Category: Uncategorized (Page 24 of 25)

The lessons of history. In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Escaping North Korea’s Nuclear Trap,” Nancy E. Soderberg, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., relates the following history behind the North Korean nuclear crisis:

• In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Soviet Union offered to build North Korea four nuclear reactors in exchange for its joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea joined the treaty in 1985.
• By 1989, the U.S. learned that North Korea was violating the treaty by secretly processing nuclear material. So the first President Bush negotiated a deal: in exchange for North Korea submitting to nuclear inspections, the U.S. would cancel joint military exercises with the South and remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula.
• In 1993, the U.S. learned that the North Koreans were violating the deal negotiated by Bush. So the Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework, in which we pledged to provide light-water reactors and fuel oil in exchange for a halt to their weapons production.
• In 2002, the U.S. learned that the North Koreans haven’t abided by this agreement either. Only a few years after signing the Agreed Framework, North Korea began a secret nuclear program and now has enough material for one or two nuclear weapons. It has now expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and is building up to five or six more bombs.

What to make of this series of events? Soderberg argues that they support further talks: “If he has learned from history,” she writes, “Mr. Bush will negotiate directly with the North Koreans.” However, someone less charitable than Soderberg might draw a different conclusion: that North Korea, having gone 0 for 3 on compliance thus far, has no intention of keeping any agreement when cheating will only bring additional concessions. Faced with this record of backsliding, one wonders how Soderberg can say with a straight face that “As President [George W.] Bush’s predecessors learned, negotiation is the best option in each new North Korea crisis.”

If negotiation is going to work, it has to be backed up by something more than paper. CSIS adviser Robert J. Einhorn, writing on the same page, recognizes this fact: “To be acceptable, a negotiated arrangement would have to provide reasonable assurances that we could detect North Korean cheating, and it would have to be structured so as to enable us to withhold critical benefits in the event of noncompliance.” Moreover, he adds that “if North Korea has indeed already decided that it must become a nuclear power, then the talks will fail.”

One can always hope for a diplomatic solution along these lines; Einhorn, for one, supports a new round of talks. I certainly hope he’s right. But then one should also be ready for a second possibility, that diplomacy may not succeed unless it is accompanied by the threat of isolation, sanctions, or worse. The most important lesson that history has to teach us is that wishing doesn’t always make it so.

Hegemony Good: Zalmay Khalilzad is one of the most influential people you’ve never heard of. The highest-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government, he currently serves as special assistant to the President for Near East, South West Asian, and North African affairs. He played a key role in creating the new Afghan government as special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002, and has since been active in shaping the U.S. approach to Iraq.

Yet Khalilzad is already familiar to a generation of high school policy debaters who came of age in the late 90’s as the author of the famous “Khalilzad card”:

C) US HEGEMONY IS KEY TO PREVENTING A NUCLEAR WAR

Khalilzad in ’95 (Zalmay, Dep. Secretary of Defense [sic.], The Washington Quarterly, Spring 95)

A world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and receptive to American values–democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world’s major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, renegade states, and low level conflicts. Finally, US leadership would help preclude the rise of another global rival, enabling the US and the world to avoid another cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange.

In the twisted world of high school debate, this paragraph became a gift from heaven. Armed with the Khalilzad card, teams could describe anything that might threaten U.S. leadership, no matter how remotely–the Germans will have solar power before us!–as a surefire path to nuclear annihilation.

It was rivaled for its effect only by the “Mead card.” The work of Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, this was used to attribute the same deadly consequences to anything that hurt the economy:

B) Preserving a strong economy is key to preventing Global Nuclear War

Walter Mead, Policy Analyst, World Policy Institute, 1992

Hundreds of millions–billions–of people have pinned their hopes on the international market economy. They and their leaders have embraced market principles–and drawn closer to the west–because they believe that our system can work for them. But what if it can’t? What if the global economy stagnates–or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India–these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the 30s.

An all-too-typical use of these cards can be found here, in a plan to improve the U.S. educational system by killing off poor students. You can outweigh plenty of dead schoolkids when your harms are World War III.

