David Ignatius has an entertaining little column in the Washington Post singing the praises of the US State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Splattered with quotes attributed only to "a State Department official"--who, to everyone's utter shock, turns out to be quite fond of the Bureau--the column credits "INR", as the Bureau is called (apparently, good intelligence doesn't require good spelling) with an outstanding historical record of predictive acumen.

Ignatius' list of INR successes, however, is more amusing than arresting. One achievement--pre-war skepticism about the presence of WMDs in Iraq--could be described as at least somewhat impressive, given that it went strongly against the conventional wisdom of the time. The rest,however, are all statements of the obvious ("it warned in the late 1970s that if the Carter administration allowed the deposed shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment, there would be trouble in Tehran"), takedowns of politicized predictions from other branches of government ("INR provided more accurate bomb damage assessments during the Vietnam War than did the Pentagon"), or both ("it warned before the March 2003 invasion about the political and ethnic turmoil that was likely in postwar Iraq").

Glaringly absent from this triumphant description of fifty-odd years of intelligence analysis is a single prediction of a major event that wasn't also being widely predicted by others. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo, the fall of the Shah in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, September 11th, 2001--all were world-changing surprises that "one of Washington's hidden jewels" with "an elite reputation" and "a culture that...demands expertise" might have earned its keep by predicting. But Ignatius can't seem to come up with any such triumph of intelligence and research. Instead, his INR hit parade has to be padded with fish-in-a-barrel prognostications like, "[i]n the Balkans, the bureau correctly cautioned that a bombing campaign would not force Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to leave Kosovo quickly." Even if it had never been wrong (and that's an impossibly big "if"), the INR would hardly have justified its 1999 budget with a no-brainer prediction like that. I only hope the inside information Ignatius extracted from his "State Department official" justified the humiliation of writing such a humiliatingly obsequious "source-greaser".

I suppose it's not surprising that a respected international relations guru would propose an original idea about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that two prominent bloggers would pronounce it brilliantly correct--despite its being one of the stupidest ideas proposed on the subject in a long time.

The guru in question, Walter Russell Mead, argues that "the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people." He proposes that the US organize an effort to compensate Palestinian refugees financially for their losses in 1948, and help them (again financially) to integrate into their current countries of residence, or else into a future Palestinian state.

Mead claims to have come to his conclusions after "meeting diplomats, officials, policy experts, military leaders, students and ordinary citizens" throughout the Arab world. It's hard to imagine, though, where he might have met these people. In Kuwait, where Palestinian transient workers were expelled en masse in 1991 for supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion? Iraq, where Palestinians have been similarly reviled after the liberation, because of their alliance with the hated Saddam? Lebanon, where Palestinians are denied citizenship, confined to refugee camps, and widely blamed for the disruption that led to the civil war that began in 1975? Egypt, which controlled the Gaza strip for nineteen years, yet did nothing to help Palestinian refugees during that time, leaving it to a UN organization (UNRWA) to provide them with day-to-day help?

Today, the entire Arab world contributes less than four percent of the annual budget of UNRWA, . The US provides thirty percent. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is a major financial supporter of Palestinians--provided that they're terrorists. The facts simply don't support the claim that Arab sympathy for the Palestinian cause is anything more than a vehicle for venting hatred against Americans and Israel (or, more accurately, Jews).

Why, then, would Mead and his supportive bloggers embrace such a nonsensical idea? Most likely, it's because they want to. After all, the thesis has several attractive qualities: it offers a simple solution to a problem (Arab hatred of America) that seems otherwise intractable; it requires neither an ugly, possibly violent confrontation with hate-filled opponents nor an embarrassing public capitulation to them; and it allows for American relations with both Palestinians in particular and Arab nations in general to be improved without jeopardizing America's friendship with Israel.

In fact, if it had the merest shred of a connection to reality, it would no doubt be a truly brilliant idea.

Apparently, in the wake of the recent troubles in Iraq, at least one conservative supporter of the American campaign there has developed doubts about the administration's handling of the Iraq campaign's aftermath. Three bloggers have cried foul in response, arguing (in Matthew Yglesias' words) that

When George W. Bush is president and is advocating a war and you, too, are advocating for war, then the fact of the matter is that you are advocating that the war be conducted by George W. Bush. That Bush would botch things was a perfectly predictable consequence of said support, based on--among other things--the fact that he'd botched everything else he'd ever done.

Or, as Kieran Healy puts it,

[S]upporters of the war can’t run away from the problems of its aftermath just because they personally might have done things differently, because frankly anyone who knew anything about both the Bush administration and the complexities of a war in Iraq could have predicted that it was going to be a mess.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it "proves too much". After all, numerous opponents of the Iraq war complained that it would waste too many soldiers' lives, while provoking massive worldwide hostility to America and neglecting the effort to eradicate Al Qaida. Surely, though, those opponents must have known that this administration would have found ways to get troops killed while alienating world opinion and falling down on the anti-terrorism job, even had it not chosen to target Iraq. Shouldn't they have been thankful, then, that at least the war in Iraq would topple a horrible dictator in the process?

