Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/ en Copyright 2007 Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Letter from Washington: The Starting Gate Evan Bayh was uncharacteristically dispirited when I met him in the Russell Senate Office Building on a quiet Wednesday before Christmas. For Bayh, who is fifty-one and was first elected to the Senate from Indiana in 1998, December will be recalled as a low moment in an otherwise high-achieving life. Less than two weeks earlier, he had the bad luck to visit New Hampshire on the same weekend that his junior colleague in the Senate Barack Obama, from Illinois, was also visiting. Bayh spoke to a hundred and fifty supporters in a Manchester restaurant; Obama swept through the state trailed by a hundred and fifty reporters. "We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones for this party," the governor, John Lynch, told fifteen hundred people who paid twenty-five dollars apiece to see Obama in a Manchester ballroom. "But we cancelled them when we realized Senator Obama would sell more tickets." It was not merely this experience, though, which led Bayh to announce, shortly afterward, that he would not seek the 2008 Democratic nomination for President. He did not lack for money--his finance chief, Nancy Jacobson, had already raised more than ten million dollars--or desire. His father, Birch Bayh, was also an Indiana senator, as well as a failed Presidential candidate, and Bayh had harbored White House ambitions for years. So his decision, made just two weeks after he formed a Presidential exploratory committee, surprised many Democrats. Bayh suggested that he was deterred by the morass in Iraq and, by extension, the challenges posed by Iran. Liberal Democrats, he said, would not respond to his views about the use of American military power. "You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle," he said. "That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They're everything we thought Iraq was but wasn't. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they've threatened us, too." Bayh believes that the American experience in Iraq is turning some Democrats away from the Party's internationalist tradition, and although that split in the Party is not new--it helped to shape the race in 2004--Bayh appears to think that it has become more intense as the next election draws closer. "While we're rightfully pointing out those errors in Iraq, we've got to say very clearly that Afghanistan was the right war to fight," he said. "There are those kinds of tough steps that occasionally involve the use of force. Lots of Americans wonder whether we Democrats have that in us." Bayh, to be sure, is a pragmatist: he saw that he had little chance of penetrating his party's consciousness in time for a 2008 race. "There are too many Goliaths out there," he said, referring to Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards, and he added, with more sharpness than usual, "I believe I would be a very strong general-election candidate," suggesting that the dynamics of the Democratic Party left little room for a semi-obscure, non-dazzling senator whose positions, in particular on the Iraq war, have been fairly hawkish. Twelve months before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, foreign policy, and not abortion, gay rights, tax policy, or voters' churchgoing habits, is what seems most to separate Democrats from Republicans and, to some extent, from each other. An early test of the Democratic contenders will be how they approach the Iraq war. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--at this point, the chief competitors--have many views in common. They tend to see China as an economic challenge rather than as a military threat; they are pro-Israel, and support (Bill) Clinton-style engagement to restart the Middle East peace process; they all want more commitment in the fight against AIDS. On Iraq, though, and on the uses of American power, there is less unity. John Edwards (the 2004 Vice-Presidential nominee, who announced his intention to run just after Christmas) has become the candidate of troop withdrawal. When I asked Edwards last week for a concise description of his Iraq position, he said, "Let's start leaving." Hillary Clinton, who has not announced her candidacy but is said to be close to doing so, is a connoisseur of statecraft, the candidate of the Democratic foreign-policy elite. She brings the most experience in foreign policy to the race--much of it gained vicariously, in her husband's White House. Unlike Edwards, she sees the loss of Iraq as potentially catastrophic for American national-security interests. Obama, who has strongly hinted at a possible candidacy, is the pleaser; he can be rhetorically hawkish, but seems most comfortable when advocating the softer forms of American power. He told me that a quick pullout from Iraq "could result in a spike in deaths," but he does not talk about looming catastrophe if Iraq is not stabilized. His tone is relentlessly measured and sometimes banal; in his best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope," a chapter on foreign affairs reads like a tentative primer on the history of American foreign policy. Obama speaks at length of a trip to Iraq, but barely mentions the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. Still, he would enter the race for President with one clear advantage: he did not support the Iraq war, even at its inception. Democrats are doubtful about the usefulness of an increase in troop levels. Obama, who does not use the euphemism "surge," favored by the Administration, but, rather, "escalation," said, "I don't know any military expert who says that a modest increase in troop levels is going to make a big difference. Even if you pursue the logic of increased troop levels, you're going to need one hundred thousand more, one hundred and fifty thousand more, orders of magnitude that we don't possess. Twenty thousand troops is not going to make a difference anymore." Clinton says that she has doubts but will withhold judgment until she sees President Bush's actual plan. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama view themselves as internationalists--eager to keep America engaged in the world and willing to employ force if necessary. And yet, if polls are to be trusted, this outlook separates them from their party's base. A 2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS. Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake--thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats. As the New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who has argued for a more assertive Democratic foreign policy, notes in an essay that will appear in a forthcoming collection produced by the Brookings and Hoover Institutions, "America's red-blue divide is no longer chiefly between churched and unchurched. It is between hawk and dove." He is not alone in arguing that Bush has done something that would have seemed impossible in late 2001: he has turned the fight against terrorism into a partisan issue. "This is an exceedingly strange moment, but a plastic moment," said Jeremy Rosner, a former Clinton Administration National Security Council official and now a Democratic pollster. "I tend to think that, once Bush and Iraq are off the screen, someone might be able to rally Democrats to an enlightened internationalism, but the data on that point is mixed right now." The Democratic Party's base may be dovish, but it accounts for less than twenty-five per cent of the American voting public. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine a serious general-election candidate who does not favor some sort of "enlightened internationalism," with its possible military implications. (Lieberman's ultimate victory as an Independent seemed to demonstrate that dovish voters, even in a liberal state such as Connecticut, cannot by themselves unseat a hawkish senator.) But the Democratic Party's chief problem may be finding a way to arrive at a coherent and persuasive post-Bush foreign policy. Michael E. O'Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, and Kurt M. Campbell, a former National Security Council official under Bill Clinton, argue in a recent book, "Hard Power: The Politics of National Security," that Bush Administration incompetence, not Democratic foreign-policy wisdom, accounts for the Democrats' success in last November's midterm election. "Without answers of their own to the questions they pose to the Bush Administration about how to keep the country safe and secure, Democrats are likely to find current gains in national polls to be fleeting or illusory," they wrote. They might have added that, whether or not the public hopes for a period of international tranquillity, the next President, Democrat or Republican, will inherit an extraordinarily difficult set of problems. "It's not a great bargain for the next President to take over the mess in Iraq," Obama told me last month. "But there is as much pressure in both the Republican and Democratic camps, because both have genuine concern for the troops and the families and the budget. It won't be good for congressmen of the President's party if we're still spending two billion dollars a week in Iraq in two years." Obama, like his rivals, would rather not see the Democrats take the blame for what recent events suggest will be an unhappy denouement in Iraq. But many foreign-policy experts believe that, even without an increase in troop levels in the coming months, Bush may yet succeed in delaying the day of reckoning until the next President takes office. "Bush is going to do anything he can do in his power not to lose," Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a onetime State Department official in the Carter Administration, said. "The worst challenge the next President will inherit will be to figure out how to lose in Iraq without the appearance or effects of losing. Then, there are these huge problems at either end of Asia--Iran and North Korea. The next President is heading into the biggest, most dangerous set of problems that we've faced since the Cuban missile crisis." On September 12, 2001, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the Senate floor in which she sounded much like President Bush, saying that the country should "make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but those who in any way give any aid or comfort whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country." She added, "You are either with America in our time of need or you are not." When we met recently in her office in the Russell building, I mentioned that speech, calling it "pretty pugnacious." "Well, I was pretty pugnacious," she said, laughing. "Post-9/11, that was appropriate language." She has since been critical of Bush's leadership of the war on terror, and in particular his handling of Iraq. She agrees with Gelb that the next President will inherit a set of foreign-policy challenges that will make her husband's 1993 White House transition seem (to borrow a term from the run-up to the Iraq war) like a cakewalk. Clinton speaks with confidence and directness. On issues of foreign policy and national security, she readily said "I don't know" when she didn't, and she referred frequently, without self-consciousness, to her husband's experience, especially in the Middle East and in the Balkans, perhaps as a way of signalling that nothing prepares a person for four years in the White House like eight years in the White House. She seems to have assimilated data on a comprehensive range of issues. In one conversation, I asked her whether she believed that the best antidote to Islamism might be Islamism itself--in other words, for Muslims to experience periods of Islamist rule to fully grasp its flaws. "Well, I don't see any evidence of that," she said. "You know, if you look around the world, Islamists have had to be defeated by internal military forces, in such places as Algeria and the Philippines, or by external military forces, in places like Afghanistan. We want to be able to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible packages. We want to be smart about this. Take the Palestinians, where we had an election. Don't you think it would have been smart to make sure that the election was run in such a way that everyone knew how to compete? Hamas certainly knew how to compete. They ran a modern election. They knew enough to run only one person in each constituency, unlike Fatah, which we apparently didn't tell. Hamas had a cell-phone system to get everyone to the polls. It's not enough to say, 'Let's have an election.' If you're going to do it and install democracy, democracy means rule of law, it means democracy education, democracy means opening up the media." She went on, "That's what we did during the Cold War. We had a multi-pronged agenda against Communism and the Soviet Union, we worked with candidates and parties in Europe, we worked to persuade people to be part of our alliance, we used every tool at our disposal." Clinton seemed just moments away from naming individual Hamas precinct captains. When I asked Clinton to place herself on a foreign-policy continuum in which Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser, represents the realists, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Defense Secretary, represents the armed idealism of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists, she demurred. "I'm me," she said. "Here's Clinton. I'm not either one of them. I think both of their approaches are not adequate to the task we are facing. I think Wolfowitz's strong feelings and deeply held values come out of the Holocaust, come out of an understanding of the need to expand universal values and create a climate in which people would stand up and fight for those human rights. I think it is real with Wolfowitz, but I think in pursuit of policies people see things that are not real." She continued, "On the other hand, if you entered the world arena and see it just as a series of Realpolitik transactions, you also miss the larger picture. We can critique the idealists, who have an almost faith-based idealism without adequate understanding or evidence-based decision-making, and we can critique the realists for rejecting the importance of aspiration and values in foreign policy. You know, I find myself, as I often do, in the somewhat lonely middle." Obama (like Clinton and Bayh) has studiously calibrated his approach to Iraq. Although he cannot be considered one of Congress's foreign-policy experts, it is hard to think of another recent graduate of the Illinois Senate who could speak as comfortably as he does about the arcana of the Middle East. Obama is discomfited by those on the left who, in his view, minimize the threat of terrorism. In his recent book, he even scolds those who put the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and the improvement of relations with America's allies, ahead of national-security concerns. "The objectives favored by liberals have merit," he writes. "But they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy." He adds that "the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating." But when he writes that it's "useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh," it's hard to imagine who would confuse the two. Obama has not yet articulated an overarching national-security world view; the political danger in doing so is that it could alienate him from a wing of his party at a time when he's just becoming widely known. In a conversation last month, he focussed on some of the most worrisome issues facing the United States, saying that the possibility of Al Qaeda or another terrorist group obtaining a nuclear weapon was "the No. 1 threat" facing America, and he warned that deterrence theories might not apply to the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang. "Just because they're state actors doesn't mean they might not act irrationally," he said. "We can't gauge their decision-making process accurately, partly because our intelligence capabilities have been entirely inadequate to the task, and partly due to the nature of the regimes. Whatever you want to say about the Soviets, they were essentially conservative. The North Korean regime and the Iranians are driven more by ideology and fantasy." On the other hand, he is hesitant to describe a scenario in which he would actually use force against those regimes. "What I don't want to see happen is for Iraq to become an excuse for us to ignore misery or human-rights violations or genocide," Obama said. "We should be engaged in Darfur. We have a self-interest and a stake in preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being slaughtered." (Obama's policy prescription for Darfur, though, is more modest than his rhetoric: he wants to build an "international protective force" in Darfur to buttress the African troops already there.) Democratic Party realism, he said, should reflect the country's moral values. He cited the coup, in 1953, against the Iranian President, Mohammed Mossadegh, aided by the C.I.A., as an example of American values gone awry. "Iran is a classic case of something biting us on the ankle, when we assisted in overthrowing the democratically elected regime that was replaced by the Shah," he said. In his less cautious pre-Senate days, Obama expressed his view of the world more bluntly. In a 2002 speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago, he condemned Middle Eastern autocrats, and condemned President Bush (and, it is possible to infer, previous Presidents of both parties) for coddling pro-American dictators in the name of stability. "Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies, so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells." I asked Obama if his sympathy for the victims of civil war and ethnic cleansing takes in the mass of Iraqis who are victims, and not the perpetrators, of the current violence. "We absolutely have an obligation to the Iraqi people," he said. "That's why I've resisted calls for an immediate withdrawal." John Edwards, by contrast, argues that America has fulfilled its commitment to the Iraqi people. "We've been there for a few years," he said. "We've devoted enormous resources, human and otherwise. And now we've reached the place, I think, where the Iraqis are going to have to take responsibility." I asked if he believed that America had a moral responsibility to the Iraqis because the Bush Administration chose to topple a dictatorship, only to replace it, albeit inadvertently, with chaos and what looks like civil war. "My view of Darfur is, we've done nothing but yap. We--as a lot of American families can tell you--we've done a lot more than talk in Iraq. And I think you just reach a place where you have to say, 'We've done our part, and now it's time for them to step up to the plate.' You can't police places forever." When I suggested that Iraqis who "step up to the plate," in the manner that Edwards suggests, are sometimes beheaded, he responded, "But when they're doing it to each other, and America's not there and not fomenting the situation, I think