Ah, the halcyon days of high school, when nuclear war scenarios can be tossed about without realizing they might actually happen…

Is Saddam Rational?: The effort to contain Iraq relies on a simple premise: that by giving Saddam Hussein the appropriate incentives, we can cause him to rationally choose disarmament (or at least restraint) over the destruction of his regime. But can Hussein be trusted to make rational choices? Josh Marshall isn’t so sure. After all, by refusing to disarm, Hussein has

now made war very likely. And if war comes, he’s out of a job, and will probably end up dead. So why the continued stonewalling? I see three possibilities.

The first is that Hussein isn’t rational, at least in the sense that’s relevant to U.S. policy. Maybe he doesn’t make the choices that best achieve his goals. Maybe he does choose well, but simply values his plagues and poisons more than he does his own life. (“‘Tis not contrary to reason,” said Hume, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”) Or maybe he does value his life, but is consistently misinformed by his inner circle of toadies and thus isn’t aware of the incentives we offer. In any of these situations, even the wisest U.S. policy may not dissuade Hussein from the future use of WMD’s.

The second possibility is that Hussein is rational, but thinks he’s a dead man already. After all, a change of regime (disarmament or no) is already codified U.S. policy. If the U.S. is going to invade this spring no matter what he does, then Hussein never had any real incentive to give up his weapons–better to keep them for use in the coming Armageddon. Under this scenario, U.S. belligerence is fully to blame for the failure of inspections and the collapse of any diplomatic settlement.

However, I don’t find this scenario very believable. No matter how much it’s stonewalled, the regime has consistently adopted a conciliatory tone since the new inspections began. Hussein’s recent interview expresses admiration for the peace movement and hopes that God will “empower all those working against war.” These are not the words of a man who honestly believes he’ll be dead before St. Patrick’s Day. If Hussein really thought war was imminent, he would be spouting anti-Israel rhetoric night and day, trying to spark a larger Middle Eastern war and to act out, even suicidally, his fantasy identity as the new Saladin.

Which brings us to the final possibility–that Hussein thinks he can get away with it. Maybe not forever, since the Americans might still invade someday; but if he can push off the invasion for long enough (until next fall, maybe later), he may be able to obtain some additional weaponry and even the playing field. In other words, he’s perfectly aware of what Resolution 1441 threatens; he just doesn’t find the threat credible.

And it’s hard to disagree with him. In order for a disarmament regime to be credible, the U.N. has to be ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, as soon as Iraq blocks access to one teensy-weensy presidential site. But several members of the Security Council have no intention of doing any such thing. Germany has already declared that it will not back any resolution authorizing force. (Even if Saddam has the inspectors shot?) And France’s call to triple the number of inspectors, widely criticized as unserious even by liberals, is no better. France is flailing, grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to stop a war without vetoing it. And if a new resolution fails, then maybe, just maybe, the U.S. won’t go in alone. By exposing cracks in the alliance–in fact, by openly opposing any enforcement of the resolutions they have passed–the nations of the Security Council have removed the credibility from the U.N.’s threat of force. Peaceful disarmament is no longer possible, and it’s France and Germany’s fault.

No one can be sure that Hussein is a rational actor, and Lord knows he’s miscalculated before. Regardless of his rationality, however, the processes designed to take advantage of it have failed. The world now faces a choice between disarmament and peace–there’s no way we can achieve both. Regretting the difficulty of this choice won’t help much. But it’s worthwhile considering how we arrived here, and what role America’s allies have played in forcing its hand.

Space Shuttle Columbia: A tragic end to the story below.

Back in a week. I was going to respond to this, but another vacation intervenes.

Iraq admits Halabja massacre–again. In addition to the earlier admission by Tariq Aziz, reported in the New York Times back in December, Iraq has now admitted for a second time its gassing of approximately 5,000 civilian Kurds in 1988 in the city of Halabja. This time, the confirmation is even posted on Iraq’s official website, uruklink.net. (For those who doubt its official status, the website is linked to by the Iraqi mission to the United Nations and hosts the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Assembly, the Tourism Board, two state-run newspapers–1,2, Saddam University, and archives of Hussein’s speeches in English and Arabic. It’s also run from inside Baghdad, according to the whois records, and it’s hard to imagine the regime allowing an impostor site to operate for long.)

