Even as U.S. officials concentrate on such troubling foreign-policy issues as the stalemated six-party talks regarding North Korea’s nuclear program, the increasing likelihood that Iran may join the ranks of nuclear powers and growing tensions in relations with Russia, a serious security problem is brewing much closer to home. Violence between drug-trafficking organizations and government authorities in Mexico has exploded in the past two years. The carnage is now so extensive that American tourists increasingly avoid Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and other cities on the U.S.-Mexico border that used to be popular destinations. Worst of all, some of the chaos in Mexico is spilling over into America’s own southwestern states.
The drug trafficking problem in Mexico is not new. The country is a major source of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine for the American market as well as the principal transit and distribution point for cocaine from South America. For years, people both inside and outside Mexico have worried that the country might descend into the maelstrom of corruption and violence that plagued the chief drug supplier in the western hemisphere, Colombia, from the early 1980s to the early years of this century. There are growing signs that the “Colombianization” of Mexico is now becoming a reality.
If Mexico goes down the same path that Colombia did, the consequences to the United States will be much more severe. Colombia is relatively far away, but Mexico shares a border with the United States and is closely linked to this country economically through the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is simply no way for Americans to regard the alarming trends in our next-door neighbor with indifference.
Washington has pressed Mexican governments for years to be more proactive against the drug-trafficking gangs. Since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, U.S. officials have gotten their wish. Calderon has even given the military a lead role in combating the traffickers, a step that previous presidents had declined to take. The principal outcome of his strategy, however, has been an even greater level of violence, with military personnel increasingly being targets. The military also has now been exposed to the temptation of financial corruption that has compromised Mexico’s police forces so thoroughly.
Even supposed victories in Mexico’s drug war prove to be mixed blessings at best. As Stratfor, a risk-assessment consulting organization, notes
inter-cartel violence tends to swing upward after U.S. or Mexican authorities manage to weaken or disrupt a given organization. At any point, if rival groups sense an organization might not be able to defend its turf, they will swoop in to battle not only the incumbent group, but also each other for control.
The turf battles have been ferocious. In 2005, slightly more than one thousand three hundred people perished in drug-related violence. By 2007, the yearly total had soared to 2,673. And it continues to get worse. By mid-August 2008, the carnage for that year already exceeded the number of fatalities in all of 2007. The State Department warned American travelers in May 2008 that battles between drug-trafficking gangs (and between those gangs and Mexican military and police) in portions of northern Mexico were so severe that they constituted “small unit combat operations.” Those battles included the use of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
In addition to the extensive violence reminiscent of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, another Colombian pattern also is emerging in Mexico—the diversification of the drug gangs into kidnapping and other lucrative sources of revenue. Some reports suggest that the kidnapping problem in Mexico is now more severe than it is in Colombia, and even U.S. citizens have been victims.
U.S. officials concede that the drug-related violence in Mexico does not respect borders. According to John Walters, the director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, “The killing of rival traffickers is already spilling across the border. Witnesses are being killed. We do not think the border is a shield.” A Dallas narcotics officer reaches a similar conclusion. “We’re seeing an alarming number of incidents involving the same type of violence that’s become all too common in Mexico, right here in Dallas. We’re seeing execution-style murders, burned bodies, and outright mayhem . . . . It’s like the battles being waged in Mexico for turf have reached Dallas.”
U.S. law enforcement officials along the border are increasingly the targets of violence. A Homeland Security Committee report notes that at one time, smugglers “would drop the drugs or abandon their vehicles when confronted by U.S. law enforcement.” That is no longer the case. “In today’s climate, U.S. Border Patrol agents are fired upon from across the river and troopers and sheriff’s deputies are subject to attacks with automatic weapons while the cartels retrieve their contraband.” Some of the attacks have come from Mexicans wearing military uniforms. It is not certain whether they are smugglers with stolen uniforms or if rogue elements of the Mexican military are attacking U.S. law enforcement personnel on behalf of traffickers.
U.S. policy seems to assume that if the Mexican government can eliminate the top drug lords, their organizations will fall apart, thereby greatly reducing the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. Washington has now backed up that policy with a lucrative aid package, the Merida Initiative, to help fund law enforcement reforms and other anti-drug efforts. In the summer of 2008, Congress approved the first installment ($400 million) of what is likely to be a multi-year, multi-billion dollar program modeled after Plan Colombia, the initiative that began in 2000 for Colombia and its Andean neighbors, and which has already cost $5 billion.
The belief that neutralizing Mexican drug kingpins will achieve a lasting reduction in drug trafficking is the same assumption that U.S. officials made with respect to the crackdown on the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia during the 1990s. Subsequent developments proved the assumption to be erroneous. The elimination of those two cartels merely decentralized the Colombian drug trade. Instead of two large organizations controlling the trade, today some three hundred much smaller, loosely organized groups do so.
More to the point, the arrests and killings of numerous top drug lords in both Colombia and Mexico over the years have not had a meaningful impact on the quantity of drugs entering the United States. Cutting off one head of the drug-smuggling Hydra merely results in more heads taking its place. Jorge Chabat, a Mexican security and drug-policy analyst notes: “For years, the U.S. told Mexico’s government, ‘The problem is that the narcos are still powerful because you don’t dismantle the gangs.’ Now they’re doing just that . . . and the narcos are more powerful than ever.”
Mexico can still avoid going down the path to chaos, but time is growing short. Washington had better pay far more attention to the problem than it has to this point, and U.S. officials need to come up with better answers than the ineffectual and discredited policies of the past. If Washington continues to pursue a prohibitionist strategy, which creates the enormous black-market profits in drug trafficking, violence and corruption will become a dominant and permanent feature of Mexican life. The illicit drug trade has already penetrated the country’s economy and society to an alarming degree.
U.S. officials need to ask whether they want to risk a chaotic, embryonic narco-state on America’s southern border. If they don’t want to deal with the turmoil such a development would create, the new administration will have to reconsider the prohibitionist strategy and do so quickly.
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international issues, including Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America (2008). He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest.
The policymaking guard is changing in Washington, but the newcomers are anything but new. Unfortunately, that will encourage policy continuity. One area which desperately needs genuine change, however, is Washington’s strategy toward Cuba.
At recent public celebrations Havana’s leaders sounded defiant, but nervous. Fifty years ago, they made a revolution, but merely replaced one dictatorship with another, turning their island into an impoverished prison. As in most communist states, the nomenklatura has prospered—the hard currency stores are filled with the sort of goods Americans take for granted—but opportunity is denied anyone lacking connections. When I visited Cuba (legally), Westerners were swarmed by Cubans desperate for dollars. “Are you looking for a nice restaurant?” “Where are you from?” And the ubiquitous: “My friend, would you like some cigars?” Even the most innocuous conversation ended with a Cuban pleading for cash to buy food for his family or milk for his children.
The regime survives only because of brute force. “Resistance has been the key word,” declared Cuban President Raúl Castro as he denounced U.S. support for regime change. But he really meant resistance to the will of the Cuban people.
The big question today is whether the self-serving elite will survive the ravages of age. Fidel Castro, eighty-two, is ill and out of view. His seventy-seven-year-old brother Raúl now serves as president, but their generation will soon pass away. Regime acolytes and opposition activists alike are waiting with a mixture of expectation and trepidation.
How the revolutionary regime would have responded had Washington accepted its victory is impossible to predict. Castro & co. were no friends of liberty, but they might have chosen to accommodate the colossus next door. In any event, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, imposition of the economic embargo in early 1962, and a superpower face-off later the same year, confrontation became a constant of American policy towards Havana.
One can argue that the embargo was worth a try when Cuba acted as a hostile outpost of America’s hegemonic rival. But the cold war is over. Cuba is an irritant, not a threat. Its violations of human rights are little different than those committed by many other nations and Havana is not alone in expropriating foreign property. There is no principled reason to apply economic sanctions against Cuba and not a score of other countries.
Even more important, the embargo has failed. Cuba survived the cold war with the help of Soviet subsidies. When that aid disappeared along with the Soviet Union, the air was filled with predictions of the Castro regime’s imminent collapse. But nothing happened. Cuba got poorer while tyranny lived on. Rather like North Korea, hardship only strengthened the Communist Party’s hold on power. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has been providing assistance as of late, though those funds might diminish with the drop in oil prices. Cuban President Raúl Castro warns of greater economic hardship in the wake of Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma, as well as falling export prices. But the regime seems unlikely to change.
Unwilling to accept failure, Washington usually responded by reinforcing the embargo. For instance, President Jimmy Carter allowed travel restrictions to lapse in 1977, but President Ronald Reagan reinstated the regulations five years later. Frustrated with Castro’s continued survival, Congress further tightened the rules in 1992. Four years later Congress used the Helms-Burton Act to target the foreign companies doing business in Cuba. This extraordinary attempt at extraterritoriality triggered threats of retaliation from Europe (as a result, presidents routinely waive this provision). The Bush II administration cracked down on academic exchanges with and family visits to the island.
There may be no other foreign policy that has so consistently and obviously failed. The embargo has not ousted Castro & co., isolated the communist regime, or even prevented Washington’s closest friends and allies from doing business with Havana.
However, U.S. sanctions have given the Cuban government an excuse for its own economic failure. When I met Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation—who had spent eight years in Castro’s prisons—he complained that the “sanctions policy gives the government a good alibi to justify the failure of the totalitarian model in Cuba.” Ambassador Vicki Huddleston, who then headed the U.S. interests section (America’s quasi-embassy) in Havana, agreed: “Castro has found the embargo to be convenient to him,” since he “uses it very effectively all the time, making us the Goliath and Cuba the David.”
Huddleston pointed to another ill consequence of U.S. policy. Washington’s high-profile campaign against Cuba turned Fidel Castro, the petty dictator of a small, poor and geopolitically irrelevant state, into the symbol of third world defiance of American and Western imperialism. Had the U.S. government ignored Cuba, people around the world would have found Castro to be a much less compelling figure.
These days Washington is alone—in November only Israel and Palau voted with the United States against a motion condemning the embargo in the UN General Assembly. Even many Cuban human rights activists, like Elizardo Sanchez, argue that the embargo has been counterproductive. If sanctions have not worked over nearly half a century, does anyone really believe they will achieve anything positive in the coming years?
In fact, the sanctions really are a political substitute for a serious policy, designed to appeal to one ethnic community in Florida. Until now, no presidential contender was willing to risk the votes of Cuban-Americans, who traditionally advocated tough policies towards Havana. However, younger Cuban-Americans are shifting towards engagement, and a majority of under-thirties voted for President-elect Obama—indeed, he would have won the presidency even without carrying Florida. Thus, he has a unique opportunity to adopt a new approach towards Cuba.