the odds are better of the place stabilizing. I mean, ultimately, that's the judgment." Edwards unequivocally recommends the immediate withdrawal of forty thousand troops, a position that may help to explain his popularity: in one poll last month in Iowa, Edwards and Obama were tied for first place, each supported by twenty-two per cent of likely Democratic caucus-goers. Iowa's outgoing governor, Tom Vilsack, who is also an announced candidate, was backed by twelve per cent of likely caucus-goers, and Hillary Clinton was polling at about ten per cent. It sometimes seems that Edwards is running in a different election than Obama and Clinton. He is focussed on next year's primaries, building support among union members and among Democrats infuriated by the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. Obama and Clinton seem focussed instead on the general election. Edwards disputes this notion. "Well, I call the surge idea 'the McCain doctrine,' " he said, laughing. When I mentioned how Obama and Clinton have approached the Iraq issue, he said, "They may be trying to run for President, too, you mean?" He insisted that his tack on Iraq was "nonpolitical," and added, "I think the political position is to be cautious. There are consequences to taking positions, but leadership in this situation requires you to make clear what you think should happen in Iraq." In his announcement speeches, Edwards called for "getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil" but did not mention counterterrorism as a top priority, which sets him apart from the current Democratic field. Rather, he emphasized universal health care, ending poverty, and combatting global warming. I met with Edwards in New York, just after he delivered a speech to the Asia Society about a recent trip he had made to China. During the question-and-answer period, he gave perfunctory responses to a series of questions, and seemed most engaged when the conversation turned to domestic policy. "I could go on all day about this," he said. When I asked about his relative inexperience in foreign policy, he said, overenthusiastically, "I love this stuff. I think it is the critical thing for the next President of the United States, and whether it is Uganda and Darfur, or the Middle East, or China, or India, or Europe, I just find it fascinating. And I think the President of the United States has to have a very strong, clear vision about how to engage the world." Edwards is careful not to rule out the use of military force against Iran, but he would much rather talk about other things--his recent interest in Africa, and his antipoverty ideas, which are at the core of his candidacy. Edwards is genial in conversation, but he became almost testy when I brought up his vote, in 2002, in favor of the Iraq-war resolution. Edwards has repudiated his vote, unlike Clinton, who has not renounced her own support for the war despite demands from her backers that she do so. Edwards worries that his vote will be seen as evidence that he was somehow fooled by the Administration into giving it his support. "I was convinced that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons," he said. "There was some disparity in the information I had about how far along he was in that process. I didn't rely on George Bush for that. And I personally think there's some dishonesty in suggesting that members of the United States Senate relied on George Bush for that information, because I don't think it's true. It's great politics. But it's not the truth." When I asked who was making this suggestion, he said, "I've just heard people say, I can't even tell you who, I've just heard people say, 'Well, you know, George Bush . . . misled us.' You know, it's just-- I was there, it's not what happened." (Edwards would not single out anyone, but he appeared to be referring to, among others, his 2004 running mate, John Kerry, who has often said that he was lied to by the Bush Administration about W.M.D.s. "We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true," Kerry told a rally of liberal Democrats in June of last year.) "I was on the Intelligence Committee," Edwards went on, "so I got direct information from the intelligence community. And then I had a series of meetings with former Clinton Administration people. And they were all saying the same thing. Everything I was hearing in the Intelligence Committee was the same thing I was hearing from these guys. And there was nary a dissenting voice. And so, for me, the difficult judgment was not about the factual information, which I was convinced was accurate. It was about whether I was going to give authority to this President I didn't trust. That was where the friction was for me. I decided to do it, and I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it." Hillary Clinton's decision to give Bush her approval in 2002 was influenced by her recent White House experience. "I have respect for Presidential decision-making and I saw what the Republican Congress had done to Bill on a range of issues, denying him the authority to deal with Bosnia and Kosovo and second-guessing him on every imaginable issue," she said. "And I don't think that that's good for the country, and I had no problem in giving President Bush the authority to do what he stated he would do and what I was assured privately on many occasions would be done." Still, Clinton was never an enthusiastic supporter of the war. In a speech to the Senate before casting her vote to support the resolution, she cautioned Bush, saying, "If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia to attack Chechen rebels. India has mentioned the possibility of a preemptive strike on Pakistan. And what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan? So, Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option." When I asked Clinton if she thought that she had been lied to, she said, "I have to tell you, I think that they believed, as I believed, that there was, at the very least, residual weapons of mass destruction, and whether the Iraqis ever intended to let the inspectors go forward was being answered year by year. There was a lot of evidence that this was not their intention." Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time of the invasion of Iraq, and in his 2002 Chicago speech he prophesied some of the difficulties that the Bush Administration is now experiencing. "I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein," he said then. "He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors." He went on, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." A year before the primaries, the Democrats certainly have solid contenders for the Presidency, each of whom--some more than others--is struggling to design a credible series of foreign-policy beliefs for a party that has foreign-policy inclinations but no reigning philosophy. Obama and Clinton appear thus far to be the Party's strongest potential candidates, and each brings strengths to the debate. Obama's foresight on Iraq may be one of his most potent weapons, just as Clinton's expertise, and essential centrism, will be an asset to her candidacy. For now, though, Edwards has something that the others lack: a position on Iraq that resonates best with his party. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_sta.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_sta.php The New Yorker Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0500 What Would Jimmy Do? PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID By Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster. 264 pp. $27 Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based. On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. "With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government." Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God. Carter's interest in the Middle East is longstanding, of course; he brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, and he has been rightly praised for doing so. But other aspects of his record are more bothersome. Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians, and in recent months he has offered a notably benign view of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization that took power in the Palestinian territories after winning a January round of parliamentary elections. There are differences, however, between Carter's understanding of Jewish sin and God's. God, according to the Jewish Bible, tends to forgive the Jews their sins. And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed. This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land." In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier. The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: "Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996." That spree of bombings -- four, actually -- was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence. Here is Carter's anti-historical understanding of the conflict. He writes: "There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: "1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and "2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories." In other words, Palestinian violence is simply an understandable reaction to the building of Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream -- as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed some 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral pullout in July 2005 -- even the most myopic among the settlement movement's leaders came to understand that the end is near. Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence. Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier." There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry. There is another approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, of course -- one perfected by another Southern Baptist who became a Democratic president. Bill Clinton's Middle East achievements are enormous, especially when considering the particular difficulties posed by his primary Arab interlocutor. Jimmy Carter was blessed with Anwar al-Sadat as a partner for peace; Bill Clinton was cursed with Yasser Arafat. In his one-sided explication of the 1990s peace process, Carter systematically downplays Clinton's efforts to bring a conclusion to the conflict, with a secure Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side, and repeatedly defends the indefensible Arafat. Carter doesn't dare include Clinton's own recollections of his efforts at the abortive Camp David summit in 2000 because to do so would be to acknowledge that the then-Israeli prime minister, the flawed but courageous Ehud Barak, did, in fact, try to bring about a lasting peace -- and that Arafat balked. In a short chapter on the Clinton years, Carter blames the Israelis for the failures at Camp David. But I put more stock in the views of the president who was there than in those of the president who wasn't. "On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again," Clinton writes in My Life. "Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations." Clinton applied himself heroically over the next six months to extract even better offers from Israel, all of which Arafat wouldn't accept. "I still didn't believe Arafat would make such a colossal mistake," Clinton remembers, with regret. According to Carter, however, Arafat made no mistakes. The failure was Israel's -- and by extension, Clinton's. Carter succeeded at his Camp David summit in 1978, while Clinton failed at his in 2000. But Clinton's achievement was in some ways greater because he did something no American president has done before (or since): He won the trust of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He could do this because he seemed to believe that neither side was wholly villainous nor wholly innocent. He saw the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for what it is: a tragic collision between right and right, a story of two peoples who both deserved his sympathy. In other words, he took the Christian approach to making peace. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/wpost/what_would_jimmy_do.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/wpost/what_would_jimmy_do.php The Washington Post Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Conflict in the Bone Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg Rare is the book that keeps me thinking long after I've finished the last page, especially when the book is not a ponderous philosophical tome but a vivid page turner. I was well aware of Jeffrey Goldberg's narrative tricks in his memoir Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide from the first line which sucked me in with intimations of a kidnapping then dropped me just before the climax into a leisurely narrative of his childhood. Okay, fine, he can tell a story. But what kept revolving around my head long after I'd worked out the plot (it's a memoir, so, you know, he survives) was just how close to the surface his emotions are from start to finish. Which is not to say that he's scared. Goldberg styles himself a tough guy (he shrugs off his captivity with a boast about having once talked his way past a hostile check point in the Congo), so we don't see a lot of fear here. What's on display, in fact, is an emotion much less acceptable in polite circles: his yearning for physical power, summed up in the worldview of his thirteen-year-old self as "Jews with guns." There are two ur moments in Goldberg's text: his persecution by schoolyard bullies who humiliate him as a "Christ killer" and a trip to Israel in lieu of a bar mitzvah where he sees for the first time Jews who are not defenseless nebbishes but machine-gun wielding Israelis. Later on, his Zionism is overlaid by a stay at a lefty summer camp in the Catskills that promotes dreams of Arab and Jew living side by side and a long course of self-study on the eternal suffering of the tribe--but at the core of Goldberg's quest is the desire never to be defenseless again. Thus fortified, the author sets out to be the righteous warrior, only to find himself and his ideals standing guard at the largest Palestinian prison camp in Israel, in the midst of the first Intifada. So the rest of the memoir unfolds as a series of contradictions: Goldberg's commitment to Zionism never wavers, but his understanding of the cost of that commitment constantly changes. What is remarkable is not only that Goldberg remembers so minutely the mercurial shifts in his positions, but that he records them so honestly. And that he desperately, almost absurdly, yearns to secure the friendship of the men he holds captive. Or at least one man, Rafiq, the Muslim of the title. Often Rafiq is more a device than a character. A gifted mathematician and surreptitious leader of the uprising, he appears throughout the book, both a sign that Goldberg has not given up on his own ideals, and a perfect foil as Rafiq's commitment to fundamentalist Islam waxes and wanes. Yet Goldberg's view of the contingencies that produce changes in his friend is necessarily obscure and, even so, not sufficiently explored. There is a limit, apparently, to how much crossing the "Middle East divide" Goldberg's character can take. Yet in episode after episode, Goldberg hurls himself against History: now in the Israeli Army, later looking up friends in Gaza; here interviewing Arafat, there Sharon. What fascinates about Prisoners is not that he manages to heal himself or anyone else, but that he dares to expose that self as a network of tiny fractures always on the verge of breaking finally apart. Listen to our conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg in the second installment of the c305 podcast series here.]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/conflict_in_the_bone.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/conflict_in_the_bone.php Interviews Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Brave Heart: Jeffrey Goldberg You started writing this before the Oslo process broke down in 2000. You must have been planning quite a different book. I actually thought that I was racing against time--that when the book came out everybody would say, "Sure it's possible to make peace; we already have it." The second intifada was profoundly depressing for me, and I did lay it aside for a while. But that seems to have made your friendship with Rafiq more interesting. My relationship with him deteriorated after 9/11. He became more radicalized, and I moved at least from the left to the center. Have things gotten any better in the region since? I have a very low threshold of hope, but I was just there in August, and I came away feeling somewhat optimistic that there are still plenty of Palestinians looking for a solution in this world as opposed to a divinely inspired one, which is something that scares me terribly. Scarier than staying in a Pakistani madrassa and declaring yourself a Jew? How did you manage that? I used it as a way of leveraging a better conversation. They're repulsed by Judaism, but they're also very curious. Did you become more cautious after Daniel Pearl's murder? I was in northern Iraq when my wife told me by satellite phone. This was before the war. I said a line that she'll never let me forget: "Don't worry, that was Pakistan. I'm in Iraq; it's completely different." But sure, in a way, it was the end of innocence. After living in Israel in the nineties, you left disillusioned. Why? I grew up venerating the Freedom Riders, not Bull Connor, and I didn't want to carry a nightstick. But you can't hold a country to the standard of perfection that I held Israel to. It's a real place with real people. Doesn't your history with Israel make you a less-than-objective observer of Palestinians? The advantage of being a magazine writer is that I have to be fair but not balanced. That said, the most criticism I've ever gotten was for a harsh look at the settlement movement. You were also criticized for writing in The New Yorker of alleged contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Is that part of the interview? Okay, fine, if you really want to go into it, the specific allegations I raised have never been definitively addressed by the 9/11 Commission. Of course, I was wrong, as was nearly everybody else, about the WMD question. How do you think Rafiq will feel about the book? I don't want this to be another test of our relationship. At times, I've used him as a stand-in for the Palestinian people. He's a broad-shouldered guy, but he can't sustain that.]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/brave_heart_jeffrey_goldberg.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/brave_heart_jeffrey_goldberg.php Interviews Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Across the Great Divide In the late 1980s, Jeffrey Goldberg moved to Israel because he was committed to the idea of being part of the Jewish homeland. That meant, of course, going into the army, and before long, Jeffrey was working as a military policeman at a prison in the Negev desert. This was just around the time that the first Intifada was heating up, and Jeffrey was guarding Palestinians.