On the website, the National Monitoring Directorate–in charge of Iraq’s compliance with U.N. disarmament resolutions–maintains a number of news items. These include a pamphlet entitled “The Dishonest Case for War on Iraq” (Google cache, just in case), a pamphlet co-written by a Labour MP and a lecturer at Cambridge. The pamphlet, as would be expected, presents a number of arguments against military action. It also, however, includes the following statement about Iraq’s past:

c) Internal repression by the Iraqi military

As part of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds (February to September 1988), the Iraqi regime used chemical weapons extensively against its own civilian population. Between 50,000 and 186,000 Kurds were killed in these attacks, over 1,200 Kurdish villages were destroyed, and 300,000 Kurds were displaced. The most infamous chemical assault was on the town of Halabja in March 1988, which killed 5,000 people. Human Rights Watch regards the Anfal campaign as an act of genocide.

The pamphlet goes on to criticize the U.S. and Europe for ignoring the genocide. The Anfal campaign, the authors argue, was “carried out with the acquiescence of the West”; after Halabja, “[r]ather than condemn the massacres of Kurds, the US escalated its support for Iraq.”

Whoever posted this pamphlet to Iraq’s official website almost certainly didn’t read it very carefully. Iraq has spent too much time denying responsibility for Halabja over the last decade to admit it quietly on the web; should the higher-ups ever notice this, I assume that heads, perhaps literally, will roll. But it’s interesting to see how truth will out, despite all attempts to keep it hidden.

Jews… In… Spaaaace… As the New York Times reports, the Jan. 16 launch of the space shuttle Columbia carried into space the first Israeli astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon. The real story, though, is buried in the ninth paragraph: how does one observe the Sabbath in orbit?

Colonel Ramon describes himself as a secular Jew, but he said that in space he would try to observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, if it did not interfere with his duties. Shabbat, observed every seventh day, normally goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. This raised the question of when the day of observance occurred in orbit, since the shuttle circles Earth every 90 minutes. The astronaut consulted a group of rabbis, who developed a consensus that the day of rest should be observed based on times at his launching point, Cape Canaveral.

Clearly, this is big news. The rabbis’ decision will have obvious implications for future astronauts living in the International Space Station — or in lunar colonies, where Jews would otherwise be useless for a full month due to the slow rotation of the Moon. (No adjustment would be needed for a colony on Mars, since each Mars day is 27 Earth-hours long — close enough.) But the rabbis don’t seemed to have answered the question fully. If what matters is the time of sunset in the place of departure, then the beginning of the Sabbath will vary by the individual astronaut. And what do you do when spacecraft launched from six different time zones all dock at the same space station?

One way to solve this problem is to look at the similar questions that arise without venturing so far afield. When, for instance, does Shabbat begin north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn’t set for six months out of the year?

A quick Google search reveals a variety of religious interpretations. “Ask the Rabbi” supports the Cape Canaveral approach, with times dictated by the traveler’s non-Arctic city of origin, but this won’t work when a single time is needed for everyone. To provide a standard time, some argue that the days should be divided by the lowest point of the sun’s dip in the sky, even if that dip takes place entirely below the horizon. Others hold that sunset in the nearest city outside the Arctic Circle should be taken as the reference point.

But neither of these approaches will work well in outer space, where the sun doesn’t dip and the nearest city can be several million miles away. What is needed is a single rule, such as that applied by an Orthodox chaplain at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. He simplified matters by beginning the Sabbath at 6:00 p.m. every Friday, rain or shine. Richard C. Nickels, who hails from Neck City, Mo., offers a more complex interpretation; he writes on BibleStudy.org that the dividing line in the Arctic is noon during the six months of darkness, but midnight during the six months of daylight.