A more reasonable discussion of the pros and cons of the Iraq campaign, I think, needs to be independent of whether the Bush administration can be assumed a priori to be evil and/or incompetent. And the striking thing about all of the aforementioned retrospective assessments of the war is their astonishing level of collective amnesia. The remarkably short, painless, casualty-free conduct of the military campaign itself has apparently now reached the status of an a priori given, and its effectiveness is therefore currently understood to be best measured by the state of Iraq's transition into peaceful, united, democratic statehood.

Now, there's no doubt that some supporters of the Iraq war have set themselves up for failure by creating absurdly optimistic expectations for Iraq's miraculous metamorphosis from fascist hellhole to democratic role model. But that's no excuse for the rest of us to live in their dreamworld. Iraq is, and most likely will continue to be, a far better place for Saddam Hussein's having been toppled. To be dissatisfied at the lack of more spectacular progress there is to embrace the neocons' own fantasies of democratic transformation--a rather poor position from which to critique them.

If one starts from my initial position, however--that is, sincere ambivalence about a risky, potentially catastrophic military incursion with the sole goal of ousting a horrible, dangerous military dictator--then the whole project looks markedly better in retrospect than it did at the outset. It's true that no "weapons of mass destruction" have been found--although few doubt that a chemical weapons program would have been easy for Saddam to reconstitute, given that he had had a highly successful one in the past. On the other hand, the strongest argument against the war--the largely unuttered "body bags" argument", envisioning a long, drawn-out, horribly bloody campaign involving thousands of civilian and military deaths--turned out in the end to have been completely contradicted by events.

I've already made it clear numerous times that I consider the grand effort to democratize Iraq to be naively optimistic. And I suppose it's possible that by hanging around for long enough, the American army could ultimately damage its country's strategic position enough to undo its spectacular victory in Iraq. But to declare the current circumstances there a disaster based on a little continued unrest is to lose track of the recent history of that troubled country--which about a year ago experienced, despite a few bumps since, a truly wonderful upturn in its fortunes, thanks to its friends from the United States of America.

John Holbo at Crooked Timber ridicules as "wrong on both counts" Anne Applebaum's lament that "Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it [and] High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it." The comments responding to his posting are generally divided between those who wholeheartedly agree with him and those who agree with Applebaum's criticism of popular culture, while defending high culture.

I'm hardly surprised that Crooked Timber's relatively intellectual members and audience share a common sympathy for "high culture", and are inclined to rise to its defense while lambasting popular culture. But it seems utterly obvious to me that they have everything entirely backwards. Popular culture doesn't "hate" high culture, but rather alternates between ignoring it and paying homage to it. The slighting references to it in pop-culture contexts, cited indignantly by Crooked Timberites, are only noticeable to someone looking very hard for them; more typical are ostentatious references to familiar classics, intended to lend an aura of dignity to otherwise low-to-middlebrow fare. Meanwhile, as I pointed out some time ago, art forms such as poetry separate themselves so much from their popular equivalents--such as hiphop--as to refuse even to consider themselves part of the same art form, for fear of being recognized as pitifully irrelevant by comparison.

The fact that modern leftists tend to be allies of high culture is somewhat ironic, for the very notion of "high art", which is not much more than a hundred years old, is largely a reactionary upper-class response to the rise of the middle class during the industrial revolution, and its undermining of the aristocracy's traditional patronage-based control over culture. Once old money could no longer outbid the masses for the allegiances of artists, it became necessary to justify the former's tastemakership some other way--and Matthew Arnold helpfully provided it. The nineteenth-century left, for their part, had little use for his snobbish depiction of art as moral instructor with which to civilize the Philistines (read: commoners), and expected artists to serve the workingman humbly alongside all the other bourgeois parasites living off his labors.

It was another movement, bohemianism, that turned out to be the savior of "high art", as it careened towards irrelevancy along with the vanishing ruling class it served. The original Bohemians rejected the new cultural dominance of the mass market, and rightly observed that the surplus wealth of a modern economy offered an alternative: idiosyncratic art generated for a small audience. While it couldn't compete with mass-appeal art, it could still support a single artist willing to sacrifice comfort for freedom.

From the perspective of the recently-dethroned patrons of high art, however, the Bohemians' oevre displayed certain very attractive qualities: it was smaller-scale, harder to find, and usually more difficult to appreciate than the mass-market kind. It thus offered a cultural playing field on which the leisure class, simply by applying its reserves of spare time, could claim to outperform the average consumer of popular art. And while money was declining as a definer of class, education, socialization and leisure became more central to elite identity. The upper classes soon adopted the avant-garde art of the Bohemians and their successors as their new symbol of cultural superiority, replacing Arnold's beloved instructive classics.

Today, most defenders of "high art" think nothing of lumping the reams of ephemeral drivel produced by modernist poets, avant-garde composers, "conceptual artists" and unreadable authors together with the likes of Shakespeare, Mozart or Rembrandt. In fact, they share nothing, apart from a common rival: popular culture, which threatens to obscure the earlier greats and obliterate the modern mediocrities entirely.