In his new book, called Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg writes extensively about his time in Israel, and about his relationships with several of those prisoners.

Jeffrey Goldberg is joining us today from Washington. Jeffrey, welcome to Nextbook.

Thank you for having me.

You spend a fair portion of this book talking about the early development of your own Zionist ideology, and I want you to walk us through that.

Sure. I was...it's going to sound strange and archaic today...but I was a socialist Zionist growing up on Long Island. I lived in a non-Jewish part of Long Island, and I had the usual--or something between usual and unusual--experiences with schoolyard anti-Semitism, and those experiences sent me, in a way, to seek out some answer about my Jewishness. And my parents, much to their later regret, decided to take me to Israel for my bar mitzvah. And when I was there, my eyes were opened to the idea of Jewish power. I didn't put it in quite that way to myself then, but that's the way it worked. Seeing Israeli soldiers, Jewish soldiers more to the point, Jewish tanks, Jewish machine guns, was quite exciting to a powerless 13-year-old boy suffering at the hands of Irish pogromists, juvenile pogromists. So, I became deeply enamored of Israel because of that.

I was also, however, raised in a very left-wing household. We were not a religious family. We didn't keep kosher. But in a sense, we did. César Chavez was our rabbi, in a way. Whatever the United Farm Workers told us to boycott, we boycotted. So, by the time I was in my teens, I had sort of two ideas running parallel. One was the socialist universalist ideal, and the other was a sort of tribal Zionist ideal. That was all well and good when I was a teenager. I belonged to a socialist Zionist youth movement, and we did two things, basically. We argued for social change at home, and we prepared ourselves to go on Aliyah to kibbutzim, Aliyah being, of course, moving to Israel, "making the ascent," literally, to Israel--to move to socialist kibbutzim. And so, everything was very harmonious in my life. In other words, I had the tribal and the universal working very nicely together. And I decided when I was about 20 or something that I would move to Israel, that I was going to fulfill this.

So, when you went, did Israel meet your expectation?

Israel did not meet my expectation. At the time I was very judgmental of the place. Kibbutz life was not like the make-believe kibbutz we built for ourselves in the summer in the Catskills at my socialist Zionist youth camp. The commitment to socialist ideals, the egalitarian ideals, was waning at that time. But the real shock to me was the army. I came of age in the period after the raid on Entebbe, so that of course was my model for what a Jewish fighter does. They go off and rescue Jews in inhospitable terrain.

But when I was in Israel, it was the beginning of the Palestinian uprising. And the army had become a police force, in essence, dispatched by the government to suppress Palestinian demonstrators, rioters, rock-throwers, however you want to call it. And that's a very different thing than fighting the Syrian army. I had a hard time with this because I imagined myself, if I were a Palestinian, I'd probably also be out there demonstrating.

The Palestinians did not meet my expectations either, of course, because these were not the Freedom Riders from 1964. They weren't sitting in at lunch counters. They were throwing rocks at people.

That said, it was an impossibility in a kind of way, because my expectations were unreal.

Let's talk about the prison for a moment. This is a prison that was set in the desert, in the Negev, and my sense from the book is that working there as a military policeman gave you a kind of political education that you hadn't yet had.

Very much so, in the sense that I had barely met any Palestinians previous to my arrival there. And all of a sudden--just to give you a sense of the scope of the place--there were roughly 6,200 prisoners in this camp when I was there--a massive camp, the size of a small city--open-air tents separated by coils of barbed wire and high fences. So, it really was essentially a Palestinian city run by a relatively small handful of Israelis. And what I decided very early on--because I already had a pretty serious notion that I was going to become a reporter--I realized that I had this wonderful opportunity to actually talk to Palestinians. Not just any Palestinians; these were the leaders of the Palestinian uprising. And because of my leftist background, in a kind of way, I was already used to the idea--which was then quite outré--that there was going to be a Palestinian state one day, and I added two and two and realized that the men that I was guarding, whose lives I was in charge of, were one day going to be the leaders of Palestine.

And because of the particular job that I had--I was one of the people who was in charge of organizing the daily lives of the prisoners; I wasn't a guard in a tower, I was right down in there--I had extensive opportunity to actually try to get to know some of these guys.

In the book, when you talk about your time in the prison--and also subsequently, when you have gone back to Israel to do reporting and have re-met many of the people who were prisoners--I get this sense that you do want to have a relationship with these people. And at the same time, there's this sense of guilt on your part that you are very explicit about in the book, that you want sort of the Palestinian approval of you as a Jewish person in Israel, but then when you don't necessarily get that kind of approval, then there's this kind of anger about having felt guilty in the first place.

Yes. You've gotten the full depths of my multifaceted Jewish guilt. I think you captured it pretty nicely.

There were a couple of reasons I wanted to know the Palestinians. One was, I have a reporter's personality, obviously. I'm curious about people I don't understand.

The second part was--this, again, coming out of my socialist Zionist upbringing--I believed in a two-state solution for the problem. I believed in many ways that the argument between the Palestinians and the Israelis was an argument between right and right, and therefore I wanted to--and this was, of course, the grandiose thoughts of someone who's not really experienced in the world--I thought that I could, at least in a small way, advance the cause of understanding or peace by engaging these guys on some of these questions, and engaging them in behaviors that didn't alienate them. But then, of course, it bleeds over into what you're talking about, which is...I'm not joking when I say that my model growing up for what a hero was, in many ways, was the Freedom Riders--Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman--or the civil rights movement.

And all of a sudden I found myself--and again, the analogy isn't perfect by a long shot, but I found myself not in the role of a Freedom Rider, but I found myself in the role of...in bad moments I thought of it as sort of the Bull Conner role, the role of the southern sheriff, keeping people in a prison who didn't actually deserve to be in a prison. Like I said, there's one huge caveat, which is that African Americans in the south used nonviolent resistance, which gave their movement a nobility and morality that the Palestinian movement lacked.

But I did feel bad about it. It wasn't the way I wanted to spend even a minute of my life, and I decided at one point that I would be excessively considerate of the Palestinian prisoners. And on moments when that wasn't received, my anger would be outsized at the rejection of my obvious good will.

Is it fair to say that you've moved from being an idealistic Zionist to a somewhat jaded reporter?

I'm not jaded. I'm just realistic, I think. I love Israel, with all its flaws. I'm deeply committed to its safety and its future. I also, spending several years in Israel, realize that it's a real place with real flaws--flaws that sometimes get overly magnified, both by Jews because we have a self-critical culture, which is, of course, a strength, not a weakness; and, of course, by the rest of the world, which magnifies these flaws.

But after a while of going back and back again, I've come to see the shift in the fundamental relationship from a battle over a piece of land between two warring tribes to more of a battle between two religions. In other words, it shifted from a Palestinian-Israeli dispute to a Muslim-Jewish dispute. And the fault for that shift, I think, lies somewhat with the Jews. But I think it lies in large part with this wave of Islamism that we've seen over the last 10 years that is excessively intolerant and is an ideology that cannot, for theological reasons, grant the Jews their equality as a nation in what they consider to be the Muslim Middle East.

So, I don't think I'm jaded. I just think I know that this is the work of generations now. It's not something that lends itself to easy fixes.

I do have another question. You're signed up to write a book for the Nextbook Jewish Encounter series, and you're going to write a biography of Judah Maccabee, who led the Maccabean revolt in the second century BC. And I wonder if there are any parallels between your own story and his story [Goldberg laughs], or between this book and his story, certainly in terms of muscularity and Jewish power, and if you could weigh in on that for us.

[Laughing] Are you asking me if there are similarities between Judah Maccabee and me?

No, no. I'm not asking you about your delusions of grandeur, if you have any. [Laughs]

Talk about delusions of grandeur. No, I think more of myself as a Queen Esther-type figure.

That's good, too.

[Laughter]

Look, I'm fascinated by Jewish power. Jewish power is an easy subject to deal with theoretically, but it's a hard one to deal with when you actually have power. The Jews reentered history when they regained their territory, the ancient land of Israel. And when you enter history you have to use power. And that's what this whole book is about, and I think that's what Judah Maccabee is about in a kind of a way. Look , the way we celebrate Hanukkah is an oversimplified way as a story of religious freedom against oppression. But what the Maccabean revolt was, in many ways--and look, I haven't written the book yet, so I don't know that much--but I'm thinking about it all the time, and I've been thinking about it for a while. The Maccabean revolt was also a civil war. It was a war between assimilated Jews--to use the current terminology--and religious Jews. The religious Jews from the hills, and the secular Jews of the cities. And they were arguing about religious purity and national purity, and the Maccabees were people who went around and forcibly circumcised assimilated Jews. And the key word in that sentence is force.

I'm fascinated about moments in history when Jews get power, physical power, and what they do with it. And there are a great many positives to the Maccabee story, and there are some negatives. And there are a great many positives to the story of the rebirth of Israel, and there are some negatives, too.

So, yes, in essence, I think both books--the one that was just written and the one that is not yet written--are about Jewish power.

