See No Evil

Steve Donoghue demolishes Don Fulsom's hack job Nixon's Darkest Secrets and then turns on Nixon:

[T]he greatest disappointment of Nixon's Darkest Secrets is how minor those secrets come across as being when measured against the full evil of the man. When Nixon went before the nation on Aug. 8, 1974, and announced his resignation -- only a few days after a White House tape recording surfaced proving beyond question that he'd known everything about the Watergate break-in -- something unspoken and completely vital to the nation cracked along its entire axis. And three years later (during a 1977 interview with David Frost), when Nixon said, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal," that crack shattered open and has never been closed since. It was an inky stain on the nation, and it spread forward in time even to the present, with the United States launching two wars, one of them illegal, mainly at the urging of two former Nixon acolytes, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the vice-president and defense secretary under president George W. Bush. The real Nixon was far darker than the bumbling cartoon villain Fulsom paints here -- perhaps the sharpest irony of them all.

When Nixon released the transcript of the June 23, 1972 "smoking gun" conversation, we learned that he'd briefly acquiesced in a Watergate cover-up, not that he'd "known everything" about the break-in. Still, it's actually reassuring to see the emergence of a critique of Nixon and Watergate based on his national security rather than alleged criminal predispositions. Donoghue traces a direct line between Nixon's "not illegal" formulation and Bush's Iraq war (presumably the one he thinks was illegal). Ironically, most people think the theory had to do with the Watergate break-in or coverup, but Nixon was actually offering a justification of surveillance of domestic militants during the Vietnam war. In 2008, when the misunderstanding was perpetuated in Ron Howard's film "Frost/Nixon," I wondered if Howard and scriptwriter Peter Morgan had blurred the record because post-Sept. 11 audiences would've been inclined to agree with Nixon that presidents have extra-constitutional authority to protect the the U.S. from violent extremists. Some may well think, as Donoghue does, that such impulses make a leader evil. I'll bet most probably don't.
Hat tip to Dona Christensen

Come Home, America

As the AP's Anne Gearan reports, President Obama said yesterday that public support for the Afghanistan war is waning "because we've been there ten years, and people get weary." She continues:

Just as he patterned his troop "surge" in Afghanistan on a successful military strategy in Iraq, now Obama is patterning his withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Iraq template as well.

The flaw in the pattern is that while George W. Bush's Iraq surge is viewed as a success, the increased U.S. commitment that Obama announced in late 2009 isn't. Gearan:

By the time the U.S. forces switched to the advisory role in Iraq, the back of the Sunni insurgency had been broken. The same cannot be said for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, which causes most of the U.S. casualties and functions as the main enemy even if Obama's preferred opponent is the al-Qaida terror network the Taliban once harbored.

As a candidate, Obama didn't see the vital U.S. interest in Iraq, and he naturally opposed the Bush surge. In Afghanistan, he did see one, so he surged. A for effort? Only if you agree, as I didn't, that the best solution was more troops for stabilization and nation-building instead of using intelligence, special forces, and other covert means to keep Afghanistan from becoming a laboratory for terrorism again. If we had known Sept. 11 was in the offing, the U.S. almost certainly could have neutralized the Taliban and al-Qaeda just based on what we saw from afar. We'll now be a hundred times more vigilant, and especially so Obama, since he knows that any attack emanating from Afghanistan would be blamed on his decision to withdraw.

Friends also tell me that a continued U.S. presence contributes to Pakistan's stability and security. And yet according to the Institute for the Study of War, our policy has been undermined by national security-conscious Pakistani officials who support our enemy the Taliban because they also happen to be Pakistan's anti-India proxies. Who need to be caught in the middle of that chess game?

The New Paternalism

Andrew Sullivan sticks up for Nixon speechwriter, presidential candidate, and pundit Pat Buchanan, fired this week by MSNBC:

Sixteen years ago, when I came out as HIV-positive and quit [The New Republic's] editorship, Buchanan, who had sparred relentlessly in public with me over gay equality, wrote me a personal hand-written note. He wrote he was saddened by what he heard - which was then regarded as an imminent death sentence - and wanted to say how he would pray that I would survive, if only so we could continue to argue and fight and debate for many more years. He was one of only two Washingtonians who did such a thing. I was moved beyond words. But he knew I loved a good argument as well. Over a gulf of ideological and philosophical difference, we could debate reasonably.