Such a system may work for most of the Arctic Circle, but it doesn’t answer the question for the poles themselves. Since all time zones converge there, couldn’t a few feet result in several hours’ difference? When would a Jewish Santa Claus — or someone working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica — rest from his labors? As it turns out, Antarctica uses New Zealand’s time zone for the sake of convenience, and presumably this choice would apply to Sabbath times as well. (Even during several months of total darkness, Antarctica still adopts Daylight Savings Time.) The simplest solution to the rabbis’ problem, it seems, would be to adopt the same convention and to declare all of outer space to be in New Zealand.

For those who find such questions pointless, I can only say that they’re part of a long tradition. The Talmud tells the following story of Rabbi Jeremiah (quoted here):

“If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limit of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it. Rabbi Jeremiah asked: ‘If one foot of the fledgling is within the limit of fifty cubits, and one foot is outside it, what is the law?’ … It was for this reason that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the house of study.”

NOTE: No posts for the next week, unfortunately, as I’ll be on vacation.

Robert Kagan’s smear. Last Tuesday, the Washington Post carried an op-ed by Robert Kagan, a profoundly influential figure in American foreign policy. (His essay “Power and Weakness” is one of the most intriguing approaches to U.S.-European relations I’ve read in a long time.) Entitled “War and the Fickle Left” (link courtesy of Oxblog), the op-ed castigates noted liberal and Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer for flip-flopping on Iraq. In 1998, Walzer had defended the concept of preventative war to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; today, however, he is counted among the doves, writing in The New Republic that “The administration’s war is neither just nor necessary.”

Kagan finds this “illogical about-face” to be unfortunately common among liberals, as those who once supported intervention in the former Yugoslavia now call Bush a warmonger. “What changed?” he asks. “Just the man in the White House.” Liberal thinkers have sacrificed their “intellectual consistency” for “partisan passions,” opposing war simply because their political enemies support it.

Kagan is right to point out that many of the arguments now marshaled against the use of force in Iraq have been used selectively. (Who knew that U.N. approval was so important during the campaign in Kosovo?) But Walzer is largely innocent of this charge. Rather than engaging the arguments directly, Kagan instead embarks on a gross misrepresentation of Walzer’s recent views, presenting a handful of out-of-context quotes and ignoring the rest. As it turns out, Walzer’s position isn’t inconsistent: it’s just more nuanced than Kagan would like to admit.

The argument of Walzer’s 1998 piece is relatively clear, and Kagan’s summary of it largely accurate. At the domestic level, where the state protects individuals’ safety and monopolizes the use of force, “political conflicts can be fought to their conclusion with the guarantee that losing won’t mean massacre or imprisonment.” No similar guarantee holds at the international level, and individual states might sometimes need to defend themselves without waiting for a collective political decision in their favor. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, necessary self-defense might even include a preventive war.

Walzer draws an important distinction (to which Kagan is seemingly blind) between preemption and prevention. A preemptive war, in the terminology that he applies consistently throughout both articles, is a war to stop an imminent attack; preventative wars are designed to address more distant threats. Walzer admits that “in international law and morality, preventive wars have generally been ruled out.” This is because the standard purpose of such a war was to prevent a shift in the balance of power, and many other options were available to the parties to avoid conflict. Late-nineteenth-century Britain may have viewed the rise of Germany with alarm, but a preventive attack would not have been justified so long as negotiations, security alliances, or rearmament were still reasonable deterrents.

Walzer’s key point, made in both articles, is that weapons of mass destruction have the potential to collapse this distinction. The days of massing troops on the border are over; a chemical or nuclear arsenal would be built in secret and launched without warning, and any response would already be too late. While a war against Iraq may not be strictly preemptive–i.e., designed to prevent an attack next Tuesday–it may be the only way to stop the catastrophic use of deadly weapons. And although one “might well hope” for an international order that removes the danger of such weapons, no such order yet exists. “The refusal of a U.N. majority to act forcefully,” Walzer concluded in 1998, “isn’t a good reason for ruling out the use of force by any member state that can use it effectively.”

