Clarke's 60 Minutes

The Wall Street Journal has a superb editorial this morning debunking the Democrats' attempt to use 9/11 as a weapon of partisan warfare. One sample:

"Inside the [9/11] commission, these [Democratic] Members have been pushing the argument that Clinton officials warned the Bush Administration about al Qaeda, only to be ignored by men and women who were too preoccupied with Iraq and missile defense to care. So having failed to contain al Qaeda during its formative decade, and having made almost no mention of this grave threat in the 2000 campaign, these officials now want us to believe that in their final hours they urgently begged the Bushies to act with force and dispatch. Sure."

Here's the key fact about Democrats in the 1990s: They saw the end of the Cold War as their personal Emancipation Proclamation. No longer would they have to contemplate the (to them) distasteful fact of international conflict. They were determined therefore to redefine all threats to US security as "trans-national" - or rather, post-national - meaning that no nation was to blame and thus all nations (except a few rogue states) could be mobilized against these threats in a Kantian league of international peace.

But al Qaeda was not really a post-national threat. It was hosted by one state, Afghanistan; acquiesced in by another, Pakistan; and funded with the at least tacit support of a third, Saudi Arabia. The Clinton people never came to grips with those realities when they had a chance. Neither (to be fair) did the Bush administration in its early months. But the Bush administration did react and react decisively and forcefully after 9/11 - and it is that reaction that has so outraged those former Clintonites who did so little when the responsibility to do something belonged to them.

Meanwhile, former Clinton counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke has released a new book - and granted an interview to "60 Minutes" - seconding these politicized charges. Unlike his former political masters, Clarke was a dedicated and effective public servant. I have yet to read his book, but I have studied his interview, and I think I understand his argument.

Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush admininstration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole. The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world. Instead, his way of presenting his concerns seems to have had the perverse effect of making the terrorist issue look small and secondary - of deflating rather than underscoring its importance.

And this propensity continues.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt - for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? - or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate - and it's the wrong side.

A Killing in Gaza

Not that we don't want to extirpate those terrorists when we can. To absorb the full two-facedness of the support of many of our European allies for the man-hunt approach, listen to what the European foreign ministries are saying about the Israeli killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, the mass-murdering chief of Hamas. The disconnect from reality is almost hallucinatory.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana wins the prize: The killing, he said, is "very, very bad news for the peace process." One has to echo Lucky Jim: The what process? The peace what?

There is no peace process: only an ongoing Palestinian terror war against Israel. There never was a peace process: only a political campaign by Yasser Arafat to accumulate as many strategic assets as possible against Israel before recommencing his terror war.

(This by the way is the same Solana who last week cautioned Europeans against "over-reacting" to the Madrid attacks. "Europe," he said, "does not find itself at war." Clearly not.)

But here's maybe the larger meaning of those words: If the European allies cannot accept the killing of the head of Hamas, who has already murdered hundreds of people, it is very hard to imagine that those same European allies would have accepted the assassination of Osama bin Laden before 9/11. And since the defining idea of American liberal Democrats is the paramount need for European approval of major American actions (see below) - then there's really no mystery at all about why the Clintonites behaved as they did before 9/11. They didn't want to upset anyone. So they did nothing. And now they're engaged in the one foreign-policy activity at which they are truly expert: blame-shifting.

Choices

On the plane to Los Angeles, I read the much-discussed new book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, formerly President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser. The book's title The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership neatly sums up its argument.

The left-wing foreign-policy writer William Pfaff complains that Brzezinski throughout his career has all too perfectly fallen in with the centrist conventional wisdom of the moment. Pfaff uncharitably points out how very wrong this centrist conventional wisdom has been: Brzezinski owes much of his fame – and thus his appointment as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser – to a book he published in 1970 that argued (to quote Pfaff) that “the Soviet Union and the United States were evolving along converging lines toward a new form of ‘technetronic’ superstate in which their science and advanced industry would leave everyone else far behind, including Western Europe and Japan.”