He's a complicated man and I will not defend for a second his views on many things. But he is also a compassionate and decent man in private and an honest intellectual in public. It says everything about the polarization of our discourse and the evolution of cable news into rival sources of propaganda that this ornery figure, still churning out ideas and books while others his age are well in retirement, is now banished.

For shame. Another step backward from real debate on cable "news".

Buchanan is indeed gracious in person, as I can attest from his and Shelley's periodic visits to the Nixon library when I was director. I haven't read the book that angered MSNBC, but I'm well aware of the broad outlines of his sometimes bizarre thinking -- diversity is hurting the United States, the U.S. shouldn't have have entered World War II, it would be better if we could return to the social and cultural conditions he remembers from his 1950s boyhood in Washington, D.C. He's also accused of antisemitism and excessively harsh criticism of Israel's allies in the U.S., although on this question his often-derided views about Jewish influence on our media and politics don't differ dramatically from those of Palestinians' advocates in progressive circles.

It's also important to remember his opposition to the Iraq war, a classic if lonely expression of conservative isolationism. Although in her memoirs Condi Rice makes a respectable case for the Bush administration's process in the run-up to war in 2003, I'm still not sure Buchanan was wrong.

I don't defend his more noxious views, which Howard Kurtz wrote had become too "radioactive" for a cable network that Kurtz says has moved sharply left, as it evidently grasps for Fox News' intellectual near-irrelevancy. It's funny Kurtz used that word. In the early 1980s I was part of a Nixon team reading through White House files to flag documents we felt should be kept secret on privacy and other grounds. The same adjective occurred to us as we read some of Buchanan's pugnacious prose on the antiwar movement and class politics, foundational expressions of what later became known as the culture wars. As I recall, I wrote a letter that Nixon signed and sent to Buchanan saying jokingly that he needn't worry, because we'd buried his memos in lead-lined drums under the National Archives. Of course Nixon also got memos from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ray Price, and other more moderate advisers and aides. He usually wanted to hear all perspectives on difficult questions before he made up his mind. On other occasions, such as when Buchanan was writing for Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon let Pat's right-wing freak flag fly. Here Buchanan seems to be quoting Agnew reading a script by Buchanan.

I also concur with Sullivan that one needn't agree with Buchanan to oppose his firing. Chris Matthews, who expressed regret about his bosses' move, isn't an apologist for racism, antisemitism, or homophobia. He's an advocate for vigorous debate as a hallmark of a healthy democracy. The man who fired Buchanan, Phil Griffin, exhibits more authoritarian impulses, believing that his views "should [not] be part of the national dialog." That reminds me of another example of the annoying new paternalism among our cultural and political elites: Rick Santorum saying that contraception is "not okay" and that as president he'd try to limit its availability. What happened to media tycoons and politicians who gave us credit for thinking for ourselves?

Iran's Shi'a Pet?

Most of my former colleagues at the Center Previously Known As Nixon were skeptics about President Bush's invasion of Iraq. Now one of its scholars, Dov Zacheim, describes the strategic consequences of replacing Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baathist regime with Nuri al-Maliki, whom Zakheim calls "nothing more than a Shi'a strongman":

Maliki insists that he is not a tool of the Iranians. Strictly speaking, he is correct. Iraq will never allow itself to be completely dominated by Tehran. Nevertheless, just as there can be no denying that Iran was the real victor of Operation Iraqi Freedom because America defanged its only seriously powerful regional rival, so too is it true that Iraq has increasingly come to share Tehran’s perspective on regional affairs. Witness its abstention on the Arab League’s vote to suspend Syria. Iraq is now firmly rooted in what King Abdullah of Jordan years ago termed “the Shi’a crescent,” which includes also Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, which also abstained from the Arab League vote, and Syria.

St. Christopher's Mettle

David Frum on a great man of the middle:

If Christopher [Hitchens] quit the left...he never joined the right. Like his great hero George Orwell, he was a man whose most creative period of life was a period of constantly falling between two stools: his new hatred for George Galloway never dimmed his old animosity toward Henry Kissinger. He was for the Iraq war without ever much trusting or liking the leaders who led that war. The stock phrase of the 2000s on the right was "moral clarity." If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity. But he was also a man of moral complexity, who would not submit to Lenin's demand that who says A must say B. Christopher was never more himself than when - after saying A - he adamantly refused to say B.