Why, then, is the Walzer of 2002 uneasy about the march to war? Contra Kagan, it’s not because he can’t stand to endorse the policies of a Bush White House. Rather, it’s because he sees the United States as having alternative options to conflict.

Let’s start with some chronology. Walzer’s recent article was published on Sept. 23. The U.N. resolution calling for a new round of inspections was passed on Nov. 8, roughly a month and a half later. At the time the article was published, the policy decision seemed to be between a unilateral adventure by the U.S., with the bombs to start falling at any moment, or an effort to work through the U.N. and create an effective inspections regime. Some say that a U.N. resolution was always Bush’s goal, with the regular Cabinet-level outbursts all part of a carefully calibrated good-cop-bad-cop strategy. But in September, this was by no means clear–many thought that the U.S. would push ahead regardless of U.N. backing, and some, like Charles Krauthammer, seemed to look forward to the possibility.

Walzer did not. The article he wrote in September argues unambiguously for a strong inspections regime, which he alleges could succeed in disarming Iraq without the massive costs of a full-scale invasion. To Walzer, the restoration of inspections represents a realistic alternative to an immediate military campaign. When Israel preventively bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981, it had few other tools for keeping nuclear weapons out of Hussein’s hands; had it gone before the U.N. and called for an inspections regime, no one would have listened. But the U.S. of 2002 can make inspections work, Walzer says, and therefore it must. After all, Iraq is not so close to deploying a nuclear arsenal that we can’t start bombing later should the inspections be frustrated.

All of this is perfectly compatible with the position Walzer took in 1998, when he endorsed unilateral action to bring the inspectors back. To Walzer, a war intended to stop Iraq from making deadly weapons is not justified so long as effective inspections are a real possibility. In order to make those inspections effective, however, the threat of war has to be on the table, and the U.S. would be justified in fighting that war unilaterally. Walzer makes no bones about the fact that inspections must be backed by “visible and overwhelming force.” The right thing to do now, he says, “is to re-create the conditions that existed in the mid-’90s for fighting a just war”–hoping that Hussein will choose disarmament over suicide, but readying for war if he does not.

What Walzer is advocating is very much like the “coercive inspections” proposed by the Carnegie Endowment (PDF report) back in August–an idea that many people regarded as superior to an immediate military campaign. The Carnegie Endowment explained clearly the rationale behind a new inspections regime:

This paper proposes a third approach, a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo that allows Iraqi WMD programs to continue and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion. It proposes a new regime of coercive international inspections. A powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council, would enable UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams to carry out “comply or else” inspections. The “or else” is overthrow of the regime. The burden of choosing war is placed squarely on Saddam Hussein.

Although one central aspect of the report–the enforcement of the UN resolutions by a new international military force rather than by member states–has not been adopted, many of the Carnegie recommendations have since been incorporated directly into Bush administration rhetoric. How many times, for example, have we been told that the decision to go to war is Hussein’s to make?

It’s true that Walzer would rather avoid war if he could; so would we all. But in keeping with his 1998 argument, he also recognizes that sometimes fighting can only be prevented by the readiness to fight–something which too many European critics have forgotten:

I think it is fair to say that many influential Europeans, from both the political class and the intelligentsia, would prefer a unilateral American war to a European readiness to fight–even if, to misquote Shakespeare, “the readiness is all,” and war itself could be avoided.

Such an attitude, Walzer writes, “suggests that they have lost all sense of themselves as independent and responsible actors in international society.”

Though only three months have elapsed since its publication, Walzer’s more recent TNR piece appears hopelessly dated. The inspections have already begun, and everyone recognizes a refusal to comply with their terms as the most likely trigger for military action. The war that Walzer describes as “neither just nor necessary” is a war fought in place of inspection requirements, rather than to enforce them. According to what appears to be the policy of the U.S. government, it is not the war we are now envisioning, nor is it the war that Kagan seeks to defend.