Jeffrey Goldberg, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/across_the_great_divide.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/across_the_great_divide.php Interviews Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Letter from Gaza: The Forgotten War Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M. We walked down a half-flight of steps and into a dark, bare room, where we sat in a semicircle, on cinder blocks. My friend introduced the leader as Abu Obeidah. I had met him several years earlier; he called himself Abu Nasser then. He was thinner than I remembered, and he had the look of a man living on his nerves. He apologized for his unkempt appearance, and for his inability to offer me coffee or tea. The night provided no respite from the late-summer heat of Gaza, and the men were sweating through their shirts. My friend tore open a small package of dates for them. They seemed embarrassed, but they took the food. "We're always running," Abu Obeidah said. "We haven't slept a night in a long time." On June 25th, a squad of kidnappers from Hamas--comrades of these rocketeers--and two other factions attacked an Israeli Army position just outside Gaza, killing two soldiers and seizing a third. The soldier, Gilad Shalit, was smuggled into Gaza by tunnel, and is believed to be in the hands of Hamas's Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Qassam Brigades report to the supreme leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who is based in Damascus. Hamas is a divided organization; its leaders in Damascus are considered more radical than many of those in Gaza. By some accounts, the Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, does not know who kidnapped Shalit, or where he is. The Israeli Army's answer to the kidnapping was Operation Summer Rains, a major artillery-and-tank offensive. Summer Rains is the forgotten Middle East war. Israel's war in Lebanon, Operation Change of Direction, dominated the world's attention this summer. The Lebanon campaign was also set off by a cross-border abduction--in this case, of two Israeli soldiers. Six years ago, under chronic pressure from Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, unilaterally withdrew his forces from south Lebanon, which Israel had occupied as a buffer zone since its invasion in 1982. Hezbollah exploited the 2000 withdrawal by entrenching guerrillas along the border, and by importing, by some estimates, as many as thirteen thousand short- and medium-range rockets from Syria and Iran. In this latest round of fighting, Hezbollah fired four thousand rockets into Israel. The rockets reached targets thirty miles south of the border, but they killed relatively few civilians--thirty-nine, eighteen of whom were Arabs. The Israeli counterattack left more than a thousand Lebanese civilians dead; killed an unknown, but significant, number of Hezbollah fighters; and inflicted serious damage in south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Still, when a ceasefire was reached, last month, it appeared as if the Israelis had been bested. Hezbollah had fought the Israeli Army to a near-standstill, which on the organization's terms represents a triumph. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, had become, in a matter of weeks, the most popular political figure in the Arab world, even though he has since admitted that he underestimated the Israeli response to the kidnapping that he ordered. Hamas, in contrast, was not besting Israel, despite firing its homemade rockets into nearby Israeli towns. Since late June, the Israeli military has killed more than two hundred Gazans, half of them terrorists and the other half civilians, including many children. The world has taken relatively scant notice of the fighting in Gaza. "Do our rocket attacks appear on television in America?" Abu Obeidah asked me. When I told him that most of the news coverage centered on Lebanon, his face fell. The Israeli Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, told me, "The Palestinians thought that the Western world and the Arab countries would look at the Palestinian Authority as some kind of golden child, but it came out as the shit child instead. Lebanon is the golden child." The confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah could be seen as an early round of a potential war between Israel and Iran, or even between the United States and Iran. The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has broadcast his desire to see Israel destroyed, and Israel and the United States believe that Iran is attempting to build nuclear weapons. Late last month, Iran risked United Nations sanctions by announcing that it would not suspend its uranium-enrichment program. But Israel's southern war, too, has great consequence for the Middle East. It has undermined the Israeli policy of unilateral disengagement, the signal innovation of the country's former Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Last year, before he was incapacitated by a stroke, Sharon ordered the evacuation of Gaza's nine thousand settlers, arguing that Israel, for demographic and security reasons, could not integrate a territory inhabited by 1.4 million Arabs. He did this, however, without consulting the Palestinians, reflecting his conviction that they were not suitable negotiating partners. Israelis hoped that the move would bring calm to Gaza's borders, if not actual peace. Instead, it was followed almost immediately by rocket fire. Hamas and Hezbollah rockets now threaten to undo the career of the novice Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, whose party, Kadima, was built by Sharon on a platform of unilateral disengagement. The evacuation of Gaza was met with great public support a year ago; now Olmert's plan to remove seventy thousand settlers, about a quarter of the total, from the West Bank--without negotiating their repatriation with the Palestinians--is nearing collapse. Disappointment with unilateralism has not been replaced by hope for a multilateral, negotiated solution. If anything, this summer's violence has further marginalized Palestinians who still argue for a negotiated, two-state solution to the crisis in the Middle East. Most are members of Fatah, the secular movement that for decades was led by Yasir Arafat, but, unlike Arafat, many seem prepared to strike a compromise deal with Israel--or were, in the days when the peace process still had life in it. With Hamas's victory in the Palestinian parliament in Jan-uary, Fatah lost power in Gaza and the West Bank. The Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, is still technically in charge of the Palestinian Authority, but Hamas is the real force now. "I'm not going to say I told you so," Ron Nachman, the right-wing mayor of the West Bank settlement of Ariel, said. "I just want the people who said that unilateral disengagement would bring peace and quiet to admit that they're wrong." He went on to say, "The only thing we've gotten from unilateral withdrawal is more rockets." Unilateralism also has critics on the left, who believe that Israel cannot simply redraw its borders on its own. "Unilateralism means that you live under the illusion that there's no one on the other side, no other party to the conflict," said Gadi Baltiansky, the director of the Geneva Initiative, which calls for renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians. Baltiansky, like many of the Initiative's leaders, is a former official of the government of Ehud Barak. "The lesson is that you can unilaterally start a war, but you cannot unilaterally get closer to peace. The only way to serve your interests is through agreements, as Israel proved with Egypt and Jordan. The road to peace doesn't run through Baghdad and Washington; it runs through Ramallah and Jerusalem." Today, Gaza is under siege; it is ringed by Israeli tanks and artillery; the sea is patrolled by Israeli gunboats, and the Air Force can strike at will. The few Palestinians who are allowed to come and go must negotiate an Israeli checkpoint. The main crossing, Erez, is a dystopia of barbed wire, metal cages, and full-body searches. When I crossed over into Gaza this summer, I felt as if I were breaking into a large, beachfront prison. My first attempt was unsuccessful. On the Palestinian side of the checkpoint, the police held me for two hours; Israeli tanks, parked about three hundred yards away, were firing into the fields of Beit Hanoun, more or less over our heads. I eventually tried to walk the nine-hundred-yard distance between the checkpoint and my waiting taxi, but I was forced back by fire from a tank-mounted machine gun. On my second try, four days later, a Hamas-fired Qassam rocket landed fifty feet from where I stood with a group of policemen. They were Fatah loyalists, and they cursed the Hamas rocket team for--inadvertently, it was assumed--firing on their position. The rocket made a sharp blast, but it caused little damage: a small patch of blackened earth. One of the policemen asked, "Do you know how many goats the rockets have killed? And cows?" "Half the rockets they fire fall on our side of the border," another policeman said, as he pointed to the source of the rockets, a few hundred yards away. "All these rockets do is bring the Israeli tanks." He pointed again, toward a platoon of Merkava tanks across the road. The tanks were laying down a barrage of suppressing fire, hoping to keep the Qassam teams from setting up their portable launchers. "Hamas should stop firing rockets," a third policeman said, "until they get better rockets." I had spent the previous day along Israel's northern border, and I was struck by the impotence of the Qassam, in comparison with the Katyusha, the short-range rocket that is a staple of the Hezbollah arsenal. The Katyusha is about eight feet long--it can be fired from an easily concealed tripod--and has alarming power. By late July, Hezbollah's rockets had forced nearly a million Israelis in the northern part of the country to hide in bomb shelters or leave for the cities in the center of Israel. While I was driving near Safed, a city in the far north, on a road that had become known as Katyusha Alley, one of the rockets fell eight or nine hundred feet from my car. The explosion made an enormous noise and shook the car. Fragments of shrapnel flew sixty or seventy yards from the point of impact. Hamas, along with the Popular Resistance Committees and Islamic Jihad, has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, but since 2004 they have killed only six Israelis, and have not forced the evacuation of a single kibbutz. Israeli intelligence officials believe that radicals in Gaza may have a small number of Katyushas (a few have already been fired in Gaza) and anti-tank missiles, which they are storing until they feel ready to escalate the conflict against Israel. Because Israel maintains such tight control of the border, Hamas cannot take delivery of weapons easily. Israeli intelligence officials have asserted, however, that Hezbollah rocket experts have given Hamas technical help. Palestinian intelligence officials also told me that radical groups have been trying to smuggle anti-tank weapons into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt. A few years ago, I visited an underground Qassam workshop in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. The workshop, a joint project of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other factions, was a quiet, efficient operation. Metal fabricators built steel tubes, which were packed with explosives by demolition experts. Detonators were then loaded and the rockets were welded shut. The equipment was designed to be disassembled and moved quickly, to stymie an Israeli attack, and the rockets were scattered throughout Gaza as soon as they came off the assembly line. One of the rocket designers told me that at the outset of the second Palestinian uprising, six years ago, the rockets were more like crude mortars--steel pipes that fired small, fertilizer-based projectiles. A Hamas explosives expert named Adnan al-Ghul built the first Qassam in 2001; it could carry roughly two pounds of explosives. Ghul was assassinated by Israel in 2004, but his successors have improved upon the original model. The newer Qassams can travel roughly seven miles, and carry as much as twenty pounds of explosives, though most seem to have less. The rocket team I met in Beit Hanoun had been firing Qassams. "We want better rockets, of course," Abu Obeidah said. "Bring us Katyushas and we'll fire them." Another member of the squad said, "And get us Merkavas and Apaches--" "And F-16s," Abu Obeidah said. He added, "We're not going to wait for someone to give us rockets. We have to do this ourselves." That night in Beit Hanoun, Abu Obeidah didn't want to discuss the technical capabilities of the rockets that his team had been firing, but he did talk about their purpose. "The rockets are the device that will liberate all of Palestine," he said. I brought up the complaints I'd heard about the rockets from people in Beit Hanoun; I'd been told that some residents had battled rocket teams when they tried to launch Qassams from school yards. "Spies for Israel," Abu Obeidah said, dismissively. "Some people aren't steadfast." I asked him if he thought that Hamas was losing the war. He sat up straight. "Losing? Ma pitom," he said, using a Hebrew expression that means, more or less, "What are you talking about?" He went on, "We are the first front. It will be Hamas that will defeat the Jews." He argued that Hamas stood at the vanguard of the anti-Zionist Muslim revolution: "Everyone, all the media, says that Hezbollah is wonderful. We stand with our brothers of Hezbollah, of course, but, really, look at the advantages they have. They get all the rockets they will ever need from Iran. If we had rockets from Iran, we could make a hell for the Jews, but we don't get any. Do you think we get help from someone outside? From where? The Egyptians? Of course not. We have to make all of our rockets ourselves. So you have to ask, Who is more steadfast in the struggle against the enemy, Hamas or Hezbollah?" One of his men said, as punctuation, "Hamas." I asked these men if they thought that Al Qaeda had a role to play in the liberation of Palestine. They ridiculed the idea. "Al Qaeda kills civilians," Abu Obeidah said. "So does Hamas," I said. "We do not," he answered. "We only target Jews." (Hamas's position is that all Israelis--whom it refers to simply as Jews--including Israeli children, are combatants.) He became more agitated. "How can you say Hamas and Al Qaeda in the same statement? How can you say the names of Hezbollah and Hamas in the same moment? There is no comparison between Hamas and these groups." His unhappiness at the comparison with Al Qaeda seemed motivated by genuine doctrinal disagreement: Hamas, unlike Al Qaeda, has the finite goal of taking Palestine. Although Hamas is angry at the United States--Abu Obeidah told me, "Israel has America. Who do we have? By God, one day America will pay for its support of the Jews"--it has not attacked American targets. Abu Obeidah's feelings toward Hezbollah, however, seemed to be shaped by resentment of its success. When I asked Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas legislator, if Hezbollah's surprising performance against Israel was a source of humiliation for Hamas, he said, "One group has been living under constant Israeli occupation, the other has had six years without any kind of interference from the Jews. So you have to consider the difficulties the resistance in Palestine has had before you sit there and pass judgment. The occupation is terrible on us." Although Hezbollah is a Shiite group and Hamas is an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement, they both see the existence of Israel as a severe challenge to Islam and want it dismantled. And both organizations are stridently anti-Semitic. The Hamas charter accuses Jews of using their wealth to "destroy societies and achieve the Zionists' interests," take "control of imperialist states," and persuade those states to "colonize many countries." Al Manar, the Hezbollah television network, recently broadcast a series based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Over the years, though, I have noticed one difference in the outlooks of the two groups; although both call for the destruction of Israel, Hezbollah officials seem to believe that this is a realistic goal. Hassan Nasrallah, to celebrate the Israelis' departure from Lebanon in 2000, called on the Palestinians to persist in their armed struggle: "In order to liberate your land, you don't need tanks and planes. . . . Israel may own nuclear weapons and heavy weaponry, but, by God, it is weaker than a spider's web." (He has also said that accomplishing this is, ultimately, the Palestinians' job.) Hamas, because of its intimate connection to Israel--most of its leaders have spent time in Israeli prisons--seemed to have a better understanding of Israel's strength, and of its permanence. And, of course, the occupation of Lebanon was not like those of the West Bank and Gaza; no Israeli wanted to stay in south Lebanon, and Barak's withdrawal was met mainly with domestic approval. Shortly before Hamas's founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated by Israel, in 2004, he told me, "Israel is a very strong, militaristic country, and its removal will have to come by God's hand. Until that time, we will have to be prepared to live with it in an arrangement of some kind." Now, though, in the wake of Hezbollah's stand against a faltering Israeli Army, some of Hamas's front-line fighters seem to be adjusting their views on the subject of Israel's durability. Abu Obeidah, for example, told me that he thought the Palestinians could actually bring about the end of Israel. "Why not?" he said. "If you put the Jews under pressure, they run away. They have a very weak society." One day in Beit Hanoun, I went to the apartment of Abu Hussein, a leader of the Qassam Brigades in Gaza. The walls were scarred by bullets, and we could hear Israeli tanks firing nearby. His home had been raided repeatedly by Israeli forces, he said. "I don't sleep here. I just come for an hour at a time." We sat in his living room, which was decorated with posters of various Hamas leaders who had been assassinated. In the most prominent spot was a portrait of Salah Shehadeh, a senior Hamas commander in Gaza, who was killed in 2002, along with his wife, daughter, and twelve others, nine of them children, when the Israeli Air Force bombed his apartment building. Abu Hussein was one of Shehadeh's bodyguards, but he had not been on duty on the night of the attack. "I would have been happy to die with him," he said. He asked what I'd like to drink, and called out to the next room, "Gilad! Bring us some coffee!" His fifteen-year-old son, Hussein, who was sitting on the couch beside him, laughed. Abu Hussein spoke about what he saw as the slow but persistent decline in the morale of the Jewish state. The pullout from Gaza "proved that the Jews are scared of us," he said. "In Lebanon, you remember, the Jews ran away six years ago because Hezbollah drove them out with fierce fighting. This proves that only by fighting can we