Indeed, the high-popular distinction would not even have been recognized by the pantheon of classic heroes, most of whom catered unembarrassedly to popular audiences. (The latter's tastes were, in practice, not always much inferior to those of the wealthiest patrons.) Rather, the current practice of elevating certain types of art to an exalted plane is more a product of a century's worth of class warfare than of any serious aesthetic consideration.

The burst of panic over the current unrest in Iraq is somewhat amusing to those of us old fogeys whose memories extend back as far as those long-ago days of, oh, around mid-2003. Back then, if you'll recall, a fairly large, well-organized insurgency was running an effective guerrilla campaign against the occupying US troops, inflicting steady casualties and preventing order from being imposed on several major locales. Military operations against the insurgents were allegedly killing, injuring or just inconveniencing large numbers of Iraqi civilians, provoking them to resent and even oppose the American occupiers. The way was thus supposedly being paved for the return of a revitalized Saddam Hussein on the heels of a fleeing US occupation force, sick of taking bullets for a sullen, hostile populace.

Today, despite appearances, the combined Sunni-Shia "uprising" is not a serious threat to the US occupation forces. I expect that within a few weeks at most, the rebellion will have been thoroughly quashed, Muqtada al-Sadr will be either killed, captured or in hiding, and American troops will once again be in fairly complete control of Iraq. Unfortunately, that's where the Americans' problem starts.

For the current unrest is not really a severe problem in itself, but rather a symptom of a much larger one: the massive power vaccuum into which former Ba'athists and al-Sadr are attempting to step. The Americans have concentrated excessively on "reconstruction" and democracy, rather than building a credible (that is, sufficiently force-projecting) domestic alternative to the former Ba'athist power structure. Worse still, they've announced their intention to, in effect, cut and run by mid-year, handing over authority to a pitifully weak provisional government. The door has thus been opened for both Sunni remnants of the old regime and Shia agents of neighboring Iran to fill the void the US troops will leave behind.

I argued eight months ago that the pursuit of democracy in Iraq was getting in the way of the urgently-needed process of building a credible governmental power structure there, and that the consequences of these misplaced priorities would be disastrous for both the US and Iraq. This past week's troubles are not themselves the disastrous consequences of which I spoke. Rather, they are a mere hint of the chaos that will reign--and the ease with which foreign powers like Iran will exploit it--if the Americans stick to their publicly stated plans.

I've written before about the absurdity of the notion that "soft power" is more important than the "hard" (i.e., military) kind, and the strange role of the fall of the Soviet Union in making this canard credible to certain gullible analysts. But it's hard to imagine a more perfect textbook case of this delusion than Joseph "Soft Power" Nye's op-ed in the Washington Post. See if you can detect any traces of actual history in his description of the Cold War:

Historically, Americans have been good at wielding soft power. Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square with a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

For forty-four years, Eastern Europeans groaned under Soviet despotism--FDR's gift to Stalin at Yalta. Chinese freedom-lovers still suffer under heavy repression today, their hopes having been crushed under the tank treads of the PLA at Tienanmen square in 1989, just as the Iron Curtain was about to fall. But to Nye, this horrible history of uninterrupted tyranny, which America was helpless to end, was in fact a glorious demonstration of America's success at "wielding soft power"--all because of a few slogans, radio programs and effigies.

Perhaps if the period in question had ended a few centuries ago, Nye would have an excuse for his own pitiful lack of perspective. But the events about which he demonstrates such utter and complete cluelessness happened during his own adult years, within any normal person's clear living memory. That he can still be respected as a serious scholar after publishing such nonsense is simply baffling.

NYT columnist David Brooks' highly conventional advice to today's high school graduates looks harmless, as hackneyed adages are wont to do. Don't worry, he writes, about the things that seem important in high school:

Once you reach adulthood, the key to success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing yourself passionately to them.

The traits you used getting good grades might actually hold you back. To get those high marks, while doing all the extracurricular activities colleges are also looking for....[y]ou could not allow yourself to be obsessed by one subject because if you did, your marks in the other subjects would suffer. You could not take outrageous risks because you might fail....You just knew that each class was a hoop you must jump through on your way to a first-class university. You learned to thrive in adult-supervised settings.....

But in adulthood, you'll find that a talent for regurgitating what superiors want to hear will take you only halfway up the ladder, and then you'll stop there. The people who succeed most spectacularly, on the other hand, often had low grades. They are not prudential. They venture out and thrive where there is no supervision, where there are no preset requirements.

Unfortunately, only highly successful people ever seem to be asked the secrets to success in life. And their answer is always the same: take risks, hold on to your dream, let nothing stand in your way, dare to be unconventional, etc., etc. Well, of course that's what they'd say, isn't it? If you interview a hundred lottery jackpot winners, at least ninety-nine of them will tell you the secret to success in life: play the lottery.

But it's entirely possible--indeed, I would say, it's highly likely--that the strategies that most often lead to spectacular success in life are, because of their associated risks, very poor choices for young people whose futures are not yet assured. If one were to ask thousands of moderately successful people the secret to their comfortable lives, on the other hand, I suspect their message would be the exact opposite of Brooks': work hard, whether you "love your work" or not; keep your passions from interfering with your duties and responsibilities, both at work and at home; respect, and learn from, your superiors; and choose safety and good sense over risk and dreams.