In barely two weeks, Barack Obama will become the eleventh president to deal with the Castros. During the campaign, he endorsed relaxing restrictions on travel and remittances, but said he supported the embargo—viewing it as “an important inducement to change” to be lifted once “freedom and justice” are achieved in Cuba. However, this is a prescription for stasis. No regime will negotiate itself out of power, embargo or not.
The new president and Congress should drop the sanctions, leaving Americans to travel to and conduct business with the island nation as they see fit. There should be no official aid—the U.S. government should not underwrite the failures of the regime whether in the name of commerce or humanitarianism. But let American tourists and businessmen become informal agents of subversion, naturally undermining the brutal and sclerotic regime.
Would lifting the embargo lead to economic and political reform? There are no guarantees. Raúl may be more pragmatic than Fidel, but he seems no less dedicated to maintaining Communist Party control. However, the embargo has had nearly five decades to displace the new communist oligarchy and has failed to do so. Maintaining the status quo will only benefit existing elites. Engagement offers the possibility of positive change.
Policy towards Cuba may seem like a minor issue given President-elect Obama’s full foreign-policy agenda. But he has a unique opportunity to redirect U.S. strategy. The embargo has failed in all of its manifestations. Its support is waning, even in Florida, which the president-elect didn’t need to win the presidency. He should act quickly after taking office; then the controversy will fade long before 2012, when engagement will have become the new status quo. Moreover, by then the cracks which we already see in Cuba’s communist wall may have widened, allowing the Cuban people to finally enter a freer and more prosperous era. That would be change in which we all could believe.
Doug Bandow is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon).
President Obama: A Realist Interventionist?
By Leon HadarFiguring out the direction President Barack Obama’s foreign policy will take has become a full-time job for pundits and foreign diplomats in Washington. And a key question on everyone’s mind is how exactly Obama will seek to exert influence as the American Empire shrinks.
A clear consensus among Washington cognoscenti on the direction of “Obadiplomacy” has yet to emerge, despite nearly two years of presidential campaigning and a full slate of Cabinet nominees. This points to two possibilities. First, that Obama has a coherent foreign policy vision and a strategy to implement it, but that he and his aides are keeping it top secret—a great skill for those who want to win victories in the games that nations play.
Or that Obama does not have a grand diplomatic strategy à la Cold War containment or the “war on terror.” If such is the case, the evolution of foreign policy under Obama could be a process of trial and error, a cost-effective diplomatic approach in which major decisions are made in response to political and economic pressures at home and abroad.
If the second possibility eventually comes to define the Obama presidency, we can be certain of one thing—the Washington foreign policy elite will not be sated. Whether they are on the right or the left, hawks or doves, liberal internationalists or neoconservatives, foreign policy “professionals” tend to gravitate to grand strategies that reflect their favorite intellectual fads or narratives—like Fukuyama’s End of History, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Kaplan’s Coming Global Anarchy, or the neocon’s Islamofascism threat. Intellectuals are drawn to global crusades to promote a collective good that tends to be transfused with a sense of adventure and romance.
But after eight years of foreign policy fantasies, the notion of an Obama administration muddling through foreign policy choices should be welcomed, even by those who will be disappointed if the new president’s choices fall short of our high expectations.
In making our predictions about Obama’s policies, many of us project our hopes and fears. Many opponents of the neoconservative agenda supported the Obama candidacy based on his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, stated willingness to dialogue with Iran and Syria, and apparent commitment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Compared to the ideologues and fanatics who were recently in charge of U.S. diplomacy, Obama has seemed a staunch member of the antiwar camp. This explains much of the enthusiasm that he garnered among antiwar bloggers during the Democratic primaries, when he challenged then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had voted in favor of the congressional resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq.
But there is a certain element of wishful thinking in this image of Obama. Obama’s earlier opposition to the Iraq War corresponded to the constituency he represented as an Illinois State Senator. But he never proposed that his position on Iraq was grounded in any leftwing or progressive anti-interventionist principles. Instead, he reiterated several times during the campaign that he respected the realpolitik types who were responsible for the more traditional diplomacy of the first President Bush. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports Obama consulted with one of these realist luminaries, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, about his foreign policy picks for the new administration.
Some hopes of progressive and libertarian antiwar activists were already dashed when Obama announced he would retain Robert Gates as defense secretary, and nominate Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and retired General James Jones as his national security advisor. The non-interventionists’s mood was probably not improved after reading reports about the potential role that former Clinton administration aides like Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, or Richard Holbrooke—known for their pro-interventionist approaches—might play in the administration. Indeed, those of us who were hoping, wishing, and praying for the making of a new U.S. foreign policy paradigm—that would disengage militarily from the Middle East, end the special relationship with Israel, withdraw from NATO, terminate military pacts with Japan and South Korea, and take a less belligerent approach towards Russia—were bound to be disappointed by many of Obama’s selections for his foreign policy team.
But then Obama never stated that he would embrace the non-interventionist agendas of Taft Republicans or McGovern Democrats. President Bush père and President Clinton have been his role models when it comes to diplomacy and national security. And these two were both committed to maintaining the U.S. dominant position in the post-Cold War era, including through the use of military force. It is true that neither Bush père nor Clinton embraced the more ambitious neoconservative policy proposals that called for invading countries in the Middle East and establishing a permanent U.S. military presence there. And while they and their aides had occasionally employed Wilsonian rhetoric, they never had any urge to “liberate” Iraq and implant democracy in the Middle East. Theirs was a pragmatic—or opportunistic—foreign policy that took advantage of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the only potential challenger of U.S. hegemony, as well as America’s economic might, to establish a dominant U.S. position in the Middle East and East Asia, to expand NATO to the borders of Russia, and to continue calling the shots at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. Under them, Washington was able maintain an American Empire whose military and economic costs were largely acceptable to the U.S. public.
Obama, with the help of the Clintonites and the Scowcrofts, is hoping to recreate that kind of cost-effective Pax Americana. Applying diplomatic means to reach a “grand bargain” with Iran and to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process could permit the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq and reassert its influence in the region. Creative statesmanship could also help reduce tensions in South Asia and create the conditions for stability in Afghanistan. Working more closely with the European Union (EU), the country could bargain and make deals with the Russians. And then there is America’s “soft power,” pumped-up by the sex-appeal of Mr. Cosmopolitan Cool himself, which might win the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere.
Indeed, during his inaugural address, Obama seemed to reiterate the kind of internationalist and realist principles embraced by Bush père while avoiding any mention of “axis of evil' or the term “war on terrorism.” Instead, he projected a mix of tough pragmatism and soft idealism. '”We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” he said, sending a message to Iran, Syria, and other governments Bush II refused to engage and sought to isolate. And he specifically addressed the Muslim world, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”.
Two days after entering office, Obama announced that former Sen. George Mitchell would be his special envoy to the Middle East to help revive the Israeli-Palestinian process, and that former Clinton aide Richard Holbrooke would serve as his special envoy to South Asia. Obama’s selection of the Lebanese-American Mitchell and not of Dennis Ross, an American-Jewish diplomat perceived as being one-sidedly sympathetic to Israel, was seen by some as an indication that Obama intends to embrace a more even-handed approach towards the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Moreover, there is a rising expectation in Washington that Obama will use his charismatic and cosmopolitan persona, including his quasi-Muslim roots, to re-energize U.S. diplomatic influence and accentuate its commitment to be an honest broker in the Middle East. Obama and his skilled foreign policy advisors will demonstrate that Washington can revive now the dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process, overcome the many obstacles to a political settlement, and help bring peace to the Holy Land.
At least that’s the way many in Washington and the media seem to see things. They insist that not before long, the Obama administration will bring stability and peace to Middle East (and South Asia and the Caucus and to…) where supposedly everyone is waiting for the United States to exert its leadership role. If Obama builds America’s “standing” in the world, they—the Israelis and Palestinians (and Indians and Pakistanis)—will come to the negotiation table and make peace.
But once again, these high expectations may not be fulfilled. The problem is that the United States of 2009 has clearly lost its position as the Global Number One. It could find it very difficult to secure even the less ambitious goal of being first among equals. The debacle in Iraq coupled with the horrific costs of the financial crisis have eroded U.S. military and economic power and, by extension, its diplomatic influence. This change in the balance of power is driven to a large extent by growing public opposition to the Iraq War and to new military interventionism.
The country’s diminished leverage is also demonstrated in the failure to contain Iran’s rising power and growing influence through surrogates in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Notwithstanding strong opposition from the Bush administration, Israel decided to open negotiations with Syria while Lebanon invited Hezbollah to join the government. Moreover, the Europeans and the Egyptians—not the Americans—played the leading role in achieving a cease-fire during the recent Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
If Washington could not get an Israeli-Palestinian peace process going at the height of the 2000 “Unipolar Moment”—when the Israelis and the Palestinians were less radicalized and led by strong and moderate leaderships—there is little reason to expect President Obama will become an instant Holy Land peacemaker. With a worn-out military and an economy in a down-turn trajectory, Obama and the rest of Washington will be forced to recognize this reality, sooner or later. But the process of a great power adjusting to changes in the balance of power tends to be long and painful.
Economists have drawn attention to the time lag between when an actual economic shock (such as sudden boom or bust) occurs, and when it is recognized by economists, central bankers, and the government. The existence of this time lag—or, to use the economic term, recognition lag—explains why, for example, it has taken economists so long to signal the current economic recession..
One can identify a similar lag between the time when an international crisis, like a military conflict, takes place, and the time when officials, pundits, and the public recognize its effect on the global balance of power. Hence, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which devastated the military and economic power of the two leading empires, Great Britain and France, it was still common for officials and journalists to refer to these declining nation-states as Great Powers.
The same kind of lag can be observed in the way officials and pundits have failed to recognize the combined impact of the Iraq War and the financial crisis have had on U.S. long-term standing in the international system. There is a tendency in Washington to attribute its declining influence to the Bush administration’s mismanagement of U.S. diplomacy and national security policy. But even the most visionary and competent U.S. president will be constrained in his ability to “do something” whenever an international crisis takes place or to create incentives for global and regional players to work with it.
Will Iran be interested in playing diplomatic ball with the U.S.? Will the Europeans continue to follow U.S. leadership or will they try to make separate deals with Russia? China and India are climbing up the economic and military ladder just as America seems to be stepping down. Realpolitik in the Obama Age could prove to be a painful cost-cutting exercise as Washington readjusts to the realities of the post-neoconservative era. In that case, imperial retrenchment could prove to be the default choice of the new president.
Leon Hadar, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a contributor to PRA’s Right Web (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/), is author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (2006). He blogs at globalparadigms.blogspot.com.