I wrote to Hitchens in June 2010, after I'd finished reading Hitch-22 and just before his cancer diagnosis. I never heard back. I'm not even sure I had the right address. Yesterday, before learning of his death, I'd been thinking of the e-mail as news came of the formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

Thank you for your wonderful memoir. I loved many things about it, but I'll confine my comments to some passages for which I was especially grateful.

As a seminarian, I preached a sermon about the Iraq war in the spring of 2003 (attached, not that you would possibly have time to read it) which, in our liberal Episcopal diocese, was viewed as bloodcurdlingly pro-war by virtue of not being antiwar. In the receiving line, a woman called me a liar for associating Saddam Hussein with Islamic totalitarianism. Since then, I've often wondered if I should've kept my intern's mouth shut, because of what our congregant said and also because of the way the war sometimes was going. Your summary of the evidence of Saddam's latter-day fundamentalism stanched one vein of second-guessing, and some patience about the ultimate outcome for the region and the people of Iraq should take care of the rest.

Thanks again.

Yours ever,

John Taylor

The De-rogue-ifier

My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt has stimulated a debate between Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's defense secretary, and former White House aide Peter Wehner over how much stress Bush placed on democratizing the Middle East in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rumsfeld says it came up very little behind closed doors. Wehner says Bush mentioned it in several major speeches. Hewitt aptly leapfrogs the conversation:

Whatever one concludes about this debate, most serious observers connect Libya's disarmament of WMD with America's overthrow of Saddam, and aren't we glad this week that Qaddafi isn't sitting on his stockpile of deadly agents?

Hewitt's argument is preferable to those that credit Bush and his freedom agenda for Egypt's Nile grassroots revolution. What's still at issue isn't Bush's admirable post-Sept. 11 vision of a freer Middle East and Persian Gulf region but the use of force to bring it about. Besides, how could the Egyptians have been inspired by Iraq, since its inenviably tenuous democracy occurred as the result of an invasion by Western powers?

But Libya's self-de-rogue-ification because it didn't want to mess with Texas was a definite win for Bush, U.S. interests in the years since, and Libya's besieged people today.

Holy Sheik

I'll leave aside the inappropriateness of "an Australian journalist and Internet activist" deciding which classified documents pertaining to the security of my country should be made public. On this question, I trust Barack Obama a lot more than Julian Assange. I'll bet Obama's beginning to develop an appreciation of Richard Nixon's frustration over the Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers (which led to the Plumbers, which led to Watergate). I also appreciate the care the New York Times put into its decision to publish 100 of the leaked documents, some of them redacted at the request of the Obama administration.

Beyond the appalling fact of the leak itself, so far the biggest story seems to be this:

[T]he cables reveal how Iran’s ascent has unified Israel and many longtime Arab adversaries — notably the Saudis — in a common cause. Publicly, these Arab states held their tongues, for fear of a domestic uproar and the retributions of a powerful neighbor. Privately, they clamored for strong action — by someone else.

And this:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia...according to another cable repeatedly implored Washington to “cut off the head of the snake” while there was still time.

The king is shown here. Other Arab leaders concur with his view.

The sheiks rarely utter a public criticism of Iran and yet privately urge the U.S. and Israel to start a war that could end up making Iraq and Afghanistan look like sideshows. What's the basis of these warmongers' inauthentic public solidarity with Tehran? They're Arabs and the Iranians, Persians, so they're not bound by ethnicity. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are tyrannies that practice apartheid against women, but that's probably not it. Within Islam, Sunni and Shiites are rivals, which could be part of the reason the sheiks want the mullahs snuffed. But they'd never have said so openly, because far more important is their ostensible mutual hatred of Israel -- which, these documents make clear, the Saudis actually hate somewhat less than they hate Iran.

So what's the right U.S. policy? It's certainly not fighting a war for the sake of the Saudis' interests or regional standing, oil or no oil. Do we go to war preemptively to stop the Iranian nuclear program for our own or Israel's sake, as Lindsey Graham and others have advocated? Only if we think the Iranians are lunatics who would invite the obliteration of their civilization by using their bomb, against Israel or any other U.S. ally or interest. But if the Tehran leaders are rational like everyone else in the world, then they can be influenced, bought, and if necessary deterred. That should be the basis of U.S. policy, just as in the Cold War, when the Soviet Union threatened our interests far more than Iran does.