Granted, these principles may not get you an op-ed column in the New York Times. But they'll probably serve the average high school grad a lot better than Brooks' verbal lottery ticket.

The stunning victory of the Spanish Socialist party in the wake of the Al Qaida bombing attacks that killed 200 in Madrid, and Spanish prime minister Zapatero's subsequent announcement that his country's troops would soon be withdrawn from Iraq, have provoked some odd reactions. Edward Luttwak, who originally opposed the US campaign in Iraq, believes nonetheless that the troop withdrawal announcement was a huge victory for Osama bin Laden, who will view it as a capitulation that invites further intimidating attacks. (In that regard, he has much company on the right-hand side of the blogosphere.) On the left, Mark Kleiman also believes that the results "aren't good news for the war on Al Qaeda", although he suspects that they are a mere electoral accident, borne of surprisingly high turnout among younger voters, rather than a metaphorical electoral white flag raised in response to terrorism.

On the other hand, Volokh Conspirator Jacob Levy believes that a Spanish pullout from Iraq would be irrelevant to the overall war on terror. Crooked Timber's John Quiggin goes even further, claiming that the Spanish reaction is actually a boon to the war on terrorism, since it helps shift attention away from the massive red herring that is Iraq, and towards direct targeting of Al Qaida. Moreover, he argues, any encouragement that Al Qaida may glean from Zapatero's decision will have absolutely no practical impact, because as a fanatical terrorist group, it simply attacks its Western enemies wherever and whenever it can, regardless of whether those enemies attempt appeasement or confrontation in response.

This last point is certainly valid; a Spanish pullout from Iraq will hardly boost the average radical Islamic terrorist's morale at all, compared with the inspiring effect of the murderous bombing that preceded it. And Levy is also correct in saying that the war in Iraq is not the same as the war on terrorism.

But all the participants in this debate are missing the real significance of Zapatero's decision: it's a strong indicator of future Spanish--and potentially future general European--attitudes towards Western assertiveness in general with respect to terrorist groups and their activities. As it happens, Zapatero did not only call Spanish troops home--he also stated that "fighting terrorism with bombs ... with Tomahawk missiles, isn't the way to defeat terrorism....Terrorism is combated by the state of law." European Commission president Romano Prodi expressed similar sentiments: "Europe applies different instruments [against terrorism], suited to help our citizens leave fear behind: using politics and not just force, which has created further fear." Regardless of one's opinion of the situation in Iraq, these comments from European leaders are not auspicious portents for the war on terrorism.

Chief Conspirator Eugene Volokh and Slate's Dahlia Lithwick seem to be having a bit of trouble with the concept of democracy. Now, I say, "having a bit of trouble with", rather than the obvious, "loathing with unbridled passion", because (a) the latter would be so completely expected as not even to be worth mentioning, and (b) the two being fairly well-respected, legally educated minds, one would not expect them to have so much difficulty mastering such a simple concept.

At issue is a bill, HR 3920, proposing to allow Congress to override (by a two-thirds vote in both houses) any Supreme Court ruling to the effect that a particular statute is unconstitutional. Now, I understand that this bill is nothing short of a heresy against America's anti-democratic judicial religion, and that any adherent of the Church of the American Judiciary would therefore reject it out of hand as completely violating the Constitution, as interpreted by the High Priests of that Church. But Volokh's and Lithwick's difficulties with the bill go beyond mere dogmatic rejection of it. In fact, they honestly can't even seem to understand it.

Volokh's problem seems to stem from being so wedded to the idea of judicial supremacy that he simply can't imagine a world beyond it. Let us suppose, he offers, that Congress overrides a ruling in some case that a particular law is unconstitutional, but a similar (though not identical) case is later brought challenging the constitutionality of the same law. "Why should the Court do anything but strike the law down?", he asks. After much rambling, he seems--just barely--to stumble upon the obvious answer: "perhaps a Congressional veto of a Court decision striking down a statute might automatically mean the statute is per se validated against all future challenges, though that would pose its own problems." What those problems are, he doesn't say. Perhaps respect for democracy poses, in his view, a whole host of problems so self-evident as not to require mentioning.

Lithwick, meanwhile, goes on and on about two competing theological visions of the Constitution: that it's a "living" document, re-interpreted by wise judges over time, and that it has a fixed meaning, requiring a "strict constructionist" interpretation by those same wise judges. The idea of allowing democratically elected authorities to have input into the constitution's interpretation is so strange to her, though, that she misunderstands it completely, summarizing it with the phrase, "anyone who interprets the Constitution using a theory that differs from one's own is simply not a judge"--a position that she equates with "arrogance and lawlessness". In other words, the decision of a two-thirds majority of both houses of the elected representative bodies of a functioning democracy is, in her view, best characterized as simply "one's own" opinion.