Becoming a Christian Citizen: Electoral Lessons from the Religious Right for the Religious LeftBy Frederick Clarkson
Frederick Clarkson is the editor ofDispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America (IgPublishing), from which this commentary is adapted. He is a member ofthe editorial board of The Public Eye.
The main reason why the Religious Right became powerful is not what most people may think. Some would undoubtedly point to the powerful communications media. Others might identify charismatic leaders, the development of“wedge issues,” or even changes in evangelical theology in the latter part of the twentieth century that supported, and even demanded, political action. All of these and more, especially taken together, were important factors. But the main reason for the Religious Right’s rise to power has been its capacity for political action, particularly electoral politics.
Meanwhile, over on the Religious Left, many of the ingredients are present for a more dynamic movement. But the ingredient that is most remarkably lacking on the Religious Left is the one that made the Religious Right powerful: a capacity for electoral politics. Indeed, there has never been anything on the Religious Left on the scale of say, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority or Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition—or even any of dozens of significant Religious Right groups—including the 35 state political affiliates of Focus on the Family—that have had any significant national or regional electoral muscle.
Conservative evangelicals have figured out what it means to be a Christian and a citizen. This new identity easily integrates Christian nationalist ideology and notions of Christian citizens’ place in history, which in turn helps to inform and to animate their politics. It is in this sense that the ideology of Christian nationalism—America as a Christian Nation—mixes with theology. It appeals to those invested in the idea that they are living in the end times (á làwriterTim LaHaye and Pastor John Hagee) and nonapocalyptic, long term theocratic political activists.
While many fine organizations on the Religious Left, broadly defined, register voters and even mobilize them when elections roll around, I know of none for whom building electoral power and changing elections is a central activity. Even worse, some see electoral politics as a waste of time and even a tacit endorsement of the excesses of the power structure. I do not agree with such dour assessments, nor do I think that electoral politics is a panacea.
Here is what I do think:
I think that anyone who is serious about the distribution of power in this constitutional democracy, and who wants to accomplish anything much, needs a broad electoral strategy that is central, not peripheral to their activities. This also means developing the capacity to carry it out in practice and not just on paper. That is why I think that the Religious Left, in order to create a more just society, is going to need to take electoral politics more seriously— and not just as a happy religious auxiliary of the Democratic or any other party.
Getting a few religious leaders to stand up and say, “We are Christians, too,” as a counter to the Religious Right in the media is fine, as far as it goes. But electoral politics is a defining activity of constitutional democracy in America. With unions on the wane, it is the principal avenue for gaining sufficient popular power to improve the lives of the poor and the marginalized via government and public policy—as well as to address the entire constellation of progressive concerns. And by electoral politics, I do not mean merely voting or encouraging others to do so. I mean actually mastering the mechanics of electoral politics and sustaining a permanent activist presence in our communities, unconnected to the fortunes of one or another candidate. And not just a shell group (or group of shells) to be revved-up only in the run-up to an election.
Getting a few religious leaders to stand up and say, “We are Christians too” as a counter to the Religious Right in the media is fine, as far as it goes.
Part ofthe genius ofthe Religious Right, particularly the once-formidable Christian Coalition, is the way they work across election cycles to build their capacity to affect electoral outcomes—recruiting, training and organizing support for candidates—particularly in party primaries for offices at all levels. They also systematically register like minded-voters and developed the capacity to turn them out on Election Day. And they keep good databases instead of having to start from scratch from existing voter lists in the run up to each election. In other words, they mastered the contemporary tools and mechanics of electoral democracy.
People can write letters, and organize phone banks, lobby days, protest marches, and prayer vigils —but what if those who hold elected office are not interested in listening? Obviously, it is far better to have people in office with whom we agree (or mostly agree) than people who don’t. So the answer is to elect better public officials.
But how would a more politically dynamic Religious Left go about this? Many contemporary progressive electoral efforts have adopted the organizing methods popularized by Marshall Ganz, a former organizer for the United Farm Workers who now teaches organizing at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Ganz found that successful organizers and organizations focus on one-on-one recruiting, the development of personal political relationships, and leadership training, all aimed at expanding the pool of progressive voters and activists. This method builds on the cumulative experiences and best practices of social justice organizing from the labor, women’s, and civil rights movements, among many others.
I describe some useful models taken from the liberal/left in my essay in Dispatchesfrom the Religious Left: the Future of Faith and Politics in America (from which this commentary is partly adapted) . These organizations recognize that building for power takes time, patience and hard work — regardless of town or constituency. People’s personal and group political behavior changes only slowly, as a general rule. But it can, and it does. One of them is the Boston-based Neighbor-to-Neighbor, which focuses on the long term political empowerment of low income communities of color.
Neighbor-to-Neighbor
Neighbor-to-Neighbor began in 1996 after an analysis showed that 47 House districts ought to have more progressive representatives than they had. Using grassroots organizing, leadership development, electoral campaigns, legislative lobbying, and voter registration and education, the group “built power” in low-income and working-class communities.
Neighbor-to-Neighbor has a remarkable record of turning around the problem of low levels of voter participation in lower- income urban communities. For example, in 2002 the group dramatically increased voter turnout in low-income precincts of several cities. These included increases of 185 percent in Salem, 900 percent in Lynn, 210 percent in Leominster, 589 percent in Fitchburg, and 131 percent in Worcester. This contributed to the election of progressive candidates in several cities as well as two progressive Democratic members of Congress, James McGovern of Worcester and JohnTierney of Gloucester. Sustained organizing in Worcester, Salem, and Holyoke was a deciding factor in the 2003 election of progressive, Latino city councilors in those cities.
The group’s success is based on “targeted organizing” around what it calls “The Working Family Agenda.” This agenda comprises “good jobs, education and training, affordable child care, health care and housing, and a welfare safety net.” Their methods include year-round intensive voter contact and issue mobilization across the election cycle, followed by personal, telephone, and mail contact during electoral campaigns. “With year-round voter engagement,” its director Harris Gruman said, “you change the equation dramatically. Most people don’t pay much attention to politics until the presidential campaign comes around.”
Navigating the Non-Profit Tax Code
Even with such hopeful models, many on the Religious Left still fear the stumbling block of the federal tax-code. It is also controversial, not least because the Religious Right consciously bends and breaks the rules to advance their political and electoral interests (and they largely get away with it) . While the Internal Revenue Service, aided by several watchdog organizations, has been better enforcing the laws in recent years, the question of abuse of the tax code and fear of the tax man has many progressive organizations understandably wary.
Fortunately, there is also a lot of experience in integrating citizen education and engagement that are well within the perfectly reasonable and understandable IRS rules governing tax-exempt organizations such as churches and service providers.
An excellent example was pioneered by Boston Vote, a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1999 to encourage social service and other nonprofit agencies in low-income urban areas to register their clients to vote, and help to turn them out on Election Day. Boston Vote offers a model that allows progressive social service agencies and religious organizations to integrate nonpartisan voter registration and mobilization into their existing programs. Boston Vote has since gone statewide and is called Mass Vote. The organization has developed basic materi als and low-to-no-cost training to help nonprofits register and educate people to vote, and to mobilize others, as well as to eliminate barriers to participation to a variety of disadvantaged groups.
The Religious Right was able to advance as far and as fast as they did because other constituencies never really engaged on the playing field of electoral politics.
A critical distinction helpful for anyone trying to navigate all this is between citizenship and partisanship. Learning about and practicing voter registration and electoral mobilization are functions of citizenship, not unlike obtaining a drivers license or filing tax returns. Applying that knowledge to a particular candidate or political party is partisanship. Naturally, applied citizenship inevitably means making choices ofwhom to vote or advocate for or what party to join. Or whether to exercise those options at all.
The Religious Right was able to advance as far and as fast as they did because other constituencies did not keep up, or never really engaged on the playing field of electoral politics altogether. All that has happened over the past few decades in the wake of the rise of the Religious Right is one of the consequences of the series of choices that were made not to keep up or to seriously engage.
There is no reason why religious progressives cannot band together within broader progressive coalitions, to fully engage as citizens, allowing them to live up to the promise of their most prophetic and pragmatic leaders. This is the stuff of basic empowerment in electoral democracy, as the much-honored but too often forgotten African-American civil rights movement taught us.
We can learn and master the tools handed to us by the generations that have brought our constitutional democracy this far. If we do, a vibrant and politically dynamic Religious Left can be a powerful part of the coalition necessary to bend the arc of history towards what Martin Luther King Jr. called justice.
Saving Monsignor Ryan
Refuting the Myths of Neoconservative Roman Catholic Economics
By Frank L. Cocozzelli
Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org, and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America (Ig Publishing, 2008). A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.
In October 1936, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America took to the airwaves to defend the New Deal from scurrilous attacks made by another Catholic priest, the demagogic radio personality of the day, Father Charles Coughlin. Monsignor John A. Ryan’s speech was titled "Roosevelt Safeguards America." In many ways, the radio volley between the two priests still reflects debates raging in the church and in American society today. Ryan’s explanation of the sources of support for Communist anti-clericalism in Spain that he outlined in his radio address remains important in light of the claims of a small group of contemporary neoconservative Roman Catholic intellectual leaders whose views have had a profound influence on the American Catholic Church, as well as broader American public discourse.
“The great tragedy of Spain,” Ryan declared, quoting fellow priest Wilfred Parsons, was that in the nineteenth century the working masses apostatized from the Church, as Pope Pius X once remarked. And, it is well to remember, it was poverty, destitution and injustice which made them apostatize. They got to hate the Church because they hated the friends of the Church, who exploited them and whom the Church did nothing to rebuke or correct.
The lesson of all this for us is that we should meet the evil of Communism not merely by denouncing it, and not at all by stigmatizing as communistic all fundamental reforms. We must attack the main causes of Communism. Among these are poverty, insecurity and inequitable distribution of wealth and income. Failure to remove these evils will do more to strengthen Communism than all the propaganda and all the "boring-in" methods of the organized Communist movement.
If, as Pope John Paul II declared, the Church has a “preferential option for the poor,” one would be pressed to find it expressed in the works of such contemporary “friends of the Church” as Michael Novak, George Weigel and other Roman Catholic neoconservatives. Indeed, they are prominent proponents of a buccaneer capitalism that exploits the poorest people of God – an idea profoundly at odds with Catholic social teaching for more than a century.
Roman Catholic neoconservatives ignore the Church’s teachings challenging unregulated capitalism and supporting worker rights and distributive justice
Many believe that neoconservatism is nothing more than a unilateral approach to United States foreign policy. But this is a dangerous misconception. Lost in the focus on a clique of Washington, D.C. militarists (as important as they are) is the role of the highly theocratic brand of neoconservatism. These "theocons" see their philosophy as a mechanism to transform the whole of society into one based upon a highly orthodox, traditionalist form of Roman Catholic morality, a fringe form resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of the Church’s American flock.