Honest people can disagree over whether even the toughest inspections regime can succeed in disarming Iraq; Walzer obviously believes it can. But he also believes that a weakened inspections regime will fail, and that the use of force, even unilateral force, may then become necessary. Walzer is crystal clear on this point, and Kagan presumably knows how to read. Describing Walzer’s position as an “about-face”–and dismissing legitimate disagreement as mere partisan spin–is dangerously irresponsible, and unworthy of someone of Kagan’s talents.

UPDATE: David Tannenbaum makes a similar argument in a letter to the Washington Post.

What’s happened to Jude Wanniski? For a long time, I knew of Jude Wanniski only as a famous supporter of supply-side economics, a supporter of unpopular ideas like a gold standard, and as the whipping boy of Paul Krugman (as well as others who actually have higher degrees in economics, unlike Wanniski). A friend in my introductory economics class was a fan of the supply-siders and of Wanniski in particular; as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, Wanniski had helped popularize ideas that have now become standard Republican dogma. Economics training or no, he seemed to have been taken seriously by powerful figures in government. It was under his tutelage, says CNN, that onetime vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp learned to be a supply-sider, an influence which still continues. President Bush is an adherent of supply-side doctrine, and Wanniski still gets quoted in the Washington Post whenever the subject arises. While at the American Enterprise Institute in the 1970s, Wanniski was the office neighbor of John Snow, now Bush’s appointee for treasury secretary. As a result, my impression of Wanniski until recently was as a figure of some influence, if only historical, in American economic policy. A quack, maybe, but a quack with plenty of loyal readers.

That was before I read his views on foreign policy. In searching for information on the Kurds in Iraq, I came across an “open memo” Wanniski wrote to Karl Rove this March. In the memo, Wanniski makes a number of remarkable claims, not least of which is the following:

“President Bush cited last week’s New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, which gives an account of the 1988 gassings based on 14-year-old hearsay. On three different Sunday talk shows, Cheney repeated the charge that Saddam killed as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds, in this manner. What I am telling you publicly, Karl, is that this DID NOT HAPPEN…. There is no possibility that Saddam gassed his own people and no evidence that he did. None.”

Throughout the memo, Wanniski is emphatic on the subject of Iraq’s innocence. Goldberg’s article, for instance, “offers no evidence, only quotes from various Kurds who seem to remember gas being used.” This is an odd way to describe testimony like the following, from a survivor of the Halabja massacre:

“On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to die,” Nouri told me. “The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could see them.” People were dying all around, he said. When a child could not go on, the parents, becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. “Many children were left on the ground, by the side of the road. Old people as well. They were running, then they would stop breathing and die.”

Or this, from a former resident of the village of Goktapa:

[Ahmed Raza Sharif] saw the shells explode and smelled the sweet-apple odor as poison filled the air. His son, Osman Ahmed, who was sixteen at the time, was near the village mosque when he was felled by the gas. He crawled down a hill and died among the reeds on the banks of the Lesser Zab, the river that flows by the village. His father knew that he was dead, but he couldn’t reach the body. As many as a hundred and fifty people died in the attack; the survivors fled before the advancing Iraqi Army, which levelled the village.

Goldberg’s article is actually one of the most powerful discussions of the Kurdish experience in Iraq that I’ve ever read. Of course, for all I know, the piece might be chock full of falsehoods–but then the right way for Wanniski to criticize it would be to cite countervailing evidence in similar detail, which he fails to provide. (Wanniski never even mentions Goktapa in his rebuttal. And according to the New York Times, Tariq Aziz has now officially admitted Iraq’s role in the Halabja massacre.) In fact, Wanniski holds Iraq largely innocent of the well-documented Anfal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, in which chemical weapons were used on a number of occasions. True, he notes, “There were hundreds of villages cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the residents were moved to new villages built for them in the interior.” It is impossible to read such words without thinking of the trains to the concentration camps, trains which were also ostensibly bound for new villages and “resettlement.”