As for whether Israel launches a strike, is it too naive to say that that's Israel's business?

Man Up, And Pass The Iced Tea

Richard Dreyfuss's snarling caricature of Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's "W." seemed way off base. but now the former president himself has described being called out by his real-life #2 over fine bone china:

At one point during their private weekly lunch, Mr. Cheney questioned whether Mr. Bush would follow through on the threats against Mr. Hussein. “Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?” Mr. Cheney demanded.

No Bullhorn

At the Nixon library, it's the president's White House aides vs. the federal government over what the public gets to see about Watergate. But that's nothing compared to what the George W. Bush library is up against: Church people! The New York Times reports about a controversy over what sounds like a benign exhibition of Bush artifacts that's been assembled to mark the groundbreaking of his presidential center on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas:

“I hope that a bullhorn will not become the symbol for the entry of the United States into an unjustified war and that a pistol of Saddam Hussein’s is not seen as some strange symbol of victory in that horrendous misjudgment,” said Tex Sample, an elder in the Methodist Church who helped lead the opposition to the Bush Institute’s placement at S.M.U. “That these should be the symbols of the values and commitments of the Bush administration and should now become the face of Southern Methodist University is cause for alarm.”

Gone

Photo by Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times

"Come Home America" Watch, Day 37

Dick Cheney accused President Obama of dithering over Afghanistan. George Will (who, it must be noted, wants our troops out) has fired back. "The Huffington Post":

"A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction," Will said on ABC's "This Week. "For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action."

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 26.75

Steve Metz says that since the U.S. will never spend what's necessary to build up nations that nurture terrorism, counter-terrorism may be the only policy left, especially in Afghanistan:

If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability--and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea--the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

Iraq At the Water's Edge

A former Spanish ambassador to the U.S. recalls a gracious gesture by Sen. Kennedy:

Shortly after the Iraq war started I saw Senator Kennedy in a public session of the U.S. Supreme Court. As we were taking our seats he briefly took my arm and told me he greatly appreciated the attitude of the Spanish government regarding the decision taken by the White House because, he said, "although you know my position " -- he was one of the few senators to oppose the authorization for the war -- "I appreciate the solidarity with my country in times like this." "I would appreciate if you relay this to President Aznar," he added.

Different Memes Entirely

Andrew Sullivan suggests that conservative bloggers are being hypocritical for savaging the Obama administration's alarmist though unverifiable statements about right-wing extremism while ignoring reports that during the Bush administration the NSA may have broken the law by collecting too much electronic data.

I'm all for political ironies, but this one doesn't wash. There's no question that some in the Bush administration lost perspective after Sept. 11. We need thorough investigations by journalists and historians of how we ended up in Iraq and probably by a government commission of the administration's dalliance with torture. But I never felt threatened by electronic eavesdropping, because I never had the remotest suspicion that Bush was interested in anything besides possible terrorist connections. If Bush and his team overreached, it was to protect the interests of the United States and the lives of innocent Americans.

I do feel threatened (offended is a better word) by the Obama administration's suggestion that if I want lower federal income taxes, I'm a potential Timothy McVeigh. President Obama and his advocates might say that it somehow helps the country to stigmatize the right, but it really has to do with the appropriations debates and the 2010 elections. So in the end, when comparing memes, motives may matter most.

Obama To Marines: "You Got The Job Done"

The New Nixon's Frank Gannon likes what he heard from the President at Camp Lejeune.

Best News Of The Day

Obama and McCain converge on Iraq.

Tending Towards Statism

During the Oct. 15 Presidential debate, moderator Bob Schieffer confronted Sens. McCain and Obama with a harsh reality. At least to him, it didn't look like the snowballing financial crisis would permit any big spending. Here's how I liveblogged the exchange:

Question on deficits; aren’t both sides ignoring reality? What from your $200 billion+ proposals will you cut back? Obama doesn’t answer. McCain doesn’t either, at first. Pushes mortgage plan and energy independence. Then: Across-the-board spending freeze. Will cut subsidies for ethanol as well as tariffs on sugar-cane imports. Finally an answer, followed by an attack on Obama as a pork-barrel beneficiary. Prof. Obama explains why across-the-board freezes don’t work (Washington insiders don’t let them work is why; he doesn’t say this, however). Ritualistic attack on McCain for voting for four out of five Bush budgets.