Much like its more secular variety, Roman Catholic neoconservatism bases its approach upon three pillars: nationalism (as opposed to patriotism), a national religious orthodoxy (as opposed to an overlapping moral consensus derived from a pluralistic society), and laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to New Deal legacy capitalism). This is generally at odds with Roman Catholic theology. For example, the concept of nationalism is in direct conflict with the Vatican’s call for universalism (neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol – echoing Leo Strauss – bemoan this as “the end of politics”). This conflict comes into sharp relief when economics comes into play – it quickly becomes apparent that Catholic neocons are more “neocon” than “Catholic.”
In essence, Catholic neocons are attempting to subvert the Roman Catholic tradition of social justice in order to further a greater (and ultimately) nonreligious neoconservative agenda. As we shall see, their take on Catholicism, social justice, and economics is not only inaccurate, but engages in a quietly ruthless form of historical revisionism. I daresay that their revisionism is one of the more remarkable deviations not only from Roman Catholic teaching, but from basic standards of scholarship in recent American history.
The point of this rewriting of history is quite simple: Roman Catholicism has had a tradition of social justice consistent with the New Deal’s generally pro-worker approach, one that calls for the use of activist government to ensure economic equity. Catholic theocons such as Michael Novak are doing their best to efface that tradition.
The Whiggish Revisionism of Michael Novak
Many theocons deceptively use the term “liberal” to their advantage. They will point to continuous papal damnations of liberalism (Pope Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors immediately comes to mind) dating back to the French Revolution, charging the great philosophy with “nihilism” and “moral relativism,” and warning of its supposed “corrosive nature.”
However, these papal denunciations are of a liberalism that has little to do with the liberalism of today. In fact, the pontiffs were condemning laissez-faire capitalism, which today has taken other names and forms. The “theoconic” economic model is arguably the successor to the very movement that the Church has repeatedly condemned – shaking off all the modern equitable improvements of the Progressive and urban liberal movements of the early 20th century – particularly those of the Protestant Social Gospel movement, the 1919 Program of Catholic Bishops, and the work of Monsignor Ryan. In essence, their goal is to return the Roman Catholic Church's economic stance to the 19th century when industrial capital was unchecked by the moral vision of the church and the practical power of the state acting on behalf of the citizens. One way they hope to accomplish this task is by having Roman Catholicism again refocus on personal virtues rather than virtues related to the broader economy.
Contrary to Novak’s fear of collectivism or centralized state power, the real issue is arbitrary power.
At the forefront of the revisionist movement is Michael Novak, the former Christian Socialist turned Catholic theocon, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Anyone who comes to Novak’s books on Catholic economic ethics, without knowing that he is a theorist of Roman Catholic neoconservatism, may be misled. Novak pays lip service to such concepts as labor laws, for example, but when the rubber meets the road, he excuses the sins of the rich and powerful at the expense of the common man and woman.
Novak's premier books on capitalism, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) and The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993), present a highly tortured version of the Roman Catholic concept of social justice. For the Catholic neocon, ethics are up to the individual and should not be incorporated into government action, but no one should be concerned because laissez-faire capitalism ensures liberty for all. Throughout The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Novak praises the virtues of “liberalism.” But when he does, he is actually referring to 19th century neoclassical liberalism, the variety that was yet to be humanized by either the Protestant Social Gospel movement or its Roman Catholic variation, Distributive Justice.
Rather than anything remotely like Roman Catholic social teaching on economics, Novak embraces the libertarian F.A. Hayek's (1899-1992) view of a very limited role for government. Like Hayek, Novak describes himself as a “Whig” on economics (referring to the British and American conservative parties that went extinct in the mid 19th century). Government’s only concern, he believes, should be the rule of law, letting a "free market" correct itself when recessions and depressions occur. Hayek and Novak believe that the only appropriate corrective measure in the marketplace is loss of profit. They fail to acknowledge that property concentrated in the hands of a powerful few can, and often has, been used to domineer the many. Beyond that, Novak and “Whig-minded” others of the Catholic Right offer no mechanism for extending property ownership to the population at large.
Hayek advocated a laissez-faire approach to business, equating it with freedom and liberty. “The planning against which all our criticism is directed,” he wrote, “is solely the planning against competition.” In this, the Austrian-born economist feared that New Dealism in America, as well as the mixed center-Left economy advocated by Britain's Labour Party, would fall short of a promised “utopia” which in turn would cause unrest and ultimately a slide into strongman tyranny – “Caesarism” – that would refuse to give up the reins of elected power. History, of course, has proven him wrong. In Great Britain, Labor governments have peaceably handed off control to Tories as have liberal Democratic administrations to incoming Republican administrations in the United States.
Novak’s embrace of Hayek gives cover to those who invoke the free market to justify bad, even unconscionable, behavior. Contrary to Novak’s fear of collectivism or centralized state power, the real issue is arbitrary power – whether it is derived from the government or powerful economic interests. Arbitrary economic power can and often does cause hardship, denying the middle, working, and poor classes economic security in the form of a home and meaningful employment. It can also be closely linked to political persecution and governmental authoritarianism, as concentrated economic power comes to distort politics and government. A close corollary is that the lack of an activist government creates a power vacuum which powerful economic interests are ever-eager to occupy; the Hayek/Novak formulation fails to take this into account.
Theocons such as Michael Novak conveniently ignore Roman Catholic notions of distributive justice, the ethics about economics based in “natural law.” Rooted in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, natural law ethics are the rules God set into motion in the world and also instilled in our own natures. While theocons distort notions of natural law to justify their views on family planning, stem cell research, and LGBT rights, they ignore this field of ethics when it comes to the economy for good reason: it throws a monkey-wrench into their entire argument.
First consider this 2003 screed on progressive taxation by Novak:
From President Jefferson to President Theodore Roosevelt there was no income tax in America, and it never entered into the heads of the Democratic or any other party that a limited government should confiscate money from some Americans on the pretext of giving it to others. Nor that in so doing government should pry relentlessly into every item of income.
Whatever one may think of Novak’s economic views, they are not rooted in natural law. His shrill ideology also avoids the facts of American history. Contrary to Novak’s slippery assertion above, for example, during the American Civil War our government instituted an income tax system as a means to finance the costs of the conflict. Obviously, the idea of an income tax “entered into the head” of Abraham Lincoln.
Contrast Novak with quotes from Ryan’s natural law ethics-based view which suggests that rather than opposing an income tax, Aquinas would probably have been for it:
The principle that ownership is stewardship, that the man who possesses superfluous goods must regard himself as a trustee for the needy, is fundamental and all-pervasive in the teaching of Christianity. No more clear or concise statement of it has ever been given than that of St. Thomas Aquinas: “As regards the power of acquiring and dispensing material goods, man may lawfully possess them as his own; as regards their use, however, a man ought not to look upon them as his own, but as common, so that he may readily minister to the needs of others.”
As well as:
The great systematiser of theology in the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas, who is universally recognized as the most authoritative private teacher in the Church, stated the obligation of distribution in less extreme and more scientific terms: “According to the order of nature instituted by Divine Providence, the goods of the earth are designed to supply the needs of men. The division of goods and their appropriation through human law do not thwart this purpose. Therefore, the goods which a man has in superfluity are due by the natural law to the sustenance of the poor.”
But Novak is not the only Roman Catholic neoconservative whose views on the New Deal run against the grain of Catholic teaching on economics. Consider rejected U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee and American Enterprise Institute Scholar Robert H. Bork (a convert to orthodox Catholicism in later life), who declared in his book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah:
The great political upsurge of equality occurred with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal…. The message was that inequality must be cured by government. No other institution is sufficiently comprehensive in its jurisdiction to undertake this task which means egalitarian passion must always lead to greater centralized power and coercion. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society carried forward what Roosevelt and Truman had begun and accomplished the most thorough-going redistribution of wealth and status in the name of equality that the country ever experienced. …The fact is that antihierarchical, egalitarian sentiments were on the rise in political movements, whose tendencies were, therefore, collectivism and centralization, with a concomitant decline in the freedoms of business organizations, private associations, families, and individuals.
Of course “the cards have been unfairly stacked.” But not in the way that Bork suggests. Before FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, both the middle class and working poor did not have safety nets such as Social Security or the National Labor Relations Board, unlike the very wealthy whose superfluous assets provided every possible cushion for the downturns in life. These are facts typically, and conveniently, left out of the writings of the theocons whose special pleadings for the wealthy are transparent to Roman Catholics well-grounded in the Church’s social justice tradition. What the New Deal provided was far more in line with Catholic teaching than any neocon’s sentiments for laissez-faire economics.
More on Whiggish Economics
“The trouble with capitalism is capitalists,” Herbert Hoover, (nobody’s socialist) once said, “They're too damn greedy.” But the claims of Novakian theocons not withstanding, an orthodox practice of religion does not necessarily inoculate one from the temptation of greedy business practices. A particularly good illustration is the business leadership of the late J. Peter Grace (1913-1995).
Grace, the CEO of W. R. Grace and Company, was constantly described as “devoutly Catholic.” He was both a Knight of Malta as well as a founding member of Legatus, an organization of Roman Catholic business leaders. On its web site, Legatus describes its mission as “To study, live and spread the Faith in our business, professional and personal lives.”
Under Grace’s leadership, the company improperly disposed of a highly toxic industrial solvent into the ground water of Woburn, Massachusetts. The substance, trichloroethylene, has been linked to an increase in local diagnoses of leukemia and cancer. The court battle over this incident was the subject of the best-selling book and film of the same name, A Civil Action. As Seattle Post Intelligencer reported, “Grace was indicted by the Department of Justice on two counts of lying to the EPA in 1982 about the amount of hazardous chemicals it used at its Woburn plant.”
And then there was W.R. Grace's role in asbestos dumping in Libby, Montana. In February 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a 10-count criminal indictment against seven senior current and former Grace officials. Seattle Post Intelligencer reported that the charges, “…alleged conspiracy, knowing endangerment, obstruction of justice and wire fraud for endangering the people of Libby by concealing well-documented hazards of the tremolite asbestos.” According to the indictment, as far back as the 1970s Grace and Company attempted to conceal information about the adverse health effects of the mining operation.
Consider as well the case of another Legatus cofounder Tom Monaghan, icon and financier of Catholic Right causes. After building his Domino’s Pizza empire, he sold it in 1998 to Bain Capital (an investment company co-founded by Mitt Romney) for a price in excess of one billion dollars. Monaghan has since been investing his fortune in conservative Roman Catholic causes such as the Thomas More Law Center, Ave Maria University, and the militant anti-abortion group Priests for Life, headed by Father Frank Pavone.