In discussing Iraq’s record, Wanniski has a rather eccentric sense of whose story to trust. Although he dismisses the conclusions reached by Human Rights Watch and its fellows–although he sees through every biased news report and is never fooled by State Department propaganda–Wanniski also repeats as literal fact a press release from the Iraqi representatives to the U.N. Who does he think writes these press releases? Maybe in normal times, trusting wholeheartedly a government that imprisons dissenters and that controls information with an iron fist would only be foolish. But when it leads him to deny murder of thousands, such negligence becomes criminal.

Wanniski’s is joined in his efforts to defend Baghdad by his “friend” and “the most important Muslim in the world,” Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. Wanniski gives a glowing reception to what he presents as a pair of letters from Farrakhan to Presidents Clinton and Hussein. The letters were written in 1998, in the course of Farrakhan’s attempt to mediate a crisis between the U.S. and Iraq that ultimately resulted in the expulsion of inspectors and a renewed bombing campaign. (I should note, by the way, that I’m forced to rely on Wanniski’s account of these letters rather than a source originating from Farrakhan himself. As far as I’m aware, these letters have not been published elsewhere. But Wanniski seems to hold Farrakhan in very high esteem, often referring to him as a friend and portraying him as America’s last best hope for improved relations with the Muslim world. At the very least, Wanniski can be trusted not to portray Farrakhan in a more negative light than the latter deserves.)

Farrakhan’s letter to Clinton is generally unremarkable, but the letter to Saddam Hussein is simply breathtaking. Consider these two paragraphs:

But, Your Excellency, we who have grown up in Islam inside of America understand that the West wants to destroy you sir, in order to make an example out of your destruction to all strong Muslim leaders.

You are a visionary, and they want to destroy your vision! If they are able to bring you down, that will serve as a warning to Brother Qadhafi in Libya; to Brothers Hassan Turabi and Omar Bashir in the Sudan; it will mean a setback for the goal of unity of the Muslim ummah.

A visionary? This for the leader of a regime that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, that has gouged out the eyes of detainees, that tortures women to make their husbands confess?

To be charitable, perhaps Farrakhan was merely being a sycophant rather than an advocate of torture and murder–perhaps he just wanted to get on Hussein’s good side, and thought he had a better chance of achieving peace by buttering up the dictator. But this stretches rather thin the notion of an “honest broker” for peace, who at the very least should be expected not to lie to the parties in order to get a better deal. Can you imagine Nelson Mandela, had he chosen to intervene in similar circumstances, calling Hussein a visionary? Can you imagine Jimmy Carter writing to Kim Jong Il, in an attempt to forestall a nuclear crisis, that “the West wants to destroy you sir”? And could he really find no better examples of Muslim leadership than in Libya and the Sudan? By publicly expressing such sentiments, Farrakhan has given up any claim to moral authority that he hadn’t already thrown away. And by quoting them approvingly, Wanniski achieves the distinction of a scoundrel as well as a quack.

When one leaves the subject of Iraq, Wanniski’s opinions get stranger still. He wrote on March 4, 2002 that there is no slavery in Sudan, a fact which he knows to be true because the New York Times was once forced to retract an article on the subject. This pronouncement will come as a great surprise to Human Rights Watch, as well as to the slaves themselves. It’s even stranger in light of a 1999 article in which he wrote that the slaves are more like indentured servants, really–and in any case it’s all the fault of the IMF and World Bank, just like the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

I’m not sure if there’s any unifying force in Wanniski’s foreign policy views. But if there is, it’s not a good one. Consider what he identifies as the real issue behind Jeffrey Goldberg’s essay on the Kurds:

My big problem with Goldberg is that he told me three years ago that he had served in the Israeli army, which made him a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. I read his long article and can tell you it is worthless as ‘evidence.’ Even at the time, Turkey said it could not tell whether Kurds showing up on its side of the border had been gassed or were victims of malnutrition. Not that Goldberg is malicious, only that he had a serious bias going into the assignment and there is no evidence he made any attempt to test his own initial hypothesis. Having a dual citizenship with the U.S. and Israel might be okay in ordinary times, but when push comes to shove, you cannot serve two masters.

