Larry Sabato’s "Crystal Ball" is often a good indication

of what the hard-boiled political analysts think. Sabato writes

about Sen. John Kerry and the war. "It’s also possible that John

Kerry will reap the benefits of being Clintonian, of voting to authorize the Iraq

war while speaking up against aspects of it and calling for ‘regime change’ in

the U.S., not just Iraq." Sabato then reminds us of Clinton’s position: "In

1991 Bill Clinton uttered this marvelously ambiguous, pre-‘the meaning of is’

statement about the congressional debate for authorization of the Persian Gulf

War: ‘I guess I would have voted with the majority [for the war] if it was a close

vote. But I agree with the argument that the minority made [against the war].’

In other words, in true Clintonian fashion he managed glibly to avoid antagonizing

either side, while giving both sides hope that he was secretly one of them."

Continue reading →

[Written

when the war appeared to be going very badly for the US, at least according to

the pundits on TV. …]

Passions are running high over the war, as

they should. Invading Iraq may turn out to be a disastrous decision leading to

massive suffering and death in the Middle East and permanent damage to our own

republic. Yet it is important not to let the passionate seriousness of the issue

ruin our national political culture. Perhaps we ought to keep these points in

mind:

Continue reading →

We’re back from a week in Greece. This is a civic/political blog, not a personal diary, so I will refrain from describing our many adventures. I can, however, file a report on how the current war looks from Greece. A few vignettes:

• We’re staying in the medieval walled village of Kastro, on the island of Siphnos—at the opposite side of the island from the port. It would seem to be a remote and isolated spot (especially during the off-season, with all ferries cancelled because of gale-force winds), far from the world and its troubles. But when we go upstairs to answer the phone in our landlords’ apartment one morning, the whole family is weeping (quite literally) at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the first marketplace bombing in Baghdad. The father clutches his chest and says, “My heart is black, black. Bush—this all for money.”
• A repeated scene, replayed in every taverna, coffee shop, ferryboat lounge, and hotel lobby we enter. A TV is on in the corner showing the al-Jazeera feed from Baghdad with Greek commentary that we can’t read, while Greeks, wreathed in cigarette smoke, sit watching and forming their opinions. These TV’s are often our only source of news, so we peer at the Greek text for clues about what is happening one time zone to the east, conscious all the time that everyone knows we are Americans.
• Eating ice cream at the elegant cafe atop Lykavittos Hill, overlooking the Parthenon and hundreds of thousands of Greeks who are marching from Parliament toward the U.S. Embassy. We’ve picked this spot, in part, because we’re responsible for two kids whom we want to keep away from any rioting, and we don’t think that the marchers will possibly try to ascend Lykavittos. Chants, unintelligible to us, float up from the Athens streets.

And now we’re back. Time always seems to slow while you travel, or expand like a fan with all the details of each day still clear in your mind. It seems forever since you left your usual life. And then you return to your routine, and the fan snaps closed. You feel that you were gone for just a dimly remembered day or two.

I’ve been thinking a bit about various theories that eorge

Bush is pursuing war for unstated motives, some nefarious and some honorable.

These thought are prompted by a Michael

Kinsley editorial and various conversations and email exchanges with friends.

As a general rule, I don’t believe that we should try to assess leaders’ motives.

That’s because:

1. We can never tell for sure what their motives are.

   (Or even what motivates our own actions.)

2. Motives don’t matter.

   You can do a bad or stupid thing with the best intentions, or you can do a great

   thing for awful reasons. We need to spend our time thinking about policies, not

   policymakers.

3. A focus on motives makes us turn for advice to insiders,

   those who may have insight into leaders’ secret thoughts. (For example, presidential

   advisors, speaking off the record.) We should instead listen to fellow citizens

   and experts with knowledge of the substantive issue.

Unfortunately,

we cannot make a very intelligent judgment about war in Iraq, because so much

of the important information that George W. Bush has on his desk is classified.

Also, much depends on how the war will turn out in the end. No one knows, but

George Bush’s motives are relevant, since he will make many crucial decisions.

Thus it is hard not to think about his motives as a surrogate way of grappling

with the issue.

This blog is becoming interactive! My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres sent

me the following email, which I quote with his permission: "Hey peter,

scouted out your blog today, and noted your irritation

with European anti-war movement. Is it safe to say their anti-americanism,

or is it their tactics to get in the way of Bush policy? Anyway, thought

you might find ‘of

paradise and power: america and europe in the new world order‘ of

interest: robert kagan lays out a hobbesian vs. kantian mood form each."

Lars then followed up with a set of good references to the whole question

of US-European relations, including this link to the Foreign

Policy Association. To Lars’ list, I would add Timothy Garten Ash’s

good New York Review piece

that collects virulently anti-European comments by senior US officials.

These are at least as inflammatory and unjustified as the anti-American

comments that set me off.

I suppose my suspicions about European anti-Americanism were born a long

time ago, especially in graduate school in England. There’s a lot of bad

faith and scapegoating on the European left: a desire to attribute bad

things to the US when European countries are just as responsible. I also

think that people on the European left tend to attribute undesirable features

of American life to something intrinsic and cultural about us—for

instance, "American individualism"—when the causes of our

problems apply to them as well. Three examples:

• I was in Britain when American teenagers started mass shootings in

  high schools. Universally, British pundits attributed these crimes to

  a profound sickness in US culture. I would have said that the "epidemic"

  of school shootings (which involved about 1 in every ten million students)

  was not a symptom of anything; it was a copy-cat phenemonon. Indeed,

  copy-cat school killers subsequently turned up in France, Scotland,

  and Germany.

• European critics generally analyze vulgar popular culture as a reflection

  of American culture, although European and Japanese firms generate a

  considerable amount of it; the US also produces a mighty stream of high

  culture; and the demand for the worst products is global. So I think

  it’s largely irrelevant to interpret Hollywood and pop music as "American"

  phenomena.

• Our social policy is more conservative than the norm in European,

  although the gap is not as big as Europeans tend to think. (They focus

  on the federal government and don’t realize that our states take 8.5

  percent of GNP in taxes and spend it on domestic programs. As a result,

  the government’s share of GNP is almost exactly the same—30 percent—in

  the US

  and in Sweden.) In any case, I do not believe that our social policy

  is more conservative because of American individualism or some other

  feature of our culture. We have a median

  family income of $62,228 (for 4-person families). At that level,

  people don’t believe that they will benefit from social spending, except

  to support retirement and local public education. Hence the solid support

  for Social Security and Medicare and local education. In Europe, median

  family incomes are lower—but rising. Hence the political center

  in Europe is gradually drifting right, and will not stop soon.

Which brings us to the current debate about Iraq. I think the French

and others are completely right that we should postpone an invasion and

try to strengthen the inspections. But to what extent is this difference

of opinion a result of a cultural gap between the Europeans (allegedly

"from Venus") and the Americans ("from Mars")? The

US has an offensive military capacity that the Europeans lack, singly

and collectively. So perhaps the US must play bad cop in order

to allow the Europeans to play good cop. Absent a military threat from

the US, there would be no inspections, and the Saddam regime would go

completely unchecked and unchallenged. This would be morally unacceptable

to the European left, especially if European companies continued to do

profitable business with Iraq. If this is right, then there are not different

cultures on either side of the Atlantic. Rather, the West is one culture;

it relies on a powerful military that happens to be headquartered in the

USA.

None of which excuses the ham-handed and sometimes offensive way in which

Rumsfeld and other Bushies handle diplomacy ….