Monaghan has thwarted attempts by Ave Maria University employees to unionize. When asked if he saw a contradiction in his actions, since unionization is supported by the Catholic Church, Monaghan replied, “I think that [the church] hierarchy doesn't know as much about those things as they do about their theology.” Monaghan’s personalized and paternalistic control of the university singlehandedly exposes the absurdity of Novak’s contention that if business leaders merely become virtuous through faith, then government oversight of industry becomes unnecessary.
In his 1990 publication, Towards a Theology of the Corporation, Novak expounds on why he believes theology is central to modern business ethics: “Finally, since most Americans are remarkably religious (and since most are of Jewish or Christian background), a truly realistic business ethic should have a theological dimension.” Several lines later, he adds, “Thus, a theological investigation of the weaknesses and strengths of a capitalist system or a business corporation supplies a necessary bit of realism. A business ethic without a theology is doomed to being a thin sort of gruel, minimalist and unsatisfying to most religious persons.”
“A necessary bit of realism,” indeed! Novak and his cohorts acknowledge that capitalism is “for sinners” and as noted above, fail to provide any remedy for the collateral damage. Their theoconic remedy is to make society as a whole more virtuous, largely as an outgrowth of individual virtue, and little or no government is required. George Weigel, one of Novak’s fellow theocons, elaborated in a 1996 interview:
In Centesimus Annus, the pope writes that the temptation of wealthy societies (or developing societies, for that matter) is to confuse “having more” with “being more.” Spend an hour looking at ads on prime-time television, and you'll see that temptation is omnipresent in America.
Capitalist economies only work when a critical mass of people are possessed by certain habits of the mind and heart (what some of us used to call “virtues”): self-command, the capacity for prudent risk-taking, the ability to form cooperative working relationships, and the willingness to defer gratification. Corporations need to be very careful that, in their marketing and advertising, they don't promote attitudes and counter-values that will, eventually, cause the market system to implode. "Just do it" is bad morals and bad economics.
Contemporary liberals understand that the federal government, one representative of the people, needs enough muscle in order to deal with the excesses of centralized economic power of trusts, monopolies, and polluters. A government built upon liberal democratic principles is the greatest deterrent to the centralized power of a plutocracy.
Roman Catholic natural law principles of distributive justice are integral to contemporary liberal economic thought, as we’ll see below. Even John Locke’s notion of natural law in Two Treatises of Government thwarts the theocons’ anything goes, free market opposition to economic justice:
It will, perhaps, be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns or other fruits of the earth, etc., makes a right to them, then any one may engross as much as he will. To which I answer, Not so. The same law of Nature that does by this means give us property, does also bound that property too. “God has given us all things richly.” Is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration? But how far has He given it us – “to enjoy”? As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in. Whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to others.”
If anything were ever a tip-off that theocons are using orthodoxy to conceal an inequitable economic system, this is it. They ignore arguments of natural law related to redistribution when it suits them.
It is important for both Roman Catholics and non-Catholics to be able to rebut the theocons and describe the profound theoconic deviation from Catholic teaching on economics, their outrageous historical revisionism, and their misplaced loyalty to economic elites. A key to our rebuttal is, as we shall see, the story of Monsignor Ryan.
A Brief Overview of Catholic Economics
So what are basic notions of Catholic social justice and how have they been applied to contemporary economics in the United States?
Modern Catholic social justice economics begins with Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) which was issued by Pope Leo XIII in May 1891 and was subtitled, The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. In it, Leo severely condemned unrestrained libertarian capitalism, while maintaining the Church's opposition to communism and support of private property ownership. Key progressive components included a living wage – the minimum salary necessary for workers to support their family – and the right of labor to organize unions.
While Leo’s encyclical is clearly based upon natural law principles, they are Neo-Thomistic natural law principles, based on a school of Roman Catholic thought that first appeared in mid-nineteenth century Italy and reinterpreted the foundational thinker of Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas defines distributive justice as follows:
…in distributive justice something is given to a private individual, in so far as what belongs to the whole is due to the part, and in a quantity that is proportionate to the importance of the position of that part in respect of the whole. Consequently in distributive justice a person receives all the more of the common goods, according as he holds a more prominent position in the community. This prominence in an aristocratic community is gauged according to virtue, in an oligarchy according to wealth, in a democracy according to liberty, and in various ways according to various forms of community. Hence in distributive justice the mean is observed, not according to equality between thing and thing, but according to proportion between things and persons: in such a way that even as one person surpasses another, so that which is given to one person surpasses that which is allotted to another..
Aquinas addresses something the Roman Catholic neoconservatives conspicuously do not: a duty to distribute with provision to the poorest of society. Theocons such as George Weigel may well point to Aquinas’s talk about inequality, but Aquinas is talking about unequal reward based upon corresponding contribution with an eye towards a minimum requirement of distribution to the most vulnerable, not distribution based upon power. Clearly, Aquinas’s teachings are far closer to the New Deal vision of redistribution and regulated capitalism than that of the Hayek-influenced theocons.
Neo-Thomism is far more flexible than traditional natural law thinking based on Thomas Aquinas. It embraces the spirit of his writings instead of focusing on the letter of the great theologian’s works. Methodology trumps static conclusions and equities are more freely allowed to rectify absurd conclusions. It was an important first step in acknowledging the role of historical consciousness in applying classical ethical teachings to contemporary issues. This difference in outlook explains why a traditionalist-minded Catholic would read Rerum Novarum and only see it as a condemnation of Socialism while a Neo-Thomist will clearly see Leo's call for bettering the economic conditions of the working class through organized labor and legislative action.
Neo-Thomism acknowledges that Aquinas viewed the world through a thirteenth century lens, and that he would undoubtedly see things differently 800 years later in light of the tremendous advances in science, our understanding of history, and so much more. Beyond addressing the need to reconcile Church teachings with the ideas of Hegel, Kant, and liberalism while addressing contemporary issues, Neo-Thomism is a huge step closer to Aristotle's methodology (Aquinas based his natural law ethics on the works of Aristotle filtered through Maimonides, as well as the works of Cicero) than the static dogmatism of Vatican traditionalists. Neo-Thomism more closely follows the Classical Greek philosopher’s admonition that everything that has changed is changing.
Much of the historical Protestant-Catholic tension within liberalism arises from divergent notions of freedom. Mainstream Protestants emphasize the freedom of the individual coupled with a faith in the basic goodness of mankind. They initially also embraced a more Darwinist economic liberalism of the nineteenth century: classical liberalism (now known as economic libertarianism). The Roman Catholic concept of freedom had less to do with the individual and is focused more communally – with an emphasis upon order and general obedience to higher religious authorities.
Nineteenth century Catholicism feared that the Protestant emphasis on the individual's freedom would lead to disobedience and societal disorder – a belief still common among Roman Catholic traditionalists, but rejected by many mainstream American Catholics (as we shall see below, many of today’s traditionalist Catholics now tend to worry more about societal disorder where biological issues are concerned, but become diametrically unconcerned on economic issues). At the time, the Vatican was concerned that excessive individualism would result in deplorable living conditions for the working class. But it must be remembered that the Church’s criticism was aimed at nineteenth century classical liberal, laissez-faire economics – not the economics of New Deal liberalism and its legacy.
On the heels of the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York State Assembly Majority Leader Al Smith and New York State Senator Robert Wagner, Sr. along with other Roman Catholic elected officials (mostly in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest) began paying long overdue attention to the needs of the worker-class. While this shift in constituency priorities may have come from the moral outrage of seeing 148 mostly Italian and Jewish garment workers either burn or jump to their deaths, a political calculation was involved: Tammany Hall and other Democratic Party machines quickly understood that political power lay with working class immigrants, not the corporate class. Real advances in public health, child labor laws, and workers’ rights soon followed.
This is where Roman Catholicism has had one of its greatest influences on modern liberalism: a deeply ingrained sense of community, and the idea that activist government could advance the nation's general welfare. This Catholic notion that we are still mutually and communally responsible for each other helped transform nineteenth century economic liberalism into the more compassionate twentieth century liberalism which would ultimately define the New Deal and its succeeding variants.
The Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction
The next major step in Roman Catholic social justice teaching in the United States came in 1919 with the release of The Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction – ghostwritten by Monsignor John A. Ryan. The program, Ryan wrote, “…was issued in response to the general need which men felt after the war for programs for the reconstruction of social regions.” It called for the right of workers to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining and for retirement insurance – yet unlike previous Catholic distributist ideas advocating by such thinkers as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day, it embraced government programs as the means for achieving these goals.
Ryan, a key theorist of Roman Catholic approaches to economics and social justice, is an often-overlooked hero of twentieth century economic liberalism. Born to Irish immigrants in 1869 Minnesota, John Ryan grew up during the age of robber barons and a labor movement with little or no real bargaining power. Ryan was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1898. In the course of his career, he blended late nineteenth century Midwestern Progressive Populism with a burning sense of Neo-Thomist ethics, and became a champion of civil liberties and economic justice. He wed theology to economics and in 1906 published his first major economic treatise, A Living Wage, that defended the ownership of private property, but simultaneously “spurned overly acquisitive and unregulated free market capitalism as economically unhealthy and morally bankrupt.” In 1915 Ryan attained a professorship at Catholic University where he taught until his retirement in 1939. To the chagrin of today's Roman Catholic Right, he was both an early board member of the ACLU as well as being a close friend of the organization's founder, Roger Baldwin.
If he were alive today Monsignor Ryan, like many of today’s theocons, would oppose artificial birth control, abortion rights, and embryonic stem cell research. But unlike today’s strident Roman Catholic Right, he understood that opponents on such matters could be strong allies on economic issues. As the Notre Dame historian John T. McGreevy noted, “The civil liberties lawyer Morris Ernst, before challenging the 1935 congressional testimony of Father John A. Ryan on contraception carefully announced, ‘(O)n many battle fronts in the fight for freedom of the press, for labor, and so forth, I have fought side by side with Father Ryan.’”
In 1916, he published the first of several editions of his magnum opus, Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth. Drawing upon Aristotelian notions of natural law ethics, he outlined a very contemporary liberal concept of the just distribution of profit in relation to contribution, merit, and special talents. He later became a confidant of FDR, earning the moniker, "the Right Reverend New Dealer."
His Bishops’ Program of 1919 called for a living wage as well as retirement insurance – a forerunner of what in 1935 was to become Social Security.
Ryan and the Bishops were not afraid of crediting Fabian socialists with ideas that could be used to make capitalism fair and more meritorious. This stands in contrast to the unthinking rejection of any and all ideas derived from socialism by today’s theocons whose fundamentalist-like faith in market capitalism smacks of idolatry to mainstream Roman Catholics.