This confusion is strange, because, as a matter of fact, Lithwick's home country, Canada, allows just such a legislative override of a judicial ruling of unconstitutionality. The Canadian constitution's "notwithstanding" clause explicitly lays out the procedure by which a legislature may, by a supermajority vote, override the Supreme Court's decision that a given piece of legislation is unconstitutional. The clause has even been used, in the (in)famous case of Quebec's language law, which mandated that French be given prominence over English in all public signs.

Now, I certainly don't endorse the result of that particular use of the clause, but the fact is that the world didn't collapse when ultimate authority was wrested from the courts and handed to a legislature. Ms. Lithwick and Prof. Volokh may not like such an arrangement--indeed, I'm quite sure they do not--and they certainly may declare it outside the current consensus understanding of American Constitutionalism. But it's extremely strange that they should treat the established practice of their neighbor to the north as some kind of bizarre logical inconsistency or anarchistic madness, like--oh, I don't know, the wacky theories of lunatics like Copernicus and Darwin.

The other night I heard Gabriel Schoenfeld speak about his new book, "The Return of Anti-Semitism". His basic thesis is that anti-Semitism is on the rise in three areas: the Islamic world, where quotations from Muslim texts are mingled with classic European slanders to create a virulent, widely embraced brand of hatred; in Europe, where the political left has joined the alienated Muslim minority in bashing Israel and Jews with increasing fervor; and in America, where the radical left, particularly on university campuses, feels free to indulge in unprecedentedly frank expressions of animosity towards Jews.

The problem with this thesis, however, is that it doesn't stand up to a thorough consideration of the past. In the Muslim world, for example, rabid anti-Semitism has been rampant for decades. Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian leader who made the news last year by complaining about Jews ruling the world, set down his anti-Semitic ideas in writing a decade and a half ago. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has long been a standard source of anti-Israel propaganda in the Arab world. The Hamas charter, dating back to 1988, is as slanderously anti-Semitic a document as one will see anywhere in the world today, blaming the Jews, their money and their "secret societies" for, among other things, the French and Communist revolutions and both world wars.

Europe, as well, is hardly a newcomer to anti-Semitism--even in the postwar era. The continent of Kurt Waldheim and Jean-Marie Le Pen didn't suddenly rediscover its roots a couple of years ago. Schoenfeld is correct in saying that anti-Semitism is stronger on the political left than it used to be--but then, it's also weaker than before on the political right. (Who, a few years ago, would have imagined the descendants of the Italian Fascists defending Jews and Israel?) In effect, the hatred has shifted around a bit, but it's hard to argue that it's significantly increased.

In America, moreover, there's reason to estimate that anti-Semitism has significantly decreased. In 1991, a Jew was ruthlessly murdered, and many more injured, during what can only be described as a pogrom in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood. The political leadership of the city could barely muster a word of regret over the incident, for fear of antagonizing militantly anti-Jewish constituents. Black leaders like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan openly engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, winning massive support. Today, even minor politicians who use similar tactics soon taste resounding political defeat.

But if anti-Semitism around the world isn't noticeably more intense today than in past decades, it's certainly more intensely noticed. Schoenfeld's book is only one example of the attention that the supposed worldwide rise in anti-Semitism has lately received. Why now?

My speculation: from 1993 to 2000--the Oslo years--world Jewry were lulled into a state of unjustified complacency. Confident that Israel's future had been secured, and with it the safety of the Jewish people, a normally vigilant group came to view all signs of anti-Semitism as minor incidents of little concern. The rude awakenings of 2000 (the "Al Aqsa Intifada"), 2001 (September 11th) and 2002 (the "Jenin Massacre") have since converted the previous serenity into panic, and today's more normal perception of the anti-Semitic threat seems disproportionately worse (only) in comparison with the calm that directly preceded it.

UPDATE: Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett seems to agree with Schoenfeld.

Did I say 2003? I meant early 2004, of course....

For some reason Oxblog's David Adesnik has chosen this moment to post a couple of long discussions of Robert Altman's 1972 film, M*A*S*H*. Even more strangely, Adesnik has focused primarily on the film's portrayal of the US military in wartime, as if that were the film's real topic.

It's been a while since I saw M*A*S*H*, but I still vividly remember the revulsion I felt as I watched it. Every now and then, you see, I encounter a film (Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and Jane Campion's The Piano are two others) which evokes in me the weird sensation of discovering an imaginary world completely misunderstood by its own creator. Most often, the filmmaker's sympathies lie with a fictional inhabitant of that world whose odiousness seems self-evident to me, despite the sympathetic presentation.

But the overpraised protagonist of The Piano is merely an obnoxious, self-centered harridan, and Crimes' loathesomely conscienceless main character is only shown in an ordinary, not admirable, light. The heroes of M*A*S*H*, on the other hand--and they are presented, unambiguously, as heroes--are genuine monsters, capable of truly immense cruelty. And the filmmaker clearly embraces, even glorifies that cruelty, because it is directed at those who are on the wrong side. As clear-eyed, politically aware subversives, Hawkeye and Trapper John are, suggests Altman, capable of recognizing the true bourgeois enemy, in the form of Burns and Houlihan--and fully justified in destroying them utterly, and without remorse.

