The killing of bin Laden will have major political consequences.

So argues Peter Beinart.

The whole article is worth reading (like most of what Beinart writes on foreign policy), but here's a sample:

[T]he view that Democrats won’t use force . . . was never true. Bill Clinton, after all, sent troops to Haiti, and bombed Bosnia and Kosovo. But barely anyone remembers those missions and because their rationale was humanitarian, they made the Democrats seem like armed social workers. The bin Laden operation, by contrast, was pure testosterone. Once U.S. intelligence tracked bin Laden to his compound, Obama chose the most aggressive option—a commando attack—rather than missile strikes, even though it risked U.S. deaths or hostages. In the mountains of Tora Bora, it’s worth remembering, George W. Bush made the opposite choice: deploying Afghan rather than American forces because he feared American casualties. And bin Laden got away. . . .

Second, the view that Democrats pray at the altar of international institutions and international law. Nonsense. . . . Obama has dramatically increased drone attacks, in Afpak and beyond, which shred international law. And this attack was so unilateral that we didn’t even consult with the “ally” on whose territory we carried it out. When Obama said he would strike in Pakistan without its permission during the campaign, few believed him; it didn’t play to type. Now it’s more likely they will.

The case for big government that Obama hasn't made

Peter Beinart lists 3 ways the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rallies captured "what the American left did wrong in the early Obama years." His last point is

the focus on “sanity.” Talk about condescending. The Tea Party types who believe that expanding government undermines their freedom are not insane. They’re tapping into a deeply-rooted American fear of government power, one that would be immediately recognizable to Calvin Coolidge or Strom Thurmond. And in the process, they’re conjuring, once again, the myth that America was born free, and surrenders a smidgen of liberty every time Washington imposes another tax or establishes another government agency. (The Tea Partiers may not be racists, but it’s hardly surprising that this idealized image of 19th Century America doesn’t impress African-Americans). The Tea Partiers, in other words, are making a serious argument, which the left too often tries to dismiss by calling them nuts. In fact, the haughtiness reflected by such insults conceals the left’s confusion over how to respond ideologically.

Beinart then goes on a tangent about how President Obama has undersold his own policies:

The Obama administration has barely tried to argue that activist government can make people more free—by, for instance, guaranteeing their health care coverage and thus freeing them to leave a dead end job. In America today, as at past moments in our history, there’s a profound debate underway not just about how to right our economy but about the relationship between capitalism and freedom. Pretending it’s not a real debate is a great way for the left to lose.

Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made the health-care point well. I'm at least convinced by their criticism of the status quo ante, though this isn't necessarily a good affirmative argument for the new law. As Klein says:

Unable to risk losing their employer-sponsored health insurance, would-be entrepreneurs don’t start small businesses, they stay in jobs that don’t maximize their productivity, they remain in positions that another worker would be better suited to.

OK, so that's a cumbersome run-on sentence. But if you edit it down to something snappier and more eloquent, why wasn't that Obama's #1 argument for health-care reform?

Short URL for this post: goo.gl/T5reP

"Comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication."

Peter Beinart, who admits that he "was comfortable there too," explains why "the American Jewish establishment" has lost its former luster among a new generation of Jews. (Via.)

A sample:

[T]he message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is . . . : since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, "Victimhood sets you free."

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

As John McWhorter has argued in a different context, the sense of victimhood, even if it begins as an entirely appropriate reaction to horrendous injustices against the victimized group, can gradually make a "transformation . . . from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself." (That's from page 2 of his 2000 book Losing the Race -- a brilliant page-turner that I give my highest recommendation.)

Previously on this blog: "How to think: Minimize your identity?"

When the fire was lit - TNR on 9/11

I'm glad to see that The New Republic has dredged up some of its old pieces conveying "the immediate reaction" to the September 11 attacks.

Here are two articles that I still remember making an impression on me:

1. Fault Lines, by Peter Beinart (Oct. 1, 2001)

Sample:

[P]erhaps the most pitiful thing about [Robert] Fisk and The Nation's efforts to rationalize bin Laden's hatred of the United States is that they don't even correspond to what bin Laden himself says. . . . In bin Laden's mind, America's greatest offense — by far — is its military presence in his home country of Saudi Arabia. . . . And that's a harder line for Western leftists to peddle. Because bin Laden isn't upset at the United States for bolstering Riyadh's oppressive policies — after all, the Saudi government's views on individual freedom and the status of women roughly mirror his own. Bin Laden is upset simply because non-Muslims live in the Holy Land around Mecca and Medina. His first priority is banishing Christians and Jews from Saudi Arabia. And his second priority is banishing Christians and Jews from every other Muslim country. As he told ABC News in 1998, "Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially the Arabian Peninsula." . . .

If Fisk and The Nation really want to argue that America brought the World Trade Center attack on itself, they shouldn't delude themselves. They are not defending the Palestinians' right to a state or the Iraqis' right to medicine. They are defending a Muslim's right not to live with a non-Muslim.

2. How to Fight, by Eliot Cohen (Sept. 24, 2001)

Sample:

We will pay a price in convenience and even, perhaps, in the full scope of our personal liberties. We will spend more time waiting in line at airports, find access to government offices more difficult, and quite likely submit to more intrusive monitoring by police and counterintelligence than we have known since the early years of the cold war. We may come to understand, at least in our big cities, the experience of Israelis today or of Londoners several years ago, when IRA bombs meant not being able to go into a cinema without having one's belongings carefully searched. Welcome to the world of omnipresent video cameras, retinal scanners, and perhaps even national identity cards.

Cohen concludes this essay by quoting Winston Churchill's response to the attacks on Pearl Harbor:

Silly people—and there were many, not only in enemy countries—might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like "a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate."

In the last sentence of the article, Cohen adds his own sentiment to Churchill's:

The fire has been lit.

Slavery vs. the draft

While discussing the general idea of national service on Bloggingheads, Peter Beinart asks Jonah Goldberg whether he's in favor of the draft.

Here's the key section from Goldberg's response, which I want to analyze:

I have a problem with compulsory military service if compulsory military service isn't needed at a time of war. . . . You know, the draft is a bad thing. It has a lot of benefits — don't get me wrong. . . . The draft is . . . an incredible . . . it is very comparable to slavery. And in some ways, it's worse than slavery, insofar as you're forcing people to kill other people and be killed. Now, it's an evil, but it's a necessary evil sometimes.

Here's the video, which includes more of the context (the above quote is from the end of this clip):



When I first heard this, my immediate thought was: "Well, he's clearly right about that — so right it's almost boring. Forcing someone to fight in a war and possibly kill or be killed is obviously worse than forcing someone to do more mundane labor, even though they're both bad."

But then I noticed that I have the following set of beliefs, which are so extremely common and mundane that I'd be surprised if you didn't share them:

1. Slavery is always immoral.

2. The draft is usually immoral, but sometimes a good idea. For instance, I would be against the United States having the draft right now, but I think it was worth having the draft during World War II.

But don't points 1 and 2 imply that the draft isn't as bad as slavery? Doesn't that contradict my agreement with Jonah Goldberg's point?

On the other hand, it's seems like the apparent contradiction can be resolved. All you have to do is acknowledge that liberty is not an absolute right, but a relative value that can be trumped by more important values. Or, to put it another way, you'd need to have not an absolute rule against infringing people's liberty, but a general rule that's subject to exceptions based on specific circumstances, e.g. the overriding need to stop the Nazis from taking over the world. Right?

Bonus question: How many made-up words does Goldberg use in that clip? I count two.