At the heart of Rerum Novarum (as well as its encyclical restatement in 1931, Quadragesimo Anno) and The Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction is a form of natural law ethics: the rules God set into motion in the world and also instilled in our own natures. Echoing the teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, both works emphasized the merits of moderation. These statements did not condemn ownership’s right to take a profit from its business endeavors; rather they required that a proper portion of earnings to be justly distributed to their workers in proportion to their contribution and adjusted to allow that worker to support a family.
“Humanity is instilled with intelligence with which to make rational choices,” The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia explains, “but its reason is bound by what one ‘ought’ to do – every being has its telos or end to fulfill and it is not for humanity to interfere.”
Rerum Novarum as well as the Program of the American Bishops say that the telos for the worker to fulfill is to be allowed to live a reasonable life. That means earning an income that would allow for the purchase of a home, food and clothing for his family. In other words, the worker who contributes to profit is to be rewarded with a dignified wage.
Saving Monsignor Ryan
Monsignor Ryan’s role and legacy in U.S. Roman Catholicism matters for many reasons. Most importantly for purposes of this essay, he is the central figure in the development of modern American Catholicism’s approach to economics and a profound influence on FDR and the development of the New Deal – making him an important figure not only in Roman Catholic but in American history.
Monsignor Ryan is an important figure not only in Roman Catholic but in American history.
It seems to be essential to the project to which Novak et al have devoted their lives – and the resources of their wealthy patrons – to erode Ryan’s influence and ideas in the American Church. One of their main methods is, as major Roman Catholic authors, to elide him from history. After all, a Catholic Church that advocates for the economic interests of the poor, working, and middle classes can threaten the unfettered practice of buccaneer capitalism. They therefore shift the focus to the micro issues of personal economic evils and away from systemic causes of economic evils. How irresistibly convenient for these neocons and their wealthy benefactors.
There is an important corollary here that is integral to the Church’s capacity to advance fundamental notions of distributive justice, one fully understood by Ryan. When only those of superfluous wealth have the ability to shape policy within historic religious institutions, eventually their economic self-interest will have a corrupting effect; religious organizations lose their independence and their ability to offer social criticism, and their history and theologies are rewritten for them.
American Roman Catholicism doesn’t need any more Novaks channeling Hayek and politically aligning with the Religious Right. It needs thinkers, writers and leaders who advocate for the average worker – an equally and often far more important player in wealth creation than seven-figure CEOs and mega-stockholders. It needs leaders like Monsignor John A. Ryan.
When Ryan's Catholic View Strayed Rightward
Monsignor Ryan’s name almost always generates apoplexy in conservative discourse, especially Roman Catholic Right discourse. A Catholic paleoconservative writer for the blog “Culture Wars” excoriated Ryan because he “…continued to serve on the ACLU board with the Communists” while the National Review's Jonah Goldberg recently cited Ryan’s economic teachings as proof of “liberal fascism.”
But although Monsignor Ryan was instrumental in shaping New Deal economics and championing free speech, like a hero of any political or religious stripe, he was not flawless.
Historian John McGreevy documents in his book Catholicism And American Freedom (throughout the chapter entitled "The Social Question") how Ryan campaigned against birth control, even going as far as describing couples who practiced it as engaging in “a love of material goods and a self-indulgence.” In fact, after economics, it was one of his primary concerns.
Another shortcoming was his attitude towards the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
By and large, Ryan was an opponent of fascism. As early as the 1920s he wrote several articles attacking Mussolini’s concept of the individual existing for the benefit of the state. And he consistently condemned Hitler, particularly in regard to his antisemitic policies (In the run-up to the U.S. entry into World War II, Ryan openly campaigned to end restrictions on neutrality that prevented providing arms to the Allies). However, on Franco and Spain, Ryan got it wrong.
According to a New York Times article published July 14, 1939, “Asks Public to Act on Neutrality Act,” subtitled “Mgr. Ryan hits Nazi Ideal; Assails Totalitarian States but Defends Franco,” while speaking at the University of Virginia on the need to loosen the restrictions that denied sending weapons to France and Great Britain, both on the verge of war with Nazi Germany, Ryan failed to make a serious connection between Nazi fascism and Franco’s Falange. Reporter Winifred Mallon noted, “the Monsignor said... he favored the Franco regime because the government it replaced had been ‘Communist controlled, and not a true democracy.’” Clearly, history records that the Loyalist regime assumed power through democratic elections.
If Ryan was anti-Nazi and anti-fascist, which he was, then what explains his apparent sympathy for Franco? Most likely, the Monsignor viewed the situation in Spain through the lens of attacks on the Church. There is the infamous photograph of Loyalist soldiers firing in execution fashion at a statue of Jesus – an image that must have chilled many a Roman Catholic. As a priest he was obviously appalled at some in the Republican forces who were executing approximately 7,000 priests and nuns (it should also be pointed out that Nationalist forces executed at least sixteen priests, not to mention incidents such as the Guernica air raid).
It is also worth noting that Ryan never again publicly defended Franco after June 1939.
Is Iran a bigger challenge than the global economic crisis? Bibi thinks so.
What's the biggest problem facing the world today? Most people would probably say the downward spiral of the global economy. Over at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Steve Schwartzman, chairman of the Blackstone private equity group, said "Forty percent of the world's wealth was destroyed in last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number." NewsCorp chief Rupert Murdoch warned "the crisis is getting worse” and said that fixing it "will take a long time."
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- whose Likud Party is leading the current polls in Israel -- begs to differ. According to the Associated Press, Netanyahu told the Davos crowd that Iran's nuclear program "ranks far above the global economy as a challenge facing world leaders."
Why? According to Netanyahu, it's because the financial meltdown is reversible if governments and business make the right decisions. But "what is not reversible is the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatical radical regime," he said, adding that "we have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in hands of such a fanatical regime."
There are plenty of good reasons to try to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and it is easy to understand why Israelis are especially concerned about Iran's nuclear program. But Netanyahu's assessment of the relative importance of these two problems is just plain wrong, for at least five reasons.
First, let's be clear about the current state of play. Iran has no nuclear weapons today, and we still don't know for sure if they will ever get them. By contrast, the economic crisis is a reality now. Iran cannot build a bomb today because it has no plutonium or highly-enriched uranium (HEU). Its centrifuges are producing low-enriched uranium (LEU), but you can’t build a bomb with that. In theory it could enrich its LEU to weapons grade, but its LEU stockpile is under IAEA surveillance and the diversion would be detected (this turns out to be something the IAEA is very good at doing). As William Luers, Thomas Pickering, and Jim Walsh note in a sensible article in the latest New York Review of Books, if Iran wants a bomb, its choices "are to cheat and get caught or to kick the inspectors out." Unless Iran has a secret clandestine enrichment program up and running somewhere (which we’ve found no sign of up till now), it’s hard to see the current situation as anywhere near as serious as our economic problems today.
Second, Netayanhu is wrong to say that the world have never seen such a "fanatical regime" with nuclear weapons. Iran's government has many unsavoury qualities, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said some stupid and offensive things about the Holocaust and about Israel. But "fanatical?" By historic standards Iran's government isn't even in the top rank, and its foreign policy behavior is hardly irrational. Joseph Stalin was an even greater mass murderer than Adolf Hitler, and his successors were ruthless, ideologically-driven men with scant regard for human life. They had a large nuclear arsenal, and yet we managed to wage and win the Cold War against them anyway. Similarly, Mao Zedong was directly responsible for millions of deaths, and he also made a number of shockingly cavalier remarks about nuclear war. Indeed, Secretary of State Dean Rusk once told a Congressional committee that "a country whose behavior is as violent, irascible, unyielding and hostile as that of Communist China is led by leaders whose view of the world and of life itself is unreal." Yet Mao had the bomb and never used it; indeed, Chinese nuclear weapons policy has been quite circumspect for over forty years.
Third, it is remarkably self-centered for Netanyahu to declare Iran's program to be a greater challenge than the global recession. The economic crisis is already harming many millions of people around the world, and it is likely to have an enduring impact on how millions of people -- even billions -- live their lives. It will lower life expectancy, alter life-opportunities, change demographic patterns, and affect the tenor of politics in many places, probably for the worse. Just look at all the social and political ills spawned by the Great Depression and you get some idea what a protracted global recession might do today. Even if Iran did get nuclear weapons someday, that is mostly a regional problem rather than a global one. Iran's neighbors would have legitimate concerns, but does Netanyahu really think that this is a bigger issue than the world economy for the leaders of Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Norway, Japan, China, Chile, South Africa, or New Zealand?
Fourth, let's not forget that Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own, and Israel's American ally has several thousand of them. If Iran were to acquire a few nuclear weapons someday, it could not use them without triggering its own destruction. Iran's government may support terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad that employ suicide bombers, but Iran's leaders show no signs of being suicidal themselves.
Finally, the more panicked people sound about the prospect of an Iranian arsenal, the more that Iranians might falsely conclude that getting a few bombs might actually give them a lot of leverage. This sort of overheated rhetoric may also convince some Israelis that an Iranian bomb would be an existential threat and convince them to leave, which in turn might give some Iranians an additional reason to pursue that option. Ironically, by portraying a legitimate security concern as an imminent peril, Netanyahu and others of his ilk may in fact be undermining Israel's long-term future.
Netanyahu's remarks may help him win more votes back in Israel, but my guess is that didn't win him much sympathy in Davos. To a sophisticated crowd with a global perspective, I'll bet it sounded like special pleading, which is precisely what it was.
The stimulus just keeps looking worse and worse
By Phil Levy
“The U.S. needs to show some proof they have a plan to get out of the fiscal problem,” said Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president who helped steer his country through a financial crisis in 1994. “We, as developing countries, need to know we won’t be crowded out of the capital markets, which is already happening.”...
“People are not stupid,” Mr. Zedillo said. “They see the huge deficit, the huge spending, and wonder what comes next.”
I erred in my earlier post on the international aspects of the stimulus bill. I was excessively optimistic. I said we might get away with lots of governments borrowing lots of money all at once for a while, since the private sector isn’t doing anything with the money at the moment. In fact, as Ernesto Zedillo goes on to note in the Times, developing countries are already finding it hard to borrow, as lenders flee to the perceived safety of the U.S. bond market. I’ll stand by my prediction that trouble would eventually come; it’s just coming sooner than I had thought.
The trouble is not restricted to the developing world. The United States just had some difficulty marketing 5-year Treasury notes and 10-year bond yields have been rising sharply. These are not the very short rates that the Fed sets; they are the longer, market-determined rates that drive borrowing costs for businesses and home-buyers. As the crisis unfolded, global investors foresaw doom and piled into U.S. government bonds as a safe haven. The result was a plunge in interest rates and upward pressure on the dollar.