Perhap when Obama wasn't answering, he was thinking, "Cut back $200 billion? Heck, Bob, I'll spend four times that by President's Day, and even then my progressive friends will be heaping hot coals on Republicans for nickel-and-dimeing me out of the last $100 billion. Within four months of tonight, the House appropriations committee will have dusted off a generation's worth of its Democratic members' thwarted dreams, and I will have stuffed the whole package down the country's throat by promising catastrophe if they don't go along with me. Not only will I not pare back my promises, Bob, I'm going to use this crisis to devise a structural increase in the size of the federal budget to the tune of 15-20% with even less debate than the last round of salary increases for federal judges."

Schieffer's question was a naive, Herbert Hoover kind of thing, suggesting that fiscal discipline would be the main way out of our troubles. The candidates played along, McCain by endorsing spending freezes and Obama by criticizing George W. Bush's deficits. How times have changed. Obama's deficits will dwarf Bush's, and liberals once again reckon deficits as righteousness, just as Bush did (and critics didn't) when they were undertaken in the name of national security and the Iraq war.

If Obama had offered a glimpse of his plans, then today I'd agree with all those who say that he had a mandate for the stimulus package and the massive increase in the size and role of government it portends. I might even agree with critics of the GOP such as Andrew Sullivan who say that refusing to give the measure bipartisan support was irresponsible during such a severe crisis.

But Obama didn't, and so I don't. Since McCain was probably doomed after the Lehman Bros. collapse in mid-September, Obama's victory wasn't a mandate dramatically to re-envision the role of government in the name of recession recovery. To be fair and balanced, Ronald Reagan's critics said the same about his 1981 tax increases. Some economists argue that the tax cuts didn't drive the mid-1980s recovery, just as Obama's critics will say that the business cycle had more to do with the recovery (assuming it comes) than the stimulus.

Since historians and journalists still debate the effectiveness of the New Deal, one assumes these partisan and ideological debates about the relative merits of tax cuts, social spending, public works projects, and frugality will persist forever. As President Nixon once told me, it's always about right vs. left. Perhaps there's even some comfort in that, especially for those of us who think the right answer is usually somewhere in the middle. But Reagan was right as well: The federal budget never shrinks. The arc of the fiscal universe is long, and it tends toward statism.

Reshaping Liberalism Without Bill Kristol

From neoconservative William Kristol's last column in the New York Times:

Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, apologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

The Washington Post says Kristol was hired for a year and has left the Times at the end of the year by mutual agreement. The Times does disclose this:

"It seems to me there were a lot of Times readers who felt the Times shouldn't hire someone who supported the Iraq war," said [editorial page editor Fred] Hiatt, adding that he wants "a diverse range of opinions" on his page.

At least for a while.

Quagmire Brewing?

Helene Cooper:

[E]ven as Mr. Obama’s military planners prepare for the first wave of the new Afghanistan “surge,” there is growing debate, including among those who agree with the plan to send more troops, about whether — or how — the troops can accomplish their mission, and just what the mission is.

Afghanistan has, after all, stymied would-be conquerors since Alexander the Great. It’s always the same story; the invaders — British, Soviets — control the cities, but not the countryside. And eventually, the invaders don’t even control the cities, and are sent packing.

Think Iraq was hard? Afghanistan, former Secretary of State Colin Powell argues, will be “much, much harder.”

Bush Critics Without A Hitch

Christopher Hitchens makes the case for George W. Bush:

[Had Democrats been in office, we] might have avoided the Iraq war, even though both Bill Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions, unavoidably in our future. And the inconvenient downside to avoiding the Iraq intervention is that a choke point of the world economy would still be controlled by a psychopathic crime family that kept a staff of WMD experts on hand and that paid for jihadist suicide bombers around the region. In his farewell interviews, President Bush hasn't been able to find much to say for himself on this point, but I think it's a certainty that historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein was something that the international community ought to have postponed any further. (Indeed, if there is a disgrace, it is that previous administrations left the responsibility undischarged.)