This is a recurring theme in Altman's films--at least those I've been able to stomach watching: real morality--standing up for the right and the good against the world's evil masters--requires copious reserves of self-righteous ruthlessness, and those who are not prepared to break a few eggs (to borrow Stalin's locution) are mere dupes of the powers that be. In "Secret Honor", a little-known Altman film based on the one-man play by the same name, Richard Nixon is presented as a hero who, realizing that his administration is actually controlled by a shadowy, world-dominating "committee of 300" industrialists, decides to sabotage his own presidency, by instigating the Watergate scandal, in order to save himself and his country from the clutches of his puppet-masters. In other words, even the misdeeds of an arch-enemy like Nixon (as Altman no doubt sees him) would have been justified, in Altman's view, for the sake of the great struggle against the evil conspiracy of the world's ruling villains.

There was a time, of course, when Altman's brand of manichaeism was fairly popular. That was the heyday of leftist radicalism, in the seventies and early eighties, when international terrorism (from the PLO to the Red Brigades/Baader Meinhof group to the various Latin American "rebel" groups) was, for many, a form of romantic heroism, and murder and mayhem in the name of the right cause was wholly admirable. The fall of the Soviet Union dampened that spirit considerably, by reminding its adherents of the danger--and, perhaps more important, the futility--of brutality in the name of utopianism. After a couple of decades of dormancy, however, this terrorist ethos seems to be making a bit of a comeback in some circles, among whom Islamist terrorists and their various unsavory allies are treated as understandable, even sympathetic fighters against the true evil (that is, American/Israeli/Jewish/neoconservative/capitalist) conspiracy.

For example, Tim Robbins, a longtime Altman protege, has just written a play confidently identifying the primary evil conspiracy in the world--and it's not Al Qaeda. Rather, it's the late philosophy professor Leo Strauss and his alleged neoconservative disciples, who in Robbins' drama form a powerful cabal bent on world domination. It would be interesting to learn just what measures Robbins would countenance today, for the sake of defending the world from his neoconservative foes.

MI7.5?

Ed Felten of "Freedom to Tinker" notes that in a list of all-time "must read" books selected by a surveyed group of university presidents, science and technology are conspicuous by their absence. Commentators on his blog (and on Crooked Timber's offshoot posting), asked to supply the missing masterpieces of science, draw almost entirely from three categories: (1) works on the philosophy and foundations of science (Popper, Kuhn); (2) Pop-science digests of various interesting topics (Douglas Hofstadter, Jared Diamond); and (3) Books by and/or about the practices of computer geeks.

Why were all these suggested books (Origin of Species might be one exception) so far in stature from the books on the presidents' list (the Bible, Hamlet, the Odyssey, The Prince)? The obvious answer is that the Great Books of science--and they do exist: viz., Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia--simply don't occupy the same place in the scientific world that the Great Books hold in the humanities and related disciplines. No half-decent undergraduate curriculum, for example, would allow its literature students to escape deep familiarity with Hamlet, its philosophy majors to avoid studying The Republic, its classicists to skimp on the Odyssey, its divinity students not to delve deeply into the Bible, or its budding political scientists to pass on The Prince.

But few geometers feel any need to familiarize themselves with geometry as Euclid explained it; nor do physicists feel incomplete without understanding Newton's original notation for his laws of motion. And I would much sooner encourage students to master a few basic college texts in math, sciences and engineering than push them to grapple with the same concepts by studying the original works that introduced them. The originals, after all, each represented one farsighted individual's brilliant-but-still-hazy insight, which has since been clarified and extended far beyond that first attempt at elucidation.

That's one of the key distinctions between the "two cultures": science seeks to separate its ideas from individual humans, and to place them in an abstract world where not only objectivity but also impersonality reigns. No serious student of literature would argue, like the hero of "Metropolitan", that reading critical essays about great literary works is better than reading the originals. The reason is that the ideas in literary works--or, for that matter, philosophical, historical or religious ones--are bound to the original thinker (and his or her original words) in a way that scientific ideas are not. Plato's Republic stands above any recapitulation of it--even one that many consider brilliant and original in its own right--because Plato's ideas come only from Plato, and understanding them requires as direct a link as possible to him.

I understand the scientist's temptation to line up great classics of science (or excellent popularizations) alongside the Great Books of other disciplines. But science simply differs from the arts in its relationship to its seminal works. And we science-minded folks would all do better to take note of that fact, and point our non-scientific colleagues--just as we would any starting student--at a good, readable, comprehensive textbook, rather than at an original document. After all, if a philosophy professor suggested that I wasn't up to studying his field the way his own students do, and recommended instead that I stick to my scientific ways by studying a "summary of philosophical ideas" textbook in place of the original Plato, I'd be rather offended.

The most disturbing thing about this story is that it's an approximate description of just about every lecture I've ever given.

Is the undeniable dominance of the left on today's college campuses a result of discrimination against political conservatives in academia? This question has been raised in response to Prof. Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department at Duke, and at least one other professor there, who apparently believe that the phenomenon has a different explanation: Conservatives are stupid.