In the past few weeks and particularly in the last couple days, demand for Treasuries has fallen off and interest rates have been rising. There can be many causes, but one concern is how the United States will pay for all its borrowing.
There is a substantial risk here. Bloomberg today quotes a trader from China’s biggest bank as predicting that the "rout" in the Treasury market will deepen and rates will rise. Imagine, for a moment, that he believes what he’s saying. The story notes that Treasuries have lost almost 3 percent this month. The trader thinks more losses are soon to come. Unless he or his international colleagues think the dollar will appreciate, they would be safer selling their holdings and keeping their money in another currency (even if their own bonds have very low yields). If they do all sell their Treasuries, that will drive interest rates up and the dollar down, thereby validating their decision to sell (bubbles are nasty that way). A weaker dollar might help U.S. exports, if only we weren’t launching a trade war. The higher interest rates won’t help at all in reviving the economy.
But wait, it gets worse! Cognizant of this threat from excessive borrowing, both Jeff Sachs (in his academic capacity) and Larry Summers (in his official capacity) have argued this week that the new spending means we will need tax hikes in the near future. While it is very difficult to see how spending in 2011 stimulates the economy now, it’s easy to see how raising taxes in the future could slow things in the present. From the perspective of any entrepreneur brave enough to invest and create jobs right now, high taxes could create a case of “heads, the government wins; tails, I lose.”
All of this is to say: there are some reasons besides partisan rancor why Republicans might hesitate to support the $819 billion stimulus bill.
| The Making of George W. Obama | ||
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| January/February 2009 | ||
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The 2008 U.S. election was all about change. But that’s not what we’re going to get on foreign policy, says the longtime speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice. Instead of a radical departure from Bush, we’re likely to end up with a lot more of the same. And that may be just what we need.  JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images On December 1, Barack Obama, who won the U.S. presidency as the candidate of “change,” announced his national security team: President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense (Robert Gates), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy for Middle East security (James Jones), and the doyenne of Democratic centrism (Hillary Clinton). Some saw this as the political cover Obama needs to lead U.S. foreign policy in an entirely different direction after Bush. Perhaps. But I doubt it. My hunch, and my hope, is that Obama will be a successful president, not because he’ll totally change the foreign policy he’ll inherit from Bush, but because he’ll largely continue it. Until just a few weeks ago, I was a part of that foreign policy. As Rice’s chief speechwriter and policy advisor, I traveled with her to 24 countries. And I helped write (and rewrite) her remarks—a body of work I’d estimate to be north of 150,000 carefully chosen words. For four years, I watched as a foreign policy took shape that was quite different from that of Bush’s first term. It was a pragmatic internationalism based on enduring national interests and ideals for a country whose global leadership is still indispensable, even as the world is becoming more multipolar. Unfortunately, the election didn’t shed much light on what this inheritance means for Obama. The campaign was a two-year referendum on the Bush presidency in which Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term and John McCain ran desperately away from the whole thing. It was as if the past four years never happened. But because they did, Obama will inherit a foreign policy that is better than many realize. Yes, there will be changes ahead—most likely, to energy and climate change policy (thankfully), to the war in Iraq (winding it down), to the war in Afghanistan (winding it up), and to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (closing it, which some in the Bush administration tried to do but couldn’t). But despite all that, Obama’s foreign policy likely won’t depart radically from Bush’s. Take the three states Bush once labeled an “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. After changing the regime in Baghdad, his administration in the second term fully committed to changing the behavior of Pyongyang and Tehran. As a result, Obama will receive the baton on a multilateral negotiation with North Korea that has been and will be a frustrating marathon, but he will likely pick up where Bush leaves off, simply because there are no practical alternatives. On Iran, Obama will almost surely proceed with Bush’s policy of sticks and carrots that seeks a diplomatic solution—a third option between acquiescing to Iran’s behavior or attacking Iran to change it. To have a better chance of success, this policy will need sharper sticks and sweeter carrots, including the direct engagement Obama has advocated. And if that fails, Obama will have to weigh his options—none of which, he has said, he’s taking off the table. As for Iraq, Obama will inherit a war that Iraqis themselves are mostly ending for him. The pace and size of the U.S. troop reduction may be hotly debated, but few in Baghdad or Washington dispute that such a withdrawal is now appropriate. This effort to end the war in Iraq will enable Obama to try to save the war in Afghanistan, employing many of the lessons learned from the surge strategy he opposed in Iraq. A challenge for Obama will be to knit the Iraq endgame into a broader approach to the Middle East. But here, too, it likely won’t look all that different from Bush’s: support for an independent Lebanon; attempts to elicit responsible behavior from Syria; and security cooperation with Sunni Arab regimes that may not love freedom, but definitely hate what Iran, and al Qaeda, are doing to the region. Another part of this strategy for Obama is continuing Bush’s engagement on the Middle East peace process. A real insight of Bush’s first term had been that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more than a border dispute, as Bill Clinton had framed it. Bush argued that peace required a successful Palestinian state and economy. But the first-term policy amounted to telling the Palestinians to put their house in order first, and then the United States would talk about ending the Israeli occupation. Only in the second term were both efforts pursued simultaneously. And because of it, Obama will inherit a Middle East peace process finally proceeding on both tracks at once: state-building and peacemaking. Just as importantly, Obama will find a changing Middle East where freedom, opportunity, and the longing for dignity are bubbling up in ways that no one can control, Washington included. Something tells me that the leader of the Democratic Party isn’t going to give up on supporting democracy, both in terms of institutions and elections. Obama may rebrand Bush’s poorly named “freedom agenda”—he may expand it, as some of his advisors suggest, into a “dignity agenda”—but the basic approach will likely continue. So, too, will there be little change on issues of global grand strategy. A refrain from the campaign was rebuilding damaged ties with America’s allies. But those ties have largely been rebuilt already—in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Obama can certainly improve these relations further, especially with real action on climate change. But another challenge may be managing the bubbles of overinflated expectations for his presidency that will soon begin bursting in allied capitals. Bush will also bequeath to Obama a realistic strategy for managing the rise of great powers. By pushing China, India, Japan, Brazil, and others to be responsible stakeholders in the international order, the Bush administration showed that “the rise of the rest” need not be synonymous with America’s decline. In fact, it might actually enhance U.S. influence. In Asia, the most geopolitically dynamic part of the world, the United States now has better relations with each major power than they do with one another. Every state wants to hedge against the others, and the partner of choice is Washington. Obama’s task will be to continue inducing these emerging powers to share a greater burden of managing a new set of global challenges that no country, including the United States, can manage alone. The asterisk here is less a rising China (though the question is still open) than a resurgent Russia. And with Russia, too, Obama will inherit a strategy that he’s likely to continue, simply because it’s better than the alternatives. It seeks neither to isolate Russia (which is impossible) nor to give Russia the blank check it wants in its old imperial stomping grounds (which is irresponsible). Rather, this policy seeks to balance cooperation with Russia on many shared interests with competition when interests diverge. Maybe this balance could have been struck better on issues such as Kosovo or missile defense, but that doesn’t signal the need for a new policy, just a recalibration of the current one. And if anything, the Georgia war showed that, if the United States wants Russia to be a responsible stakeholder, encouragement won’t be enough. There will even likely be a great deal of continuity in the fight against al Qaeda. There’s a consensus now that preemption is necessary to fight terrorism; Obama himself has advocated for it. But in Bush’s second term, the administration basically converged on a new mantra: “We can’t kill our way to victory,” a key tenet of counterinsurgency strategy. The focus became not just fighting terrorists but building conditions of security, opportunity, and justice for the societies that terrorists seek to radicalize. It was even accepted that the United States might have to reconcile with some terrorists, as it did in Iraq and as some now support doing in Afghanistan. Obama most likely—and correctly—will not refer to a “war on terror” as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, but that doesn’t mean he won’t approach terrorism in much the same way. Such a strategy depends, as the Bush administration eventually conceded, on embracing nation-building as a national interest. There is now a consensus that the United States is threatened as much by failing and poorly governed states as strong, aggressive ones. Obama’s challenge will be to continue the Bush administration’s effort to make nation-building a civilian-led effort—to demilitarize U.S. foreign policy by trying to prevent states from failing in the first place. This effort will require a transformation of U.S. institutions of “soft power”—a goal that former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then Rice, and most famously Gates made into a personal crusade. Obama will inherit the start of it—an enlarged diplomatic corps, a rudimentary civilian expeditionary force, and foreign assistance that has been increased more than at any time since the Marshall Plan—and he looks poised to carry the torch. The pragmatic internationalism that Bush will pass to Obama was largely defined through changes made during the past four years. And for that reason, there might be more continuity between the second term of Bush and the first term of Obama than between the two terms of Bush himself. This foreign policy is a valuable inheritance. And if Obama avoids spending his early years in office pursuing change for the sake of change—simply trying to disassociate himself from his predecessor, as Clinton and Bush too often did—he could create the makings of a new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. Obama might realize this, but the Democratic and Republican parties, I fear, will not. They could each pretend as if Bush’s second-term foreign policy never happened. At worst, Democrats could swagger righteously into power, believing their predecessors were rubes who screwed everything up, and now is the chance to do everything differently. For their part, Republicans could tell themselves the comforting lie that they lost because Bush abandoned a real conservative foreign policy—that his second term was all capitulation to the striped-pants appeasers of the State Department. One of my regrets about my work at the State Department is that we were unable to convince the American people that Bush’s pragmatic internationalism had within it the makings of a strong, sustainable global leadership for the 21st century—and that, as such, it had the potential to heal some of the fraught divisions over America’s role in the world that have plagued the country since the end of the Cold War. My hope is that Obama will not only continue this foreign policy, but strengthen it and expand support for it among all Americans. Were he able to do that, it would truly be a change I could believe in. Christian Brose is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. He served as chief speechwriter and policy advisor for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to 2008, and as speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2004 to 2005. |
Inside an Afghan battle gone wrong: What happened at Wanat? (I)
Just before dawn last July 13, Taliban fighters attacked an outpost in eastern Afghanistan being established by U.S. Army soldiers and fought a short, sharp battle that left many American dead -- and many questions. But the U.S. military establishment, I've found after reviewing the Army investigation, dozens of statements given by soldiers to investigators, and interviews with knowledgeable sources, simply has not wanted to confront some bad mistakes on this obscure Afghan battlefield -- especially tragic because, as the interviews make clear, some of the doomed soldiers knew they were headed for potential disaster.