make the Jews do what we want. "Yes, we don't have tanks," he said, acknowledging the cannon fire outside his window. "But we have martyrs. Look at the faces on my wall. We are all willing to die to win back our homeland. The Jews will leave Palestine rather than die. That's the difference." When I remarked that the situation in Gaza had deteriorated since the Hamas election victory, he replied, "It's a long war. We will bring the liberation of Palestine to the people. In any case, how can you say Hamas hasn't helped its people? We drove the Jews from the settlements." As we sat in Abu Hussein's living room, he pulled his son, Hussein, close to him. Hussein is a spirited ninth grader whose passion, he told me, is drawing. "I want him to finish his studies, but if he happens to die I don't have a problem," his father said, "so long as he dies as a martyr, and on the condition that he takes Jews with him when he dies. I will be happy if he dies this way." Hussein ran out of the room, and came back with a photograph of himself. "This is my martyr picture," he said, handing it to me. In the photograph, he wore khaki shirt and pants and held an AK-47. "If I die, this is the photo that will appear on the martyr posters in Gaza." All of his schoolmates have a "martyr photo," he said, "so when we get killed we'll have the best posters." "Islam is winning," his father said. "The second intifada was stronger than the first intifada, and the next one will be stronger than this one. We'll keep improving our weapons and rockets, and we're not afraid of martyrdom. We're happy to sacrifice our families to win this battle." Hussein said, "I'm his only son, and he wants me to die!" Then he laughed, and put his arm around his father. In Gaza, the most opulent villas belong mainly to the potentates of Fatah, whose time in power was marked by corruption and an inability to provide basic services, despite infusions of foreign aid. Since winning the January election, Hamas leaders have seemed refreshingly uninterested in the material privileges of power, but they also seem unwilling to acknowledge their own failures of governance. "Hamas never expected to win power," Hisham Abdel Razek, a prominent Fatah leader in Gaza, told me. "They expected to win forty per cent of the vote. They're not ready for this." Razek said that he saw Hamas's rocket campaign as an act of self-sabotage. "I think Hamas wants to show the world that they can't manage Gaza, that they really can't be trusted," he said. Hamas's position is that Israel is still to blame for the debasement of Gaza. Mushir al-Masri, the Hamas legislator, said that the occupation continues as long as Gaza's airspace and borders fall under Israeli control. "You saw it at Erez," he said. "We're in a prison." I brought up the Israeli argument that if Hamas were allowed to take control of Gaza's borders it would import rockets and anti-tank weapons. "Resistance is a right," Masri said, reflexively. He was defensive, as well, about Hamas's performance in the management of Gaza's economy, which is somnolent. An international boycott has forced high Hamas officials to smuggle cash into Gaza in order to meet their financial obligations. The Hamas foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, was caught by customs officials loyal to Fatah carrying twenty million U.S. dollars across the Egyptian border. (The money was turned over to the Finance Ministry.) There is also a foreboding of civil war between Fatah and Hamas. For several months following the elections, clashes erupted repeatedly; in the fiercest fighting, in May, which involved several exchanges of gunfire and kidnappings, three gunmen were killed and at least ten others were injured. No one is starving to death in Gaza, but very few people are working. The economic benefits of Israel's withdrawal have yet to materialize. One day, I visited the remains of the Israeli settlements, which had occupied about twenty per cent of Gaza's territory, including much of its seashore. Piles of rubble stood at the site of Netzarim, once a settlement of some five hundred Israelis. I asked a Palestinian journalist who had travelled there with me why no one had built apartments for the residents of Gaza's crowded refugee camps, or even a soccer field. "They're waiting for the international community to help," he said. We walked through the remains of the settlement. Only a few walls still stood. On one, we saw garish, spray-painted pictures of exploding Qassam rockets and the words "We are victorious." In July, I visited an artillery battery on a dusty field in Israel's far north. The ceasefire was three weeks away, and the soldiers, reservists, were firing 155-mm. howitzer shells into south Lebanon. I had driven up with the historian Michael Oren, who is a fellow at the center-right Shalem Center but has also been a critic of the settlers. Oren had been drafted into active service--he is a reserve major in the Army spokesman's office--and his task that morning was to guide the "Today" show news anchor Ann Curry to a front-line position so that she could interview soldiers. At a checkpoint, Oren explained Curry's mission to the commander of the artillery battalion. "Hem antishemim?" the commander asked, half jokingly. "Are they antiSemites?" "No," Oren answered. "They're from NBC." Oren was accompanied on his rounds by the screenwriter Dan Gordon, who wrote "The Hurricane," and who served in the Israeli Army as a young man. He had come to Israel this summer to help the Army explain itself to the foreign press, but he was having a hard time understanding Israel's strategy--an air campaign that was simultaneously aggressive and ineffectual, and a stop-and-start ground campaign conducted by ill-equipped and poorly led troops. "If you can figure out even the tactical goals here, let me know," Gordon said, as we drove down Katyusha Alley. Oren, like Gordon, was depressed by the events of the summer. "I don't lament leaving Gaza, not for a second," he told me. "I'm mourning the fact that we didn't respond the first time they fired Qassam rockets at us. That's when we began to hemorrhage the benefits of the unilateral disengagement. It's a very simple calculus--you can shoot the Jews out of Lebanon, you can shoot them out of Gaza, why not shoot them out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? It's a logical syllogism. I don't fault them for making that syllogism at all." Oren said that among the victims of Israel's unimpressive response to Hezbollah would be the Palestinian moderates. "The way this war is being understood will kill whatever minuscule chance remains for talks with moderate Palestinians," he said. "Hezbollah is a hero. The thinking among the Palestinians would be: 'Hezbollah beat you guys and you ran away, and now I'm supposed to sit down at the table and make concessions to you?' We hurt the Palestinian moderates when Barak unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. The proof of the failure of the policy is in the rockets Hezbollah is firing at us. We did more damage to the Palestinian moderates from our lack of strength than from our lack of magnanimity." A few days later, I went to see Ehud Barak in his Tel Aviv office. In a photograph on the wall, taken in 1972, a thirty-year-old Barak, then a commando, stood on the wing of a hijacked Sabena airliner, pistol in hand, looking down on a dead terrorist. The events of recent days have not emptied him of his legendary self-assuredness. "I'm very proud of my decision to pull out from Lebanon, which ended a tragedy that cost us the lives of a thousand Israelis over eighteen years, without ever increasing the protection of Israel's north from Katyushas," he told me. "If we hadn't pulled out from every square inch of Lebanese territory, we would not now be enjoying the moral high ground in the world that we now enjoy." He paused for a moment, and then adjusted his analysis: "The moral high ground that we enjoyed at the beginning of this operation, and to an extent enjoy now." Barak doesn't agree that Israeli unilateralism has undermined Palestinian moderates. To Barak, who failed to reach a permanent peace agreement with Yasir Arafat at Camp David, in July of 2000, the Palestinians have consistently undermined themselves. "We tried for a decade to act on the assumption that in the P.L.O. we had a partner that could accept the paradigm of two states for two peoples, and, unfortunately, after ten years we saw it failing--and I know this perhaps better than anyone else," he said. "It failed not because we were not ready to go the extra mile but because the other side had a strategy of redrawing the horizon whenever we came close to a solution." President Clinton, who oversaw the negotiations at Camp David, later wrote that Arafat made a "colossal mistake" by not accepting that offer or a subsequent one. A few months later, when I asked Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank Fatah leader, why Arafat had not made a counteroffer to Barak, he told me, "Egypt got one hundred per cent of the Sinai back in exchange for peace, and Hezbollah got back one hundred per cent of Lebanon through armed resistance. Why should we take less than one hundred per cent?" When we spoke, the second Palestinian intifada was already under way. Despite his disappointment at Camp David, and the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, Barak said that he believes, at least sometimes, that there are Palestinian moderates with whom Israel can negotiate. "I'm not sure, but probably it is possible," he said. "We should always be optimistic. You can't do it with Hamas and Hezbollah. They get their orders directly from Heaven, and their orders are to destroy us. But with Fatah people it might be possible." Marwan Barghouti is the most popular Fatah politician in the West Bank, and perhaps in Gaza, a man frequently spoken of as a possible future President of the Palestinian state. In 2004, Barghouti was convicted of aiding in the murders of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk and is now serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison. The Israeli government says that Barghouti is not a suitable negotiating partner--"He's passe," Avi Dichter, the Internal Security Minister, said--but other Israelis, particularly on the left, predict that he will one day be released from jail. In Israeli government circles, some have speculated that Barghouti could be freed in an elaborate prisoner exchange involving the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who is in an American prison, as well as Shalit and the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah. In the nineteen-nineties, Barghouti was a favored interlocutor of the Israeli left, a stalwart advocate of a two-state compromise, but in the first two years of the second Palestinian intifada both his rhetoric and his actions became extreme. "Negotiations without armed resistance didn't work," he told me in 2000. "So now we have to have both." The following year, when I spoke to him again, he called the Israeli government "the Tel Aviv leadership," a term that is sometimes used by those who deny Israel's legitimacy, and had become closer to figures in the more radical Palestinian factions. Last month, however, Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, who serves as his spokesperson, told me that her husband's understanding of the conflict remains unchanged. "He has always said the Palestinian people have a right to resistance, but that the only solution for this region is two states for two peoples," she said. Fadwa Barghouti, a round-faced woman who is a lawyer by training, seemed haggard when I met her; since the start of this summer's wars, Israeli authorities have not allowed her to see her husband. She has been able to visit her son, Qassam, a twenty-year-old who has been held without charge by the Israelis for the past three years. "It's just a way of putting pressure on Marwan, I think," she said of her son's arrest. I asked Fadwa if she thought that the twin successes of the Muslim rejectionists--Hamas's electoral victory in January, and Hezbollah's military achievements against Israel--have made it more difficult for advocates of compromise with Israel to be heard. "Not if the message is being said by someone with Marwan's credibility," she said. "The fact that he is a resistance figure means that people will listen to him when he speaks about compromise and negotiation." Of course, the Palestinian idea of what constitutes compromise has not often matched the Israeli idea. Barghouti, for one, has spoken about the right of Palestinians who became refugees in 1948--and, by extension, their families--to return to their ancestral homes inside Israel. This would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, so it is unacceptable to most Israelis. But other Palestinian moderates have said that the refugees could be settled on the West Bank and in Gaza. "Everything is still open for discussion," Hisham Abdel Razek told me. He is a former Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, and one of the most prominent voices for moderation in Gaza. "Right now, emotions are in charge, but that can change," he said. "I was emotional myself once." He looked down at his hands, which were scarred thirty years ago when a bomb that he was trying to plant in the Israeli town of Rishon LeZion exploded prematurely. He served twenty-one years in prison for that attempt. Like many Palestinian moderates, Razek blames Israel for the weakness of Fatah. "Israel doesn't help the situation at all," he said. "It has strengthened Hamas and Hezbollah in so many different ways, and they never try to strengthen the moderate camp." He said that Sharon's refusal to acknowledge that Arafat's successors might have been more willing to make the hard compromises necessary for peace was a mistake. He added, "If the pullout from Gaza had been done as part of a negotiation with the Palestinian Authority, Fatah would still be in power here. Hamas would have lost. But Hamas appeals to the emotions, not to the intellect." There is little reason to believe that Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor, could have made a durable pact with Israel. He is considered by both sides to be ineffective. But Ariel Sharon virtually assured Abbas's failure, and Hamas's rise to power, by refusing to enter into negotiations with him. The battle between Fatah and Hamas might be the crucial war for Israel's future. In the short term, Israel's struggle with Iran is more consequential, but the possibility of a permanent peace hinges directly on the ability of Fatah moderates to convince Palestinians that Hamas's path is self-defeating. "There's no alternative except negotiations," Rafiq Hamdouna, a former Fatah leader who heads an organization of Palestinians who have served time in Israeli jails, told me last month. "The only realistic solution is a two-state solution. There are many people here who believe this." But he added that the Israeli siege, the temptations of violent death, and Hezbollah's example have made it difficult for Palestinians to recognize the advantages of unheroic compromise. "My son Basel came to me one day and said he wanted to be a martyr bomber," he told me. "I had to keep calm. I said to him, 'Basel, do you know what happens when you blow yourself up?' He just looked at me. I said, 'You don't go to Heaven. You go into a hole in the ground, and you get covered up with dirt.'" I was reminded of Abu Hussein, the Qassam commander in Beit Hanoun, who had had a very different answer for his son. "Every father in Gaza has the same conversation with his sons," Hamdouna said. "Every father faces this." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_gaza_the_forgotten.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_gaza_the_forgotten.php The New Yorker Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:00:00 -0500 A Writer's Notes and Comments on the Mideast Melissa Block, host: New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg has just returned from a reporting trip to the Middle East. He was in northern Israel and Gaza. On previous trips he spent a good deal of time in southern Lebanon, meeting with the leaders and members of Hezbollah. I asked him if he hears anything different in Hezbollah's rhetoric during this conflict. Jeffrey Goldberg: What they're getting better at is adjusting their rhetoric for Western ears so as not to sound anti-Semitic. And they've been more careful, I've noticed lately. Maybe people aren't asking them these questions but even when they're asked, as you did, you know he's using now a traditional Palestinian rejection as formulation about Israel. I'm not going to say I recognize Israel's right to exist. I'm going to acknowledge that it exists, which of course is not the same thing. And it's not exactly a recipe for long term calm and peace in the region. Block: And it goes far beyond that. I mean, in your travels in southern Lebanon, you found very explicit signs of exactly how Hezbollah sees Israel and sees the Jews. Goldberg: Literally, one of the signs. There was a billboard that they had planted about ten feet from the Israeli border. And it was a billboard that had a blown-up photograph of a Hezbollah fighter holding the severed head of an Israeli commando, and basically threatening all sorts of, you know, vile acts to come against Israel. It's a very, very radical, anti Semitic organization and we need to acknowledge that. Because if we acknowledge that, then we'll understand what the long term hope is or not is for disarmament and for Hezbollah to join the political process in Lebanon without arms. Block: Is there a hope that that could happen? Goldberg: No. Probably not. I should never say never. But in 2002, when I spent much of the summer there, there was a debate at the time in Western circles. Is Hezbollah becoming part of the political process or will it maintain its core identity as a Jihadist organization? And there were big splits in the community of people who study these things. And a lot of people thought that they were going to give up their arms. They were going to stop this. Of course, they didn't. And so I'm surprised now when people look at this organization today and say well, now they can disarm. They have no incentive to disarm. If anything, they've come out less powerful on the ground, obviously, at least for the moment, because they've been degraded. Their weapons have been degraded and their fighters have been killed. But they come out empowered. They come out as the vanguard, as the leading edge of the Islamic fight against Israel. I can see no reason why they would want to give up their arms. Block: You hear Hezbollah described often as a state within a state in Lebanon and I wonder whether that actually understates their strength at this point? Goldberg: It's not a state within a state. It's a state that controls a state. They don't control it in the same way that al-Qaida controlled the Taliban, but they certainly have a veto power over its progress, as we have just seen. They invited Israeli attacks that have set back the country I don't know how many years, and it's sort of interesting because the Bush administration for one has argued that the Cedar Revolution of