Eugene Volokh, among others, had a good time making fun of this charge. But Andrew Sullivan chose to respond with an implicit countercharge, in the form of a long, familiar of series of anecdotes from the trenches, demonstrating what might be described as a "hostile environment" towards conservatives on campus. His argument was presumably that bright conservatives have been hounded off campus, rather than failing to make it there on their own merits. Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy offered the obvious rejoinder: that conservatives who generally don't accept anecdotal evidence and numerical disparities as proof of racial discrimination shouldn't be so quick to accept these signs as proof of ideological discrimination.

Both sides, however, have tacitly accepted a highly questionable premise: that there are intellectually coherent philosophies that can be described as "left" and "right", and that adherents of the former can therefore be said to be have dominated academia for some appreciable length of time. In fact, much of what would be described as leftist today--racial and sexual separatism, isolationist anti-militarism, protectionism, suspicion of presidential malfeasance and abuse of power, hostility to Israel, environmentalism, even opposition to tax cuts--would at some point in the last fifty years have been described as a right-wing position. A similar list, of course, could be compiled of "conservative" views that were, not so long ago, viewed as incorrigibly liberal.

This legacy of flip-flops supports my long-standing contention that terms such as "left", "right", "liberal" and "conservative" represent coalitions of groups sharing common interests, rather than consistent collections of ideas. The persistent collective allegiance of a particular group, such as academics, to such a coalition is much less mysterious than its adherence to a specific ideology. After all, a group with a particular stable socioeconomic position is more likely to maintain common interests with a more-or-less fixed constellation of allied groups, over time, than it is to maintain a common set of political beliefs.

And it is hardly surprising that academics, as members of the educated, professional white-collar middle class, have over the years allied themselves with other members of that class, even as their actual positions on all sorts of issues have changed radically. (Members of, say, the modestly educated, blue-collar working class, or the property-owning investor class, show a similar consistency of affiliation and volatility of concrete political position.) No accusations of stupidity or discrimination are necessary--the simplest explanation is that professors are liberal because liberalism is defined, to a large extent, by the views and preferences of professors and people somewhat like them.

Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell supports an, er, interesting proposal for helping to democratize the Middle East. The plan, apparently being peddled by the US State Department, is modeled on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the organization that oversaw the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union, and later helped encourage democratic movements in former East Bloc nations. Of course, there are differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For example, the main alternatives to the latter region's ruling autocracies are not pro-democratic dissident movements, but rather Islamic fundamentalist theocrats. But Farrell suggests what he considers a suitable "trial run": Israel.

For all its flaws, Israel is the one country in the region that approximates a real democracy. However, its internal tensions have demonstrably had a destabilizing effect on the region and helped corrupt autocrats elsewhere to shore up their rule....A genuinely multilateral initiative to help solve the Israel-Palestine problem could help push both the Israelis and Palestinians into making some real concessions, while providing an external framework to help ensure that any agreement stuck, thus alleviating the fundamental problem of distrust between the two sides.

Now, the Crooked Timber folks, while unabashedly of the left, are fairly thoughtful academic types, so this kind of truly stunning nonsensicality requires a bit of explanation. How does the CSCE, which ratified the Soviet Union's colonial domination of Eastern Europe before volunteering its friendly advice to Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel et al., become a model for democratizing benighted Arab despotisms--after first resolving the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict? How can anyone sane calmly compare the conquered-but-restive nations of the Warsaw Pact with the tribal tyrannies of the Middle East--or with a functioning parliamentary democracy like Israel--and then prescribe the same political process for all of them?

The answer lies in Farrell's remarkable--and instructive--recasting of the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's.

The CSCE helped to secure the democratic transition in Western Europe in two important ways. First, it created a normative framework that enabled democratic activists in Warsaw Pact countries to have their protests heard.....As time went on, the Helsinki commitments proved to be a potent weapon for democratic activists within Eastern bloc countries; they could now use their governments' failure to live up to international commitments as a tool to embarrass them in public. The US and other democratic states provided a sympathetic audience.

Second, the CSCE created a set of instruments designed to allow a limited form of collective intervention within CSCE participating states in order to shore up democracy. It's usually difficult to get states to agree to allow outsiders to intervene in their internal affairs. However, the states participating in the CSCE had previously made an internationally binding commitment to democracy. Furthermore, many of them were interested in joining the EU at some stage and wanted to show their willingness to reform. This meant that many CSCE states were prepared to allow the CSCE to become involved in internal disputes as a sort of honest broker, representing the collective interests of other states in ensuring a secure neighborhood.

The idea that the Soviet Union collapsed after decades of cynical casuistry (not to mention far-reaching conquest, brutal oppression and mass slaughter) because it couldn't take the embarrassment of failing to live up to the Helsinki accords is simply absurd. As for the notion that Western European diplomats made the difference between democracy and dictatorship in Poland, Hungary and Estonia (while failing in Serbia, Belarus and Bulgaria, and being entirely irrelevant and unnecessary elsewhere)--well, perhaps the sunrise, as well, depends on European diplomatic encouragement. But given that numerous factors--active local dissident movements, economic development, even northerly latitude--ended up correlating much better with post-Soviet democratization than CSCE involvement, the case for the latter's importance is pretty weak.

