The Informationist

On Iraq, the problem remains that from day one, Bush underemphasized the real goals of the mission. Much of his dialog early on focused on regime change and WMDs. He allocated the resources appropriate to changing the regime, changed it, and ascertained that Iraq is not overrun with WMDs. Missions accomplished. So why are we still there?

We’re there because those were never the real missions, they were simply the ones easiest to sell to the American people. Neither one of them made any sense at all. Bush’s critics were correct that tighter sanctions and more intrusive inspections could probalby have served those goals at least as well as military intervention.

The goal of this mission from the start has been to change the rules of the game--something that Bush always claimed, but that he buried for a long time to win over his Realist wing. Our posture in the Arab world has long been simple: the more authoritarian the better. Westerners have never much trusted Arabs, and the ability to put a single recognizable face with whom we could deal in charge of them always seemed to work. And so we--along with the Europeans--supported the House of Saud, Saddam, Arafat, Mubarak, and anyone else who could “keep those people in their place.” We would have welcomed Assad had he agreed to play by at least some of our rules--much as we have recently welcomed Qaddafi. These folks have done more to trample the aspirations and the human development of Arabs than anyone in the West.

We went into Iraq to announce: NEW RULES! We care about human rights--and if you continue suppressing them, we will shift our recognition from you to your dissidents. Basic human dignity precedes either Westphalian sovereignty or some notion of “self determination.” Bush has been rhetorically wonderful on this point; his refusal to allocate sufficient resources is more incompetence than anything else.

Unfortunately, his dissembling early on cost him much credibility--even (particularly?) among those who considered him highly credible at the time. We’re still in Iraq because we made a multi-generational investment, and the insurgency is surging because Bush is either unwilling or unable to admit what it’s going to take to do it right.

Guantanamo is a different matter. The problem there is that we have rules to deal only with criminal defendants and with POWs. We suddenly found a new category of people dangerous enough to detain: terror suspects. The problem is that they don’t fit into either category. If we call them criminals, we will either extend full constitutional protections that will make it impossible to investigate and thwart terror plots—or we will erode those protections to enable anti-terrorist methods to emerge (likely both). If we treat them as POWs subject to Geneva Convention protections, we will simply house them and feed them forever (or until the war on terror is over, whichever comes first), and learn nothing useful from them. Clearly neither category fits the situation, and none of these outcomes are acceptable.

Early on (before 2001 was out), I heard both Alan Dershowitz and Newt Gingrich (independently) push for a new set of rules appropriate for terror suspects. Nothing has happened on that front. The Democrats had the perfect opportunity to push for such a draft during Alberto Gonzalez’s confirmation hearing, but they chose instead to go for cheap political points. In the meantime, the administration has concluded that because it neither the Constitution nor the Geneva Convention bind it, it can do whatever it wants—a problem for anyone who believes that government power is always limited. I recently asked Richard Posner what he thought about this situation. He commented—in a manner reminiscent of Justice Jackson’s Korematsu opinion—that he preferred the current situation. As he sees it, rules tend to legitimate the otherwise illegitimate. Under the current situation, people can respond to exigencies as they occur, and risk either the political or legal consequences.

I suspect that anyone who has ever considered himself or herself a centrist shares the belief that good ideas can come from either side of the aisle, and that the country would be well served by politicians who tried to craft broad consensus rather than to claim narrow victories. To the extent that there is a centrist “morality,” my guess is that that’s it.

In the current climate, people who consider themselves social libertarians and economic conservatives are unlikely to be thrilled with either party. They believe that if the government was split, the parties would impose fiscal discipline upon each other, and that it would simply be hard to impose draconian social changes. People with other combinations of positions that violate the current R/D breakdown are likely to share their longing for divided government.

The coalitions that are today’s parties draw their lines in strange places. As a matter of simple logic, someone who told you where they stood on Bush’s tax cuts should not have given you any useful information vis-a-vis their thoughts on abortion. Yet somehow, they have. If you had no idea where they stood beforehand, a discovery that they supported Bush’s tax plan increased the likelihood that you placed on their being pro-life; opposition to those cuts makes them appear more likely to be pro-choice. Why? No reason grounded in logic--it’s simply the nature of the coalition.

Liberalism and Conservatism are both well defined and venerable political philosophies. Virtually no one who describes himself as a political liberal in America today is a philosophical liberal (the most common philosophy is social democracy). Political conservatives are quickly losing their own philosophical anchor, as conservatism becomes increasingly associated with moral hegemonism.

In this context, its no wonder that you’re having a hard time nailing down a centrist philosophy--much less a centrist moral center.