First, here's my account of what happened that day, drawn from the official investigation and other sources:
The 45 Americans, mainly from 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, had begun building a patrol base in the Waygul River valley village of Wanat on July 8. There also were three Marines present, who were training Afghans, and 24 soldiers from the Afghan army. (The initial Army report said two Marines, but subsequent documents corrected this.) The platoon's leader was there the whole time, but the company commander was busy elsewhere and only arrived the day before the attack. None of their superiors visited the outpost during that time. Significantly, there was no overhead surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles because of bad weather, according to Army documents.
At 4:20 a.m., just before sunrise, volleys of rocket-propelled grenades began to hit the base. There were approximately 200 attackers, according to the Army investigation. They began by concentrating on the American's heavy weapons -- a 120 millimeter mortar, a TOW missile system, and a .50 caliber machine gun. It felt like "about a thousand RPGs at once," Spec. Tyler Hanson later told an Army interviewer. With the first two heavy weapons knocked out, the Taliban moved in to fight just feet away from the Americans, making it difficult to call in air strikes against them. Enemy fighters threw rocks into their Americans' fighting holes, apparently hoping they soldiers would mistake them for grenades and jump out, exposing themselves to fire. Enemy fire was coming from every direction. "The whole time we were thinking we were going to die," said Spec. Chris McKaig.
Many did. When most of the fighting was over, about an hour later, nine American soldiers were dead and another 27 were wounded. Between 21 and 52 of the attackers were killed. The Americans held the outpost, which is impressive, considering their 75 percent casualty rate.
Those are the facts of the matter. They are not in dispute, except for the size of the Taliban force, which one account claims is smaller than the Army's estimate of 200. You can read a redacted version of the Army's 15-6 investigation at the "Wanat" page on Wikipedia. Also, here is a Army Times' outstanding view of the battleground.
It is an interesting case to study especially because of the discrepancy between what is known about the incident and what has been learned from it. In other words, the facts gathered by Col. Mark Johnstone in the Army investigation are compelling, but the conclusions drawn from those facts are not. Rather, the Army appears determined to shy away from the lessons indicated by those facts. Here is what the Army concluded -- basically that we did OK, we should have had a Predator overhead, and that we shouldn't have trusted those lousy Afghans. And then let's talk about how brave our soldiers were:
The soldiers did fight valiantly at Wanat. I am in awe of them. As one reported to the Army investigator, "I continued to lay suppressive fire with the 240 [machine gun] but it was difficult because I was unable to stand due to wounds in both legs and my left arm." When this soldier ran out of ammunition he realized that he was the only one left alive in his corner of the outpost, with the enemy so close he could hear them talking.
It takes nothing away from the soldiers to say that there are other lessons to be learned here. "You go through the 15-6 and your heart sinks, as you see all this," said one person who has reviewed most of the data gathered on the battle.
Indeed, one way to honor them would be to look at what might have been done better to help them. But the Army seems positively determined not to study the Wanat incident. A few weeks ago, two interviews about the battle were posted on Fort Leavenworth's very good series of Operational Leadership Interviews -- but then were removed.
Screwups are inevitable in war. But there are serious questions to be addressed here -- and I hope to do so over the next few days on this blog, drawing on the investigation itself and other sources who have raised concerns with me about the painful, and so far unlearned, lessons of the battle. As one Army source put it to me, "The paratroopers sent to Wanat knew they were in big trouble. Although the battalion HQ was only 7km away, these guys lacked class 4 [construction and fortification materials], ran out of water and had little material to build up their defensive positions." Indeed, some of the statements made by those who fought raise the question of whether their concerns are being heard by their superiors.
Before leading the Wanat mission, Lt. Jonathan Brostrom, who died during the fight, told his best friend in the battalion that "he thought it was a bad idea and knew he was going to get 'fucked up,'" according to that friend's sworn statement.
Taking corrective steps is, of course, what the chain of command should be doing, but doesn't appear to have done. "I would not characterize this as anything more than the standard fighting that happens in this area in good weather that the summer provides," Col. Charles Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, told Stars & Stripes about a week after the battle. In other words, nothing to see here, move on.
If the brigade commander and others in the chain of command don't want to think about the lessons to be learned here, then perhaps the Army Inspector General should-a good IG is more about instruction than punishment. Failing that, the vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Pete Chiarelli, might direct Lt. Gen. William Caldwell at Fort Leavenworth to have some experienced officers aid the Center for Army Lessons Learned in a review. I have heard that a historian at Leavenworth's Combat Studies Institute had been working on a history of the battle, but I've also been told that his study for some reason has been put on hold.
In the next several items, I will discuss specific lessons that might be learned about resources, planning, support and other life-and-death issues.
BreaktheMatrix becomes BuildtheModel
I'm changing the name of my BTM TV show-- out with the old, in with the new. My show called BreaktheMatrix has primarily focused over the past six months or so on the criminal conduct of our bankster friends and their stooge politicians in Washington. Of course I'll still be talking about these things since they're in the news every day, but something important has changed over these last several months, and it's a change that's irreversible and soon to be painfully obvious to a broad cross--section of the American people. Here it is: the regime in Washington DC and Wall Street is not merely collapsing; it's not just going through a downward trough in the cycle. These criminals aren't simply facing a correctible recession, or even a depression comparable to the 1930s. No-- this moment we're living involves something more; something different; something infinitely more profound than a recoverable economic downturn. THE REGIME IS FINISHED. The long--running, central planning liberal/socialist/fascist/communist two--party duopoly framework of 20th century America IS DONE. They're going down for the count, freedom lovers. These globalist bankers and their political figureheads have created a mountain of regime and personal debt so large that it cannot, and will not, be overcome. So the news is here, and our international bankster overlords are dead-- they simply haven't acknowledged it yet.
It turns out there won't be any need for a revolution to bring down the structure-- our charlatan "leaders" have done the job for us with their own insufferable hubris, arrogance and greed. These losers have destroyed their own corrupt system, and it's only a matter of time until the criminals turn on each other and finish the job. Obama? The Messiah? Sorry, dreamers, but there's nothing he can do. Bad policies; he's owned by the bankers; too little; too late. Obama is simply a tool of the corrupt class, and this collapse in Washington DC and Wall Street is destined to end up in one place, and one place only. In a pile of rubble; at the bottom of the heap; then we start again, with higher values and stronger people.
My new show is called "BuildtheModel" and I've added a subtitle: "Creating the Post--Collapse America." Time to look to our better future, and what each of us can do to bring it about. There's no use crying about the fallen regime, or this tragedy and parody our dear leaders have left behind. The banksters and their paid political hacks will soon disappear from the scene, and our task now is to "Build the Model" and start laying the groundwork for a fresh America. The times ahead won't be easy (putting it mildly, lol), and the cleanup job to clear away the mess will be nothing short of enormous, but look at the upside. Freedom! No more Federal Reserve! No more income tax! No more bankster controlled money! Ethics! The limited constitutional framework of the founders! The creation of a new community! All of this is possible, and so much more.
Those of you who've been regular watchers of my show in the past know that my core philosophy is "Optimism! Always Optimism!" Never have we had greater reason to speak these words. Join me to "BuildtheModel"-- every weekday evening at 8:00pm Eastern. FREEDOM TIME! Starting tonight on BreaktheMatrix Television.
"Stimulus" Spending Will Harm Recovery
Congress is now considering the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the latest barrel of pork to be tossed into the recessionary pit. This time around, the misnamed stimulus will, in the self-congratulatory language of the House's summative press release, "create and save 3 to 4 million jobs, jumpstart our economy, and begin the process of transforming it for the 21st century with $275 billion in economic recovery tax cuts and $550 billion in thoughtful and carefully targeted priority investments with unprecedented accountability measures built in." [Emphasis in original.]
All you really need to know about the plan is implied by the two numbers given: $275 billion in supposed benefits to taxpayers, and a figure exactly twice that amount that the federal government intends to bestow on itself and its primary beneficiaries. The $550 billion will include, among many other things:
• An $87 billion "temporary" increase in Medicaid matching aid (and here we must note that the phrase "temporary government program" is oxymoronic);
• $20 billion for food stamps;
• $39 billion for healthcare for the newly unemployed;
• $43 billion for increased unemployment benefits and jobs training;
• $15.6 billion for Pell grants;
• $79 billion for state fiscal relief (probably only a down payment on a dole for the states, several of whom are lobbying for a bailout of $1 trillion);
• $41 billion for local school districts;
• $30 billion for highway construction;
• $6 billion to weatherize modest-income home; and
• $32 billion to transform the nation's energy transmission, distribution, and production systems.
"Even with this package," the House press release warns, "unemployment rates are expected to rise to between eight and nine percent this year. Without this package, we are warned that unemployment could explode to near 12 percent. With the passage of this package, we will face a large deficit for years to come. Without it, those deficits will be devastating and we face the risk of economic chaos. Tough choices have been made in this legislation and fiscal discipline will demand more tough choices in years to come."
All of this is arrant nonsense mingled with a contemptible disregard for limits, constitutional or otherwise, on the size, power, and cost of government. "Tough choices" for whom, may we ask? Well, certainly not for our preening Capitol Hill nomenklatura nor for the millions of workers on federal, state, and local government payrolls and the many thousands more quasi-private sector contractors who will be receiving the lucrative public-works contracts contemplated in this bailout. For all of those folks, business is booming; even as corporation after corporation — from Microsoft to Caterpillar to Home Depot — announce massive layoffs or liquidates altogether, we've heard nary a peep about layoffs among federal employees. Government, it seems, is not only deemed too large to fail, it's also too large to downsize. This is the message Congress is sending loud and clear to American taxpayers as it contemplates spending two dollars on itself and its hangers-on for every dollar it returns to the taxpayer.
But beyond the purely fiscal outrage, this bill, like so many federal bailouts stretching all the way back to the Great Depression, is an affront to lawful, constitutional government and yet another slap in the collective face of the Founding Fathers. What, this author wonders, would the Founders think of us, their heirs, could they see the willful bondage to which we are subjecting ourselves? Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there any authorization for Congress to spend money on housing, public schools, mass transportation, telecommunications, food stamps, healthcare, college tuition, clean water, scientific research, or jobs training. Yet all this and much, much more is in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009.
The only part of the House's statement with a ring of truth is the soothing cant about "transforming" our economy "for the 21st century." That, unfortunately, is exactly what this bill is about — hastening the descent of the United States into full-blown socialism of the sort that most of the rest of the world has already experienced and is experiencing. And no matter how much damage this bill does to our already crippled economy and entire way of life, the strident apostles of government interventionism can be counted on to claim — as they did throughout the Great Depression — that things would be worse still without their benevolent ministrations.
The only possible remedy for the economic crisis, as pointed out over and over, is to allow the recession to run its course and free-market mechanisms to heal the economy. Instead, this bailout bill, like those gone before it, is only a feckless try at re-inflating the bubble and providing golden parachutes for the wealthy and well-connected.
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