On the other hand, although Farrell claims his view "wasn't popular" when he proposed it several years ago, I believe he understates its appeal. Certainly the use of the Helsinki process as a rallying point by Soviet dissidents during the 1980's caused many Western analysts to credit it with an important role in the downfall of the Soviet regime. The current plan's supporters in the State Department apparently also endorse that interpretation of history.

This conclusion may have been somewhat less implausible in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the sudden dissolution of a powerful empire seemed so mysterious that pundits were grasping for any explanation they could find. In retrospect, though, it's clear that the Soviet Communist Party was in such a state of political decay by the late 1980's that it couldn't resist the obviously fatal Gorbachev-Yeltsin "reforms" until the coup of 1991, when it was too late. The diplomatic embarrassment associated with the Helsinki Accords was a minor symptom--and certainly not a significant cause--of Soviet decay.

But if you want to find the source of European diplomats' (and some US State Department officials') ludicrous faith in "soft power"--diplomacy, economic measures, "embarrassment"--to solve everything from Iraqi democratization to the Arab-Israeli dispute, you need look no further than the primal mirage of "soft power" as an effective tool: the fall of the Soviet Union. If earnest committees of chattering Western European bureaucrats can bring a superpower to its knees, after all, then there's no telling what else they might accomplish. And why would an earnest, chattering Western European want to think otherwise?

The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein invokes a standard argument for America's superiority over her Canadian and European allies: the direction of emigration is primarily towards America from these other countries, rather than vice versa. For all I know, the numbers may back him up, but his reasoning is faulty.

Consider, for example, cemeteries. By Bernstein's reasoning, they are truly magnificent places--after all, people move into them at a prodigious rate, but the number exiting is negligible. Obviously then, the people therein must be content, while those elsewhere pine for its comforts.

A similar bias infects Bernstein's argument about countries. America is famous as a "land of opportunity"--a place where the ambitious can go and improve their lot through hard work. Other countries promise instead a safe, stable, comfortable life, with fewer demands and smaller maximal rewards. The result? The ambitious from all over the world--restless by nature--flock to America in search of opportunity, while the more easily contented, by definition, stay where they are--whether they are in America or elsewhere (and whether they would be happier elsewhere or not). The result: a net influx into the US, which Bernstein mistakenly takes for a proof of America's preferability.

For those who care about such things, I've just enabled RSS for my blog--the link is on the left.

For those who don't--well, frankly, neither do I.

I've just finished reading the extraordinary memoirs (available online) of Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman empire from 1913 to 1916. Originally published in 1918, this account of his time in Constantinople is a rare example of a fascinating historical document that's also wonderfully entertaining to read. Morgenthau presents colorful sketches of the major personalities with which he interacted as part of his job--particularly Turkish leaders Dalaat Pasha and Enver Pasha, and German ambassador von Wangenheim--and clearly explains the strategic military and diplomatic issues of the day.

His most valuable contribution, however, is to give telling insight into what might be described as inchoate German and Muslim fascism. From his conversations (as a neutral party) with German military and diplomatic representatives in the lead-up to World War I, for example, he becomes convinced that the German leadership had been planning on war for years; that they expected to win, and to impose harsh terms on the countries they anticipated defeating; and that if they lost, they would simply study their mistakes, correct them, and start another war in a decade or two. His portrayal of Germany as a confident, aggressive, ruthless nation, with absolutely no principles beyond victory at all costs, no fear of defeat, let alone war, and no compunction about planning for victory in the next war--in 1918!--is frankly stunning to read in hindsight.

His portrayal of Turkey is comparably evocative. Run jointly by a triumvirate of former democratic idealists ("Young Turks") turned ruthless dictators, his host country is, like its German ally, full of aggressive, ruthless confidence--but without any of the economic or military prowess to back it up. As a result it throws itself into grandiose political and military campaigns that lead only to slaughter and disaster. Its victories--repulsing the Entente navy at the Dardanelles, and the British Empire's forces at Gallipoli--are a result of massive German assistance. Its other endeavors are bloody, feckless disasters, in which large numbers of innocents are slaughtered, Turkish troops are soundly defeated, nothing is accomplished, or all three of these results come to pass. All the while, though, official pronouncements remain faithful to a kind of "Baghdad Bob"-style mirror reality, in which Turkey is always noble and blameless, its enemies evil and corrupt, and its inevitable success assured. A more vivid picture of a modern Middle Eastern Muslim nation would be hard to draw even today, let alone in 1918.

The main lesson of Morgenthau's portrait of these two countries, it seems, is that nations that are dangerous--to their neighbors, their despised minorities, and to the world--share certain identifiable characteristics. By now this list should be familiar: a large, dense population, a history of vigorous, chauvinistic, somewhat race-tinged nationalism (perhaps masking deep internal disunity), a strong military tradition, a national inferiority complex encouraging a sense of slighted belligerency, confidence inspired by a recent spurt of political or economic vigor, and, of course, a ruthless, thoroughly undemocratic government with an ambitious ideology. Perhaps now my prediction about the rise of China as a major source of world conflict in 2004 makes more sense....