There are rewards for accurately foreseeing the future. Unfortunately they usually tend to come posthumously. The really big prizes tend to go to those who get things wrong in socially acceptable ways.

Yet somebody has to epitomize the conventional wisdom – and Zbigniew Brzezinski does so with unusual erudition, precision, and intelligence. He even mitigates the dour style of his book with a not-bad witticism. You’ll find it in solitary splendor on page 133: The World Economis Forum in Davos, Brzezinski tartly observes, “has become, in effect, a party congress for the new global elite.”

Those of us who disagree with him should be especially grateful to Brzezinski for laying out his argument so sparely and clearly: By doing so, he enables us to put our finger on exactly where he goes off the tracks. And here it is, on page 105:

“Europeans see terrorism less as a manifestation of evil and more as a political emanation. As such, it has to be attacked in a manner that recognizes the connection between direct measures to extirpate terrorism and policies designed to cut its political and social roots. In other words, the struggle against terrorism cannot be the central organizing principle of the West’s security policy …..”

True, at various points, Brzezinski calls on Europeans to show more sensitivity to American concerns. But it is plain that his heart is not in it. When he criticizes the U.S. government, he is specific and emphatic; when he criticizes European governments he is vague and cautious.

Thus, the United States must defer to Europe because otherwise it will be “perceived as arbitrary.” Those who oppose such deference may be seen as engaging in “fear-mongering” and “self-righteous arrogance.” They risk “defensive self-isolation” that will alienate the “democratic allies” needed to “overcome the challenge of global turmoil.”

By contrast, the Europeans need to “weigh more carefully their complaints against America.”

I don’t think it is unduly reductive to sum up Brzezinski’s message thus: “We have to stop the war on terrorism; the Europeans don’t like it.”

Throughout this book, Brzezinski treats the preferences and beliefs of European governments as unchangeable facts, like the laws of thermodynamics or the location of the Grand Canyon. American preferences and beliefs, however, he proposes to rearrange like dahlias in a flower setting. But why? Why is it America that must adapt to Europe and not the other way around? One strongly gets the impression that Brzezinski believes that Americans should defer more to Europe because the Europeans are following policies that Brzezinski approves of and the Americans are not. It is hard to avoid the impression that if some unforeseen electoral switch were to reverse this calculation – if Brzezinski liked the American president more and European policy less – he would then reverse his advice.

Decision in Canada

Stephen Harper won a decisive first-ballot victory in voting for the new leader of the new (or anyway renewed) Conservative Party of Canada. This is a great event in Canadian politics. Harper is a cerebral, tough, conviction politician very much in the Margaret Thatcher mould. He negotiated the deal that united Canada’s right-of-center parties – and then put his own leadership on the line by resigning to run as just another candidate.

The next Canadian election is expected very soon. For the first time since 1988, there will be a single, electable right-of-center alternative on the ballot in all regions of the country. The Liberals still have the edge – as indeed they always do. The Liberal Party of Canada has held power for 77 of the past 108 years. That’s the winningest record in the democratic world. It’s a better record for that matter than that racked up by Mexico’s PRI or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yet there are reasons to think that they may be heading for a bad beating at their next outing. The Liberals are embroiled in a very serious corruption scandal: They directed hundreds of millions of dollars to party favorites in Quebec, who in turn kicked back money to the party organization. Incoming prime minister Paul Martin says he knows nothing about the scandal – but since he was the minister of finance who signed the checks, and a particularly effective and inquisitive finance minister at that, many Canadians doubt him. Martin has also promised to find the “missing” funds. But as my friend Andrew Coyne points out, the money isn’t “missing.” Everybody knows where it is: in the pockets of dozens of influential Quebec Liberals.

Harper has a great opportunity – and for the first time in a long time, there’s reason to hope that the opportunity will be used. I have a column about the leadership vote in Monday’s National Post; I regret to say it is not available on line. I am seeking permission from the Post to post it or portions of it here.