“Serve two masters”? This is dangerous language, echoing the old canard of Jewish control of the media, only updated to replace “Jews” with “Israelis.” But Wanniski is not always so careful to update his prejudices. In another article, Wanniski asks the rhetorical question, “Do Jews control the media?” “You bet they do,” he answers, at least as far as reporting on Israel is concerned.

Wanniski argues that such a claim isn’t really anti-Semitic: “In my mind, anti-Semitism requires one to want to do harm to Jews in some way–at a low level barring Jews from country club membership, for example, a practice that still exists in some clubs at least ‘unofficially.'” But one can harbor prejudices against a group without meeting Wanniski’s extraordinarily high standard of wanting to do harm to members of that group. For instance, someone who claimed that Jews were intellectually and morally inferior people might mean no harm to anyone; in fact, he might want to help Jews by enabling them to overcome their innate deficiencies. And one can even harbor prejudices against a group without believing in that group’s inherent inferiority: the virulent WWI-era prejudice against Germans, which certainly had its share of wild accusations and conspiracy theories, had no alleged basis in biological differences. In writing that the Jews control the media, Wanniski wasn’t merely trying to praise the resourcefulness of a highly accomplished ethnic group by noting its over-representation in positions of influence. “Control” has clear connotations of influence used in a nefarious manner–and in any case, he represents the alleged Jewish control of the media as a very bad thing, which it wouldn’t be if he didn’t think Jewish influence was being used for undesirable ends.

And although Wanniski says his claims about Jewish media control are limited to the subject of Israel, that’s clearly not the case. There’s no better evidence of this than his story of Minister Farrakhan meeting with some Chicago-area rabbis:

Min. Farrakhan tells of a dinner meeting with a group of influential rabbis in Chicago a few years back, a dinner arranged by Irv Kupcinet, the columnist. He says the dinner went beautifully and the rabbis suggested they adjourn to another room for coffee, to come down to business. He said one rabbi took out a sheet of paper with a list of demands, telling him that if he complied with them, they would assure him his problems with the news media would go away. One of the demands was that he apologize for everything he had said in the past that distressed them, another that he say nothing in the future that would distress them. Farrakhan told me he said he would apologize for anything he said that was not true, if they would wish to discuss it with him man-to-man, but that he could not grant blanket apologies as if he were a child and thus could not comply. He said he told the rabbis that he could also take a list of demands from his pocket, if they were willing to sit and listen. He said he acknowledged the Jewish community had done more for the black man over the past century than any other ethnic or religious group. It was always in a parent/child relationship, and it was time for equal footing at an adult level. No deal.

Now, a reasonable person might interpret these events a different way. Perhaps the rabbis’ case to Farrakhan was that if he signed the statement and apologized for the statements they found objectionable, his problems with the media would disappear as writers and editors, whether Jewish or not, stopped considering him an anti-Semite. You don’t have to believe in a vast media conspiracy to think that a frank apology by Farrakhan, taking place at a joint news-conference/lovefest at which the Anti-Defamation League makes him its honorary president, might have positive effects for his image.

But that’s not how Wanniski tells it. The rabbis weren’t trying to achieve a rapprochement; they were offering to make Farrakhan’s media problems “disappear,” like Don Corleone taking care of union trouble. The image Wanniski presents is one of every newspaper editor in America placing a call to the Elders of Zion before signing off on another Farrakhan story. And if that’s how the system works, how is Jewish control of the media limited to the subject of Israel–and how is such an account of it different from anything that might have been printed in Der Sturmer?

In short, it seems that Wanniski, whose ideas were always in dispute, has finally gone off the deep end. Of course, maybe this occurred a long time ago; maybe he was just as wacky when he was talking about the Laffer curve or the suffering of the American rich. I don’t know enough economics to be sure. But it’s still a little scary to hear a figure of some influence in American politics denying slavery in the Sudan, defending Iraq’s programs of ethnic cleansing, and decrying Jewish influence in the media. Why have so few people picked up on this, and why is Wanniski still treated as a legitimate commentator rather than a dangerous crank?