(if I were the) King of the Forest

Richard Clarke’s charges that the Bush administration ignored the growing threat of Al Quaeda – and ignored his own prescient warnings about that threat – in the months leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center became a cause celebre among those who wished fervently to believe both in the incompetence or venality of the President and his policies and in the capacity for government to keep us safe from such atrocities. If we only listened to smart and dedicated people like Richard Clarke (and his old boss, Bill Clinton) then we could have back our golden age.

That is certainly the story that was told by the news media. But notwithstanding subsequent revelations about Mr. Clarke’s apparent epiphany on the dangers of Islamic Fascism between his services on the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams, is it really reasonable to expect that a new President and a new administration – even if they have both a vision and a mandate – is going to turn around decades of policy thought and practice in their first nine months in office?

The question of the day seems to be whether Spain’s election results and subsequent announcement that they would withdraw their troops from Iraq amounted to an exercise in democracy or an act of appeasement. Notwithstanding the vehemence and sanctimony accompanying pronouncements either way, the answer may simply be “Yes. Both.”

The rebellion in Haiti that brought U.N. peacekeepers to the island early in 2004 came during the heat of the Democratic presidential primary season. As a result every candidate felt the need not only to make some pronouncement on the situation but to criticize the administration for its response. At times it seemed the response itself was irrelevant to the critique – politics demanded criticism whatever the policy might be.

Periodically in discussing issues surrounding nuclear non-proliferation someone – typically but not always someone from some Islamic country – will assert that we have no right to deny the likes of Saddam Hussein or the Iranian Ayatollahs access to nuclear weapons – that such a demand amounts to imperialism, that it interferes with the self-determination of their peoples and usurps their legitimate sovereignty. Inevitably the need for nuclear weapons in the hands of such countries is rationalized by the need to “counter the threat” from Israeli nuclear weapons or from our own. And inevitably attempts to limit the number of nuclear nations in the world are classified as arrogance, the presumption that only members of the nuclear club are sophisticated and moral enough to be trusted with such power.

There is some validity to the issue of the usurpation of sovereignty – although if we wish to be so solicitous of sovereignty we really should have a debate over what constitutes legitimate sovereignty in the modern era of human rights and ascendant democracy. But where nuclear weapons are concerned basic survival, not sovereignty, is really the most fundamental consideration. And if our desire that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il not have nuclear weapons represents a presumption that they are not sophisticated and moral enough to be trusted with such capabilities, that presumption is not arrogant but prudent.

In November of 2003 Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times used his column to announce a contest to rename the Iraq war, which the military had dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was my entry.

Notwithstanding their characterization by opponents of the war in Iraq, arguments in favor of war were never as simplistic or one-dimensional as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, imminent or otherwise, and never presumed any direct link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center.

So it is with the ABM treaty. Abrogating it may or may not be wise policy but, Mr. LaFortune’s outrage notwithstanding, it is not a violation of international law and it is not a moral affront to the international community.

The case of Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy whose mother drowned trying to get herself and her son to America, illustrated both the sanctimoniousness of the American Left in dismissing concerns about political and economic freedom under socialist governments, and the ineptitude of the American Right in articulating them.