticize President Bush’s supposed indifference to opinions of other countries, particularly with regard to the liberation of Iraq. However, such a claim belies an ignorance of the true circumstances of America’s struggle for independence.

Although there was some sympathy in the world for American independence, particularly among long-time enemies of Great Britain, the goal of the American Revolution to establish a large republic certainly threatened much of the global status quo. After all, the ethos behind the American experiment relied on the bold assertion by Thomas Paine that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” This is hardly a sentiment likely to endear Americans to the powers of the world, made up of mostly authoritarian regimes of one sort or the other.

A more careful examination of the phraseology of the Declaration shows that the consequence of a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” was a duty to “declare the causes which impel them” to certain actions. Decent respect only required a thoughtful explanation of American reasons, not slavish obsequiousness to the opinion of others. Whether others agree or not with our conclusions, the American explanations at the United Nations constituted dues paid the opinions of mankind. Respect was indeed shown.

Indeed, is it not true that all countries should do what they reasonably believe is correct and ethical unconstrained by the opinions of others? Let us posit for the moment that the French and the German opposition to the liberation of Iraq, despite a century of those countries making exactly the wrong geopolitical decisions, was motivated out of the purest of motives. This proposition may be belied by a number of subterfuges they employed; including French assurances to the Iraqis they could stop the Americans in the UN Security Council. Nonetheless, let us presume that objections to Iraqi liberation arouse out of a deep and abiding affection for the United States.

Should the French and Germans have fought in international bodies to keep Coalition forces from liberating Iraq or should they have, in the name of international collegiality and in order to maintain good relations with the US, acquiesced to American perceptions of threats? Surely, Bush’s critics would argue the French should have done what is right and not submitted their best judgments to a veto by the United States. France and Germany should not do what they believe is wrong just because it would make the US happy and similarly, the US should act in a way it perceives is correct after a due explanation in deference to the “opinions of mankind.”

The question then reduces to what is the best policy, not what others happen to agree with.

Two of the most reliable predictors of voting behavior are at war with one another. How can the apparent contradiction be explained?

The National Survey of Religion and Politics by the University of Akron compared church attendance, as a rough proxy for religiosity, with voting patterns. They found that those who attend church or temple more than once a week voted for George Bush in 2000 by a margin of 68% to 32%. Those who never attended church cast their votes for Al Gore 60% to 35%. Now the survey clearly shows that there are people who attend church regularly that voted for Gore and people who refrain from formal religious observances who voted for Bush. However, the trend is unmistakable. The more likely one is to attend religious services and for whom presumably religion provides normative guidance were more comfortable voting for Bush. Perhaps the Democratic Party’s positions in favor of abortion, gay rights, and the party’s close connection with those in Hollywood associated with cultural decadence and decline make many religious people uncomfortable.

On the other hand, African-Americans have significantly higher church attendance rates than white Americans yet vote almost exclusively Democratic. In 2000, Gore received 90% of the votes of African-Americans and that result is unlikely to change in 2004. Democrats have been the party of government, and government programs for the disadvantaged disproportionately aid black Americans. It is, therefore, not surprising that Democrats are able to garner a majority of votes of African-Americans, but the 90% figure seems irrational. It is hard to imagine how similar unanimity on any other issue in any other community could be achieved. It is hard to get 90% of any group to even agree on the time of day.

African-Americans may benefit from government programs, but they also suffer disproportionately from the burdens of terrible public schools in the inner cities. Democrats are so beholden to teachers’ unions that they are unwilling to grant black Americans the freedom to opt out of failing government-run schools. In African-American communities, local churches often provide social services. African-Americans, therefore, would benefit from President Bush’s faith-based initiative where public services delivered at churches could be partially financed by the government. Moreover, socially conservative black Americans who attend church regularly might be uncomfortable with the Democrats’ absolute commitment to even late-term abortions. Reason would suggest that these factors alone should be able to swing more than 10% of African-American voters to Bush.

Ralph Nadler, a Republican consultant, has completed a study which might offer some explanation for this phenomenon. Black Americans are radically ill-informed about Republicans. Amazingly, 69% of black Americans believed that Democrats were more committed to “protecting the rights of the unborn” than Republicans and Republicans were more likely to raise taxes than Democrats. Not even John Kerry would believe those positions.

This problem may be indirectly related to the splintering of Americans’ viewing and listening habits into little niches. There has been an explosion in the number of cable stations and alternative media outlets. Where all Americans used to watch a few broadcast stations so everyone received their news from common sources, different groups have different viewing habits. African-Americans watch Black Entertainment Television and listen to radio stations that cater to black Americans. These media have been largely co-oped by Democrats who can help define the political culture of African-Americans. In no small measure, according to Nadler, Republican neglect is at least as much of responsible for this as Democratic cultural imperialism. If Republicans are ever to claim a reasonable share of African-American voters, they are going to have to find ways bring their message to black media. The advantages of doing so are hard to exaggerate. If Republicans can even expand the number of votes from African-Americans they attract to 15% as opposed to 10%, it can have a dramatic effect on close elections. So long as black Americans are taken for granted by Democrats and have little voice in the Republican Party, the issues of most concern to this community will likely be neglected.