Lebanon, the democratization process in Lebanon, is proof that the Middle East is progressing toward democracy and greater freedom. And I was always struck by that, because the Bush administration argument seemed hollow. It just seems to me that all this talk of Lebanon as being on the road to democracy is a bit premature, to say the least. You can't have a viable democracy when a terrorist militia has functional veto power over the acts of your government. Block: When you talk to people, Shiite Muslims in the south of Lebanon, do they share Hezbollah's views about Jews, about Israel? Would that be widespread? Goldberg: Hezbollah itself, Hezbollah's ideologues, have very advanced and convoluted and complicated theories about Jews. I was in Bint Jbail, the town that people are talking about, one of the centers of the fighting. I was there four years ago, and you don't pick up that sort of European style anti- Semitism. By European style, I'm talking about the archaic sort of European style, fascist anti-Semitism. You pick, obviously, a great deal of resentment about Israel. There is not that same quality, the average person, that same quality of Iranian style theocratic anti-Semitism that one finds in the ruling councils of Hezbollah. You have resentment toward Israel, but I think many of the people there would be happy, and have been happy, to live in peace with Israel a few miles to the south. Block: They would be? Goldberg: It's been a pretty good six years in the south of Lebanon since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000. Business is booming. When I was there, building was going on like crazy. People were making money. It wasn't a bad life there, and I think Israel had receded from many people's minds as a problem. Israel had withdrawn behind an internationally recognized boundary, and they were done with it. It's not analogous to what's going on in Gaza or the West Bank, where the lives of the Palestinians and Israelis are deeply intertwined. The people of south Lebanon, I think to some degree had forgotten about Israel. And certainly one could argue that Israel, especially its military establishment, had forgotten about Hezbollah. The past six years have been a strange period where one organization, Hezbollah, was building up for something, the Israelis were ignoring it and I don't think the average Lebanese person in the south or in Beirut fully understood what was coming. Block: Was there, do you think, a serious miscalculation on the Israeli side? Goldberg: Yes. There are tactical miscalculations, obviously. I think that Israel is in a position right now - I mean, I think the government of Israel is in a position right now where it might not survive. You have another aspect here, which is very interesting, which is that you have a government whose platform has now been taken away from it. Ehud Olmert and the Kadima Party were elected to do one thing, to disengage from the West Bank as Ariel Sharon had disengaged from Gaza. Pull out Jewish settlers, bring the lines back in. That's dead. That's not going to happen any more. The Israeli people have recognized the futility of unilateral disengagement. So combining these two things - the fact that you have a ruling party that has no platform anymore with the fact that many Israelis believe that both tactical and strategic miscalculations were made in this war - and you have a recipe for longer term instability in Israeli itself. Block: It would bring down this government, you think? Goldberg: I think there's a good chance that many people in the army will lose their jobs over this. I mean, it's a fascinating thing that the asymmetries here are manifold. By technical standards, Israel did very well in one sense. They probably killed 25 to 30 percent of all Hezbollah fighters. They probably destroyed hundreds of rocket launchers. They certainly destroyed the infrastructure of Hezbollah, and yet it's consensus in Israel that Israel lost this war because Nasrallah is still alive and he comes out of his bunker and he says we won. Block: Jeffrey Goldberg, thanks for coming in. Goldberg: Thank you. Block: Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He just returned from a reporting trip to Israel and Gaza. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/a_writers_notes_and_comments_o.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/a_writers_notes_and_comments_o.php Interviews Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: Central Casting An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers. Kerry reminisced about clearing fields on a Massachusetts farm and promised to side with small farmers in their struggles against agribusiness. Teresa Heinz Kerry handed her husband a note, and then stood up to speak, recalling a visit to an organic hog farm in Iowa. "It's really inspiring to see the work that they did," she said, and encouraged her audience to consider organic farming. "It can be done. It's economical, and there is a huge market in America." At that point, Winston Simpson, a hog farmer from Clarence, Missouri, stood up and interrupted. "I said, 'Mrs. Kerry, you've got to understand that hog farmers just freak out when they hear people telling them to go organic,' " Simpson recalled recently. "She looked kind of surprised. I was just there helping out, making a crowd, but I've got an adrenaline problem, and when someone pisses me off I jump up and tell them." Simpson is a grower-finisher; four thousand or so hogs come to him at forty pounds and leave their pens for slaughter two hundred and fifty pounds later. "I'd go broke if we switched to organic farming," he said. His public advice was informed by tactical, rather than ideological, concerns. "I don't have a problem with people raising food organically. If people want to eat that way, fine, but she shouldn't have been pushing that as a solution to the farm problem. A lot of farmers think of those organics as some kind of elitist lunatic-fringe thing." For some, Mrs. Kerry's performance recalled other moments of Democratic campaign obliviousness, like Michael Dukakis's endorsement of Belgian endive as an alternative crop for Iowa farmers. Simpson described himself as a loyal Democrat who would have preferred to attend a better-orchestrated Kerry rally. "I'm even pro-choice-that's how much of a Democrat I am," he said. He came to that position, he explained, through his knowledge of animal husbandry. "If you've ever seen a young heifer get bred too soon, you know what a fiasco that is, which is why I think teen-agers should have access to abortion. But I'm out of the mainstream on this." He continued, "I always tell people who are running for office that if they want to get elected in Missouri, when someone asks them for their feelings about Roe v. Wade don't give some long scientific talk. Just say, 'I'm against abortion,' and move on quick." Simpson, whose son, a former marine, served in Iraq, wishes that Kerry had won in 2004. "Kerry couldn't connect with people," he said. "It's too bad, because just think if they got elected-maybe they could have turned this whole thing around in Iraq. Maybe we would be better off today. But they never took the lesson that you shouldn't give the Republicans things that they could use against you." Claire McCaskill lost her 2004 race for governor, but the contest was close-fifty-one per cent to forty-eight. Kerry lost Missouri to George W. Bush by a slightly wider margin, fifty-three per cent to forty-six. This year, McCaskill is running for the U.S. Senate. Polls show that the race is a statistical tie, and analysts from both parties consider McCaskill to be one of the two or three strongest Democratic challengers in the country. McCaskill says she is a centrist. She is one of many Democrats-Hillary Clinton being the most visible, and the most diligent-who are trying to establish themselves with middle-class moderates. These candidates see an uncommon opportunity this November-and in November of 2008-to win back many "Reagan Democrats," the voters whom the Party lost to Ronald Reagan a quarter century ago: the white working class, suburbanites, and Catholics. The collapse of President Bush's popularity-brought on most directly by his detached performance during Hurricane Katrina, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals, and public displeasure with the mismanaged war in Iraq-is working to the Democrats' advantage. Polls show that even on national security-the issue that has favored Republicans since George McGovern's candidacy, in 1972-Republicans are now no more credible than Democrats. "We could be seeing in George W. Bush a Hooverian Presidency," the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told me. "This would go a long way to helping the Democrats rebuild a new version of the grand Roosevelt coalition"-one that included a great measure of the country's working class. Wilentz added, though, that "what you need for a Roosevelt coalition, of course, is a Roosevelt." For the midterm elections in November, the Democratic Party does not need a Roosevelt. Some agree with Newt Gingrich, who recently told Time that if he were a Democratic strategist he would run a campaign that simply asked voters, "Had enough?" Many liberal Democrats would like to make Bush's record the focus of the upcoming campaign. Centrist Democrats, though-particularly those running in states that have cooled to their party-think that something more is needed this year, and certainly for 2008, when Bush will be retiring. They argue that their party must speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri. To take control of the Senate-no longer a fantastical notion-the Democrats need to win six seats; for a majority in the House of Representatives, which has been in Republican hands since 1994, they must take back fifteen. The Senate races are populated with centrists like McCaskill. Among those running for the Senate are Jim Pederson, a shopping-center developer in Arizona; Harold Ford, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old African-American congressman from Memphis, who is running a campaign meant to appeal to conservative white Tennesseeans; and Bob Casey, the anti-abortion state treasurer in Penn-sylvania, who hopes to defeat the incumbent Rick Santorum. McCaskill's Republican opponent, the incumbent Jim Talent, has been hurt in the polls by aligning himself against a Missouri ballot initiative to protect stem-cell research. His stand has been inconsistent, which has alienated some of the evangelical Christians who are part of his core constituency. McCaskill, an ex-county prosecutor who believes in the death penalty and says that she worships, in the Missouri manner, "God and common sense," has made her name as the state auditor by running uncompromising investigations of state government performance. Winston Simpson, the hog farmer, said of her, "She's the kind of woman who could really jerk Donald Rumsfeld through a knothole." McCaskill is disarmingly loquacious. She is fifty-two and speaks with a flat Missouri accent; the day we met, she was wearing a red suit of a style that, in Washington, one associates with Republican women. "I'm having a good day," she said, almost as soon as we'd said hello. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Laura Bush is coming to the state to campaign for Talent, and Vice-President Cheney and the President of the United States are coming, too. They must be scared of someone." The candidate was on a domestic errand. Her sixteen-year-old daughter was applying for a learner's permit, and had forgotten her I.D., so her mother was making a detour home. "Oh, damn," McCaskill said, with a laugh. "I didn't want you to see that I was a rich lady." She is indeed rich, and lives in an oversized modern swooped-roof house beside a creek in a St. Louis suburb. But her wealth is of recent vintage: her second marriage, in 2002, was to a developer. She grew up in small-town southern Missouri. Her father's family kept a feed mill, and her mother had a drugstore that, she says, was "put out of business when Wal-Mart opened up." She worked her way through college and law school as a waitress, and later married David Exposito, with whom she had three children. It was a troubled marriage; Exposito nearly ended McCaskill's political career when he was arrested on a riverboat casino and charged with possession of marijuana. He was sentenced to community service, and he and McCaskill subsequently divorced. As we drove past strip malls and big-box stores, McCaskill talked about the Democrats she most admires. "I would say I go back before McGovern to find role models. Clinton was an exception in some ways, but certainly not on a personal level. Harry Truman, J.F.K.-those are the role models." She added, "I'm not a liberal. When I was a prosecutor, I saw child murderers, people like that, and so I believe that there is such a thing as evil in this world." In many ways, McCaskill sounds like any traditional Democrat. She speaks out against oil companies and pharmaceutical companies-she usually gets her biggest applause when she condemns Bush's prescription-drug plan-and she is in favor of abortion rights, although she doesn't make it a central issue. "If people ask, I tell them I'm pro-choice," she said. "That doesn't mean I can't understand the other side of the debate, though." She went on, "Being a Democrat is about balance. It's about being moderate and truthful and strong. Harry Truman, leaders like that, they were strong enough to take on foreign enemies when they needed to, but they were also strong enough to know when not to fight, when to use other weapons besides military force. That's the message the Democratic Party should be sending. We should let the American people know we want to work with allies, work with the U.N., and that we don't like war, but that we'll defend this country's interests with everything we've got." Referring to the Kerry-Edwards campaign stop, she said, "I'm sure Teresa's motives were fine. But I think it's a tone thing. It's the 'We know better' thing. Some of it is completely unfair, but there's a critical number of Missourians who believe that people from the East Coast or West Coast don't think that people in the heartland are smart." In 2004, exit polls showed that sixty-one per cent of voters who said that they attended church on Sunday supported Bush; Kerry received the support of thirty-nine per cent of the churchgoers. Fifty-nine per cent of voters who were married with children supported Bush, to Kerry's forty. It is difficult for Democrats, who are so closely associated with abortion and gay marriage, to shake off entirely their McGovern-era "acid, amnesty, and abortion" label, and the Party's recent history is a reason that many centrist Democrats still feel uncomfortable about the election, last year, of Howard Dean to chair their party. Dean had backing from the Party's antiwar wing, which supported his briefly astounding run for the Democratic nomination in 2004, but his main support came from state Party leaders, and he has rewarded them by funding a handful of field workers in each state to help fortify the local parties. Dean has tried to reach out to, among others, evangelical Christians, and he doesn't like what he suggests is the Party's gradual abandonment of the socially conservative but economically liberal working class. "The Democratic Party was built on four pillars-the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions, and African-Americans," he said not long ago. "But we had stopped communicating with the Catholics and with labor, and so all you had left was the Roosevelt intellectuals and the African-Americans." Nevertheless, Dean often seems almost chemically incapable of communicating effectively beyond his base. Not long ago, at a rally in a union hall in a grimy industrial section of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he drew hundreds of Bush-loathing liberals of the sort who animated his 2004 candidacy. The crowd consisted of union members, including many from unions that represent government workers; Navajo activists from New Mexico's vast reservations; a modest number of hardscrabble Latinos; and a much greater number of retirement-age whites, some of whom came to the event from Santa Fe and Taos and who wore sandals and turquoise jewelry. Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans. (The popular centrist governor, Bill Richardson, skipped the rally, telling me later that he had been busy.) Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor-a veteran, she noted-pointed out one day that her flag was "torn and tattered" and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, "I keep it here because it's going to stay flying tattered and torn because that's how this war is going. It's going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over." The woman seated next to me, Carol Ann Bowman, the secretary of the Torrance County Democratic Party, leaned over. "I just hate this war," she said. "I don't understand how anyone could vote for Bush." Then she confessed, "I have two children who were in the military, and they voted for him. I just don't understand why." Dean came into the room at a gallop. The applause was raucous and sustained. "It's like a Dean rally," Bowman said, and, at the podium, Dean proved that he is still ready to follow his own muse, even in public. He was soon improvising an attack on Vice-President Cheney. Returning to Cheney's accidental shooting of a hunting companion in February, he said, "I don't want to get on Cheney's case too much, but this is a hunting state, right? I come from a hunting state. What kind of guy has a beer at lunch and then goes hunting and shoots a guy in the face? For God's sake." Dean's face was turning purple and his neck muscles were stretched tight. "I mean, this is a hunting state, this is New Mexico, right? Vermont's the same way. You know, you don't hunt like that. What kind of hunting program is that? I never heard a respectable hunter do that kind of stuff. Nonsense. Enough already. Go back to Vermont-I mean, go back to Washington. For God's sake, don't go to Vermont." Dean looked over at his fretting public-relations man. "All right, we won't go too far. I can see my staff and the choir over here are getting really nervous." His words were cheered enthusiastically. So was his praise for the absent Richardson, who recently ended electronic touch-screen voting in the state, reverting to a paper-ballot system. Dean got his loudest applause when he suggested that Republicans were conniving with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines, and he singled out Diebold, a favorite target of bloggers whose rage against the Bush Administration seems limitless. The only statement that was greeted with apathy was a blunt pledge to confront America's enemies. If the Democrats are restored to power, he said, "we will not permit Iran to be a nuclear power, we will make the deal with the Chinese to get nuclear weapons out of North Korea, and we will catch Osama bin Laden or kill him, one or the other." One of the Democratic National Committee's initiatives under Dean has been to place campaign field workers in every state rather than to concentrate resources where the Party's chances seem most promising-in particular so-called "red states" on the electoral map that may be leaning Democratic. Dean told the crowd that his fifty-state program was going to pay dividends. "If we can win races in Mississippi and Alabama and Utah after only less than a year, because these organizers haven't even been on the ground a year, we can win races anywhere," he said. "You know why? Because this is a Democratic country, with a big 'D.' We ought to be speaking about our values everywhere we go, because the truth is, American values are consistent with Democratic Party values. Most Americans believe that it is immoral for small children to go to bed hungry at night, and we believe those kids ought to be fed, but the Republicans are cutting school-lunch programs." Dean's fifty-state plan has caused fissures in the Party. Congressional leaders want the D.N.C. to direct its money to states where the odds-and the polls-favor the Democrats. Scott Pastrick, a former D.N.C. treasurer, said, "A lot of people think this strategy is pie in the sky, and this feeling is shared by a lot of the traditional donors. They're wondering why we're not putting resources in winnable states." Representative Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, who chairs the Democrats' congressional campaign committee, and who has fought openly with Dean on this question, is more disparaging. When I suggested that Democrats in Mississippi were probably grateful for Dean's attention, he said, "If you think that Mississippi and Ohio are the same thing, you're an idiot." In a restaurant in Santa Fe after the Albuquerque rally, I asked Dean if the crowd's lack of reaction to his stand on national security surprised him. His supporters, he replied, "are more liberal than I am." That is true. Because of his early opposition to the Iraq war, Dean was often characterized as a leftist, but he is a pro-gun, anti-gay-marriage (although pro-civil union) fiscal conservative who sounds hawkish on the question of a nuclear Iran. Dean's stance is actually in harmony with the idea put forth by Third Way, a new centrist group that advises Democrats on ways to speak to moderate voters. (Third Way's views are similar to those of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped Bill Clinton win the Presidency in 1992, but more sharply focussed on the practical business of electing Democrats.) Third Way argues-and Dean agrees-that the Democrats risk perpetual irrelevance if they write off entire sections of the country. However, when I asked Dean, not long ago, if Democrats might have to risk alienating core supporters in order to attract national-security voters and cultural conservatives, he replied, his color rising, "Certainly not. Absolutely not. Why would you even think of such a thing? It goes contrary to everything we're doing. No, it's the wrong thing to do." For Governor Bill Richardson, a possible Presidential candidate in 2008, "the key to victory is to develop a coherent national message of optimism and opportunity and not incessantly try to appeal to our base." He said last week, "It's more important to try to appeal to disaffected Democrats and Independents who are on the verge of coming back to us. What is important is that we not just criticize the President, that we have alternative, positive policies." Democrats have a set of policy prescriptions that they hope to enact if they win majorities in Congress, such as increasing the minimum wage, rolling back parts of the prescription drug law, and reinstating budget deficit controls. But they are only muddling toward a Gingrich-style Contract with America, which, in its drama and clarity, gave 1994 voters an understanding of national Republican priorities. Even on the minimum wage there is no consensus: Party moderates believe that a proposal to make college tuition taxdeductible would appeal to more voters than a promise to raise the minimum wage. As if policy differences weren't enough, the Party's many spokesmen tend to speak disparately and concurrently, especially on matters of national security. Witness the confusion, not long ago, when Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, a former marine, called for an immediate pullout of troops from Iraq, leading to graceless scenes of Democratic leaders scrambling to embrace him and keep him distant, sometimes simultaneously. Rahm Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, says that the collapse of Bush's support-recent polls put his approval rating in the high twenties-is not enough to propel the Democrats back to power. "We still have to pick the lock here," he said, referring to the difficulty of unseating incumbents, especially in congressional districts that, over the years, have been gerrymandered into single-party redoubts. Some of his colleagues, however, do little to restrain their optimism. "I'll tell you this: if the election were held today, we would win," Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, who represents San Francisco, told me earlier this month. Pelosi appeared excited by the prospect of one specific consequence of a Democratic victory: "We win in '06, we get subpoena power." Pelosi has said that the Democrats would reserve the right to investigate every aspect of the Bush Administration, including its rationale for the Iraq war. Pelosi's vision of a subpoena-filled 2007 appeals to her party's most liberal supporters. But there is a worry that such a tack might alienate moderates, and that it would motivate otherwise dispirited Republicans to go to the polls. "You know, if you spend your whole day trying to catch the dog that bit you because all you want to do is kick him, you're not going to win many friends," Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, told me. This would be a surmountable problem for Democrats if liberals outnumbered conservatives. But the liberal base of the Democratic Party, even fully mustered for battle, is too small to carry a Democrat to the Presidency, or even to many of the Senate seats being contested in 2006. The math is unforgiving, according to Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way. "Exit polls consistently show that twenty-one per cent of Americans self-identify as liberal and about thirty-four per cent as conservative," he said. "And a plurality, about forty-five per cent, self-identify as moderate. So this means that the Democrats have got to pull almost two-thirds of moderate voters to be the majority party." A recent report by the political scientists Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston argues that greater polarization in the electorate hurts Democrats, for a simple reason: one out of every three voters belongs to the base that in the past Karl Rove has so successfully mobilized; only one out of five belongs to Howard Dean's. "In 1976, Jimmy Carter eked out a victory with only 51 per cent of the moderate vote because he won nearly three in ten conservative voters," Galston and Kamarck wrote. "In 2004, John Kerry won 54 per cent of the moderates and still lost by 3.5 points because he won a much smaller share of conservatives. With three conservatives for every two liberals, the sheer arithmetic truth is that in a polarized electorate effectively mobilized by both major parties, Democratic candidates must capture upwards of 60 per cent of the moderate vote-a target only Bill Clinton has reached in recent times-to win a national election." Al Gore received the support of fifty-two per cent of self-identified moderates in his popular-vote victory over President Bush, in 2000, but eighty-one per cent of conservatives voted for Bush-"enough to carry Bush through in states Gore needed," Third Way's Matthew Bennett said. On national-security questions, it is easy to misread even the most encouraging polls. "Before 2004, the Republicans generally polled somewhere around thirty-five points better on such questions as which party is better able to fight terror," Bennett, who worked for General Wesley Clark during his 2004 Democratic primary run, said. "Now that gap has closed entirely, but almost exclusively because people don't trust the Republicans anymore. It's not because Democrats have done something to take advantage of that." Meanwhile, position papers cascade from Democratic think tanks. The Democratic Leadership Council has just issued a book with the barrel-chested title "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty," which offers essays by nineteen Democratic foreign-policy and defense experts. Even the most liberal Democratic officeholders recognize the need to speak to security-conscious voters in ways that will separate them from Republicans. Nancy Pelosi made a game attempt at ferocity when I talked with her. "Here's my thing, and I will say this and you have to bear with me," she said. "I'm a mom. I have five children, and I have five grandchildren. I always say to people, 'Think lioness.' This is how Democrats are. You threaten our children-and that's America-you threaten our country, you're dead. You're dead." Pelosi, Dean, and Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, recently issued a report called "Real Security," which promises a "tough and smart" program of national defense. The report was met with some skepticism in Democratic foreign-policy circles. Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations (and a former State Department official in the Carter Administration as well as a onetime Times columnist), said, "Where I grew up, if you have to say you're tough and smart, you're not." The "Real Security" report declares that the Democrats will "eliminate" Osama bin Laden, given the chance, although it does not say how. It also says it will implement the homeland-defense recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and provide better support and health benefits for American soldiers and veterans. There is no discussion in the report of the doctrine of preemption, or of Bush's endorsement of global democratization as an antidote to terrorism, and it states that the Democrats will "insist" that the Iraqis themselves "defeat the insurgency." Democrats are sensitive to charges of defeatism-Howard Dean was widely criticized when he said earlier this year that the war is lost-but the Democratic Party's more hawkish leaders (Connecticut's Senator Joseph Lieberman excepted) no longer argue in terms of victory or defeat. "I don't think we're losing," said Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa and the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (as well as a possible candidate for President in 2008). "It appears to be a draw. People are upset by the fact that their kids are over there and there doesn't seem to be any end to this whole process. It's not pacifism that makes people think this way. They're questioning the credibility and competence of the Commander-in-Chief." Though Vilsack is no optimist on Iraq, he still puts himself on the more conservative side of the Democratic spectrum. "I don't think the face of the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi," he said pointedly. When we discussed why there had been no domestic terrorist attacks since September 11th, he even echoed Bush's argument that fighting jihadists in the Middle East is preferable to fighting them in America: "We have a hundred and thirty-two thousand Americans in a country where they have a lot easier shot at hitting us than they have here. It's a lot easier to attack us in Iraq and Afghanistan, since they're a lot closer." Rahm Emanuel notes that nearly five years after the September 11th attacks Democrats still lack an authoritative spokesman on national-security questions. "What we need is a single credible voice," Emanuel said. There is also a worry that the Party will confuse antipathy for the Iraq war with a desire to make national security less of a priority. "We make a mistake if we think that just because people are fed up with George Bush they want George McGovern," Kathleen Sullivan, the chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said. Democrats in Republican-leaning states worry, in particular, that much of the Party's national leadership underestimates the role of patriotism-the impulse to celebrate American virtues, even in difficult times. Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, appears to see this as a benign sort of nationalism. "The well-heeled New York, Northern California world of Democrats considers nationalism a very discredited concept, that nationalism equals Brown Shirts," Carson said. (Carson lost his race in 2004 for Oklahoma's open Senate seat. The winner, Tom Coburn, is among the farthest right members of the Senate.) "In most of the country, nationalism is as normal as breathing. I live in a bloodred state, I know"-sixty-six per cent of Oklahoma voters chose Bush in 2004-"but this holds true across thirty states. The Democrats have to look like they axiomatically stand up for America's interests if they're going to be competitive." Claire McCaskill fits the Carson model: she sounds pugnacious, and not overly nuanced, on the subject of national defense. Though she believes in multilateralism, she also asserts, "We need to be the strongest country on the planet, so I view our problems as 'What do we have to do to maintain our strength?' In Washington, there's this hyper-dissection of Iran, all these layers of complication- what's going on with China, and Russia, and so on. For Missourians, the issue is: Iran is thumbing its nose at us. If we're so strong, why are they thumbing their nose at us? The reason is because the President is letting it happen. If he's so tough and smart, how did he let this happen?" McCaskill doesn't attempt an answer; the clear implication is that Administration fecklessness is to blame. Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, who has quickly won a national following, is troubled by demands for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. "The two foreign-policy issues that have bloggers most fired up are getting the troops out of Iraq and sending troops to Darfur," he said. "They are exactly right to be fired up about Darfur. It is in our national interest to stop states from failing, and to stop genocide. But they also have to recognize that if we are willing to engage militarily in those circumstances, then there certainly are situations that call for direct military engagement in defense of our national interests." Iran, he believes, is an example of a country that might one day warrant the attention of the American military. He looks at the war in Iraq as a test of American credibility-which is why he doesn't support an immediate withdrawal, even though he believed that the original invasion was ill-conceived and badly executed. In front of Illinois audiences, he said, "I'll talk about the fact that we are less equipped to deal with Iran because of the Iraq war." Obama has been criticized on the Party's left for his stance on Iran, but voters in Illinois approve of his position, he said. There is a desire among many liberals to see the Democrats more energetically oppose the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program, and its treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. facilities-to campaign, in short, against the Administration's perceived immorality as well as its mismanagement. "We have a good message to send about the rights of innocent Americans," Senator Russell Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, who recently led an unsuccessful attempt in the Senate to censure Bush, said. "We believe that folks who have done nothing wrong should not be abused. If we don't go out there and say it, there's going to be a sense that we're hiding, that they've successfully intimidated us. I see myself in the middle of a creative process of transforming the Party into one of boldness. If you go into your foxhole, they win." When I asked Rahm Emanuel if he thought that the Democrats should make civil liberties a focus of the upcoming campaign, he replied, "Middle-class American families are proud of their country. Economic security is the issue we should be talking to people about." Obama, making much the same point, said, "Americans want to feel good about themselves and their government. They can be called upon to sacrifice, and they can be ashamed when we fall short of our ideals, but they don't believe that the main lesson of the past five years is that America is an evil hegemon." The proper lesson of Iraq, Senator Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, said, is that the Democratic Party should run not to the left of President Bush on national security but to the right: "It's a better opportunity than Jack Kennedy had when he ran on the phony missile gap. We have real issues." To run to the right of the G.O.P., Democratic centrists say, the Party's candidates must learn how to speak the language that conservatives speak. Third Way has distributed a primer on countering the traditional Republican emphasis on national security. It cautions Democrats to "take fear seriously," and says, "Voters will not respond to approaches that ignore fear, mock it or try to intellectualize it away, like calling Bush a 'fear-monger.' " The voters, the guide says, "need to know that you understand the dangers we face." The primer counsels Democrats to "show comfort with the military," and warns candidates not to "pity or patronize the troops when criticizing the war. Remember that they are serving their country and proud of it." The guide goes on to note, "Progressives have always been surprised that the morale among troops deployed in Iraq is quite high-they are doing their mission." Bush's diminished credibility on national security should help Democrats in local races this fall, Dodd said, but 2008 is a different matter-for the obvious reason that Bush won't be running. A John McCain candidacy, or the nomination of the Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, would alter the dynamic in ways that cannot now be measured; in 2008 voters may have a choice between candidates with more similarities than differences on issues like national defense, health care, individual opportunity, and whatever appears to be the latest iteration of "family values." Dodd is convinced that the Party is so weary of losing that its voters will make their decisions strategically. "The Party won't nominate someone who starts in a hole. They will make that determination if they perceive a person not to be a winner. They want to win. They really want to win." Claire McCaskill knows the price that Democrats pay when they send a Northeasterner to Missouri. Although she said that she didn't blame Senator Kerry for her own loss-"The person on the top of the ballot always affects what happens to local candidates"-she added that Kerry would not be coming to Missouri to campaign for her. "John Kerry is a good man and a brave man, but he's from the city," she said. When I asked what she would do if Howard Dean showed up to endorse her, she said, "I'm not afraid to say I disagree with Howard Dean. I can go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy if I disagree with them." Hillary Clinton is a sensitive subject for McCaskill. After the governor's race two years ago, many Missouri Democrats assumed that in 2008 McCaskill would make another run against Matt Blunt, the Republican who defeated her. But she has told people in Missouri and in Washington that a ticket led by Clinton would be fatal for many Democrats on the ballot, and that a Clinton candidacy would rule out her chance to win the governorship. "The Democratic Party has to look at candidates who can be competitive in all fifty states," she said. A few days later, at the annual Jackson Day dinner of the Greene County Democrats, in Springfield, Republican protesters held signs labelling her "New York's third senator." In states like Missouri, coolness toward Hillary Clinton puts many Democrats in an uncomfortable position. Harold Ford, Jr., is close to both Clintons. He is running a strong race in Tennessee-if he wins, he would be the first popularly elected African-American senator from the South. When I asked Ford if Hillary Clinton would be campaigning with him, he said, "I'm not running away from her position on the war or her position on energy independence. I'm doing events with her." When I asked him where, he said, "In Washington." Some Democrats fear any association with national Democrats, who are perceived to be too liberal. "I had this notion that I could convince people who were skeptical of national Democrats to vote for me because I could bring home the bacon, or because I could find some personal pitch to them," Brad Carson, the former Oklahoma congressman, said. "But it was very hard for people to separate me out from Hillary Clinton. All their ads were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and me. They said I was more liberal than these guys, and that if I went to Washington I'd be supporting their agenda. I found that extremely difficult to overcome." Across Missouri, I heard similar fears. At a breakfast fund-raiser for McCaskill in Kansas City, Katheryn J. Shields, a Democrat who is the chief executive of Jackson County, which encompasses Kansas City, said of Hillary Clinton, "She's great." But when asked if Clinton should be the Party's nominee, Shields said, "That would be a hard one." The outgoing executive director of the Greene County Democrats, Nora Walcott, was more direct. Though she said she was to the left in the Party, she feared that Clinton's liberal credentials would alienate Missouri voters. "You've got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary," she told me. "It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party." Clinton's obvious shifts to the center frustrate Walcott on two counts, she said: "I disagree with the way she's going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it's not working. People don't believe she's a moderate." Uncertainty about Senator Clinton's real views seems to be more troublesome than the views themselves. She has always been less liberal than some believe, and at times her centrism is ostentatious, as when she spoke in favor of a law banning flag-burning. Clinton has reached out to anti-abortion voters, she refuses to call for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, and she has become a new friend of Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of the onetime Clinton-bashing New York Post and Fox News, who is hosting a fund-raiser for her this summer. All of this recently led the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write, "Does she know what she believes? Do we know what she believes? Hillary, help us. Who the hell are you?" Clinton, who is expected to easily win a second Senate term in New York, refused to be interviewed for this article; she has apparently decided not to discuss Democratic political strategies for now. But her chief strategist, Mark Penn, said that Democrats in conservative states would benefit from a Clinton candidacy. "She has a wildly enthusiastic base, much larger than anything we have seen in a long time. People say about her what they say about President Clinton: wherever he went, votes followed." Penn also said that Clinton could win over skeptical voters in red states. She has done so in upstate New York, where she continues to be popular. Only a few nationally known Democrats have been invited to Missouri to speak on Claire McCaskill's behalf; one was Obama, whom she described as "so popular that we have to get him back." Obama returns the compliment: McCaskill, he told me, "is a terrific candidate who is deeply rooted in Missouri and understands the people of Missouri." He added, "A successful swing-state candidate can and should stand for progressive values, but they've got to appeal to common sense and pragmatism as opposed to ideology. I think what doesn't work in these places is a sense that you are ideologically liberal." The former Virginia governor Mark Warner, who was the keynote speaker at the Jackson Day dinner in Springfield, was another welcome visitor. (Springfield is perhaps the most conservative part of the state; it is home to John Ashcroft, the former Missouri senator and United States Attorney General, and it is also the headquarters of the Assemblies of God.) The crowd applauded Warner after watching a campaign-style video that highlighted his achievements in education and business development in Virginia. (It did not mention that he had raised taxes.) Since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964, only two Democrats have won the Presidency-both moderate Southern governors. Warner, who has shown signs of interest in becoming a Presidential candidate in 2008, argued elliptically against a Hillary Clinton run for President, saying that it would be self-defeating for the Party to nominate someone who has appeal in only sixteen states. He criticized what he calls the "triple bank shot" approach of focussing on the Northeast and the West Coast and hoping for a win in Florida or Ohio: "There's no reason to write off whole regions of the country." Warner said that he represents the "sensible center" of Democratic politics: fiscal soundness and a robust but selective national-defense strategy. When I mentioned that Missouri Democrats seem to resent what they see as the condescension of national Party leaders, Warner said, "Part of this is just showing respect. Respect for culture, faith, values. You know, not everybody wants to live in a big city. The assumption sometimes is 'Why wouldn't you want to be in the middle of where all the action is?' I think people in rural America may talk a little slower, but they get a good sense of whether you understand where they're coming from. Sometimes the folks in the press have translated that into 'Well, that means it's only about faith.' I don't think it's only about faith; it's about values and respect. It's about being comfortable at a NASCAR race as well as in a boardroom." In 2001, when Warner ran for governor of Virginia, he sponsored a NASCAR truck, campaigned enthusiastically in the state's conservative southwest, and even commissioned a perishable bluegrass song extolling his candidacy. None of this spared him from having to visit Springfield's Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, which is advertised as the world's largest hunting-and-fishing store. There Warner submitted to one of the most reliable humiliations of Democratic politics: the firing range. Though his spokeswoman described him as "more of a rock climber than a hunter," Warner, entourage in tow, found himself facing a paper target eight yards in front of him. "Eight yards?" a local reporter asked. "That's not a lot of distance." The Bass Pro Shops guide gave Warner a petite .22 to fire. "You generally want to start out with something small," he explained. Warner managed to put holes through the target, although he missed the bull's-eye. Later, he turned to more substantive issues. "One of the challenges we've got right now is that this Administration is undermining the American people's confidence that our national government can get anything right," he told me. "You know, whether it's successfully removing Saddam Hussein or getting Iraq to a stable position, or whether it's reacting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or getting the prescription-drug-benefit program right." Warner does not believe that the Democrats automatically benefit from popular unhappiness with the Administration. "I think the Republicans bear the vast majority of the blame for these things, but there's a little bit of a 'plague on Washington' feeling now." The Democrats, he said, would serve themselves better by focussing less on Bush's problems. "I get some criticism from Democrats who say, 'Well, Warner, you're not giving us enough red meat all the time.' But the case has been made. We don't need to remake the case of all the mess-ups of this Administration. What we've got to do now is answer the question 'All right, if we turn the keys over to you guys, what are you going to do differently?' " Warner added that the Party needs to start by trying to reach beyond its liberal base: "Sometimes the Democrats advocate tolerance, except for people who don't agree with them." The Democratic Party of 2006 bears little resemblance to the party that dominated American politics from 1932 until 1964. But if the New Deal coalition has dissolved, there is a persistent desire to revive it-and to modernize it-especially among those who feel estranged from the Party's national leadership. "We used to be the party of the big tent," Montana's Governor Schweitzer said. "We have to respect regional differences. A Democrat in Montana looks a little different than one from Massachusetts. You don't have to agree with my idea about gun control, but you've got to respect it." Schweitzer's idea about gun control is this: "You control your gun and I'll control mine." In 2004, Schweitzer became the first Democrat elected governor of Montana in twenty years; he won fifty per cent of the vote, to his opponent's forty-six. (Kerry lost to Bush in Montana by fifty-nine per cent to thirty-nine.) Schweitzer did not win by posing as a Republican, he said. "In the first ninety days, we put more money into K-through-12 education than anyone had ever done; we used the money from a new tobacco tax to help small businesses buy health insurance for their employees; we passed a law to incorporate a curriculum about the great achievements of our Indian population into our schools; and we passed a law to require that fifteen per cent of our electricity will come from wind power or solar power. Now, does that sound ruby-red to you? Or does it sound progressive? We're not hiding as Democrats out here." Success, he said, comes in the approach. "Democrats are losing elections because they're less likable sometimes. They want to explain the whole book, and voters want the Cliffs Notes. Most of us go to church on Sunday to hear a sermon. We don't want candidates telling us about all the things that are wrong." There are certain issues that can't be neutralized by a friendlier manner, he conceded, such as the Second Amendment. "We have about nine hundred and twenty thousand people here, and about six or seven million guns. This is who we are. You can't get around it. But you can accept it." For more than thirty years, since the Roe v. Wade decision, nothing has been so divisive for disaffected Democrats as the Party's stand on abortion. But here, too, the Party appears to have become more pragmatic; it has, for instance, embraced Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, the anti-abortion, pro-gun candidate for the Senate, which would have been unimaginable ten years ago. (Casey's father, the late Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey, Sr., was not allowed to address the 1992 Democratic Convention, because he refused to endorse the Democratic ticket, which favored abortion rights.) Abortion-rights groups are uneasy when Democratic centrists urge them to shift the discussion from "a woman's right to choose" to the need to reduce the number of abortions. Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank founded by the former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser, a former senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. "I said at this session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this country and that's too many, and it's too many for the majority of Americans," Laser, who runs Third Way's Culture Project, recalled. "Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that." After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience "by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?" As Laser remembers the moment, "It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also see something sad in what this procedure does." Laser believes that Democrats have an opportunity to attract voters troubled by Republican inflexibility, and she called the South Dakota legislature's recent ban on all abortions a bracing example of extremism. But, she continued, liberal Democrats must learn to speak to people who feel differently about things. "If you're a candidate in many parts of the South or the Midwest, you shouldn't be using the old frames of choice and individual rights, because against the frame of life you will likely lose. You can neutralize the playing field by talking about reducing the number of abortions. If progressives are going to win nationally, they have to meet the American people where they are." The Democratic Party's challenge, though, is not only to recalibrate its positions on abortion and national security but also to persuade voters that Democrats have something essential to offer: an aptitude for governing. Moderates argue that a year after Katrina Americans are searching for plausible and competent leadership. (Michael Dukakis, who in 1988 campaigned against charisma, may have been a prophet without honor.) But, the argument continues, candidates must express concern for the welfare of their audiences, have a vision of an equitable society, and, perhaps above all, learn to speak without condescension. "Every time a pro-state-income-tax candidate runs in New Hampshire, they get their butt kicked," Kathleen Sullivan told me. "And then what you have is Democrats who say, 'Well, we just have to educate people more.' Well, no, that's not what we have to do. We have to not nominate someone who is for a state income tax. The voters don't need to be educated on this. They know what they believe." Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, said, "The impulse behind the people who run the party is humanitarian, and humanitarians have a problem in American history-they're always trying to perfect you, make you better." Wilentz added, "Acceptance of human imperfection would do a lot to help the Democratic Party." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_central.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_central.php The New Yorker Mon, 29 May 2006 12:00:00 -0500 The Talk of the Town: Sprucing Up Nixon The nine-acre campus of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, in Yorba Linda, California, features the thirty-seventh President's boyhood home; his burial site; a gift shop that sells, for $9.95, the "Nixon surf logo beanie"; and a sleek museum that highlights the good and the bad, but mostly the good, of Nixon's sui-generis Presidency. What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library. In 1974, Congress impounded forty-four million of Nixon's Presidential papers and almost four thousand hours of his tapes. There was an entirely reasonable belief at the time that Nixon could not be trusted with his own papers. So the California library was opened, in 1990, without the documentary record of Nixon's Presidency. It was administered not by the National Archives, which oversees the nation's eleven other Presidential libraries, but by the Nixon family. Nixon assiduously sought possession of his papers, but the cause was subverted by the library's first director, Hugh Hewitt, who announced that he would screen researchers for partisan compatibility; Bob Woodward, Hewitt said, would not be welcome. Hewitt is long gone (he has since made his name in conservative talk radio), and his successor, the Reverend John Taylor, a one-time Nixon factotum, made peace with the idea of dispassion in scholarship. After years of negotiations and lobbying, the National Archives finally agreed to turn over the documents. So, this fall, the Archives will take formal control of the library, relieving the family of its role (and putting an end to the squabbling for control that caused Nixon's two daughters to stop speaking to each other). The National Archives has just hired a University of Virginia historian named Timothy Naftali to run the library and to oversee the transfer of Nixon's records to Yorba Linda. Naftali is a less than obvious choice. He is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Until last year, he was a Canadian. He is an expert not on Nixon's Presidency but on the Cold War and American counterterrorism. Nor is he a museum curator, although the ideological reengineering of the museum may become his first task. "I'm going to give people a museum that will lay out the peaks and valleys," he said recently, over breakfast in Washington. Taylor concedes that the museum's exhibits now shade toward veneration. "All of the libraries do it," he said. "Because of President Nixon's particular status in history, our exhibits get attention that is far more"-he paused-"acute." Naftali is not a keen admirer of Nixon, but he is not an acid critic, either. In his latest book, "Blind Spot," a history of American counterterrorism, he praises Nixon for his foresight. "Nixon took terrorism very seriously," he said. "Kissinger told him not to, but he was very concerned, very early on." Naftali is forty-four, and he is thin and excitable. His boss, Allen Weinstein, who is the Archivist of the United States, calls his new employee "cheerfully caustic." Service in the federal bureaucracy may eventually cure Naftali of insouciance, but in the meantime he is happy to offer a blunt critique of President Bush. He suggested that the current Administration has many of the Nixon Administration's vices but few of its virtues. "I think that Nixon was a pragmatic internationalist, and every great foreign-policy President has understood that you can't do it alone," he said. His principal mission, he said, is to insure open access to the Nixon material at a time when, he believes, secrecy has become an executive-branch fetish. The National Archives itself has lately become entangled in a scandal: not long after 9/11, the Archives secretly agreed with the C.I.A. and the Air Force to reclassify once open documents. (Weinstein, who was not the archivist at the time, placed a moratorium on the reclassification.) Naftali says that the scandal is reminiscent of Nixon-era attitudes, and he described himself as "doubly angry." He said, "This is a cover-up of a reclassification effort, if you can imagine such a thing." When asked if he expected similar difficulties in Yorba Linda, he said, "Check back with me in a year. "The seventies are very important right now," he went on. "After all, we have a government that is trying to relive the seventies, to move us back to a period before congressional oversight." Naftali promises a wider-ranging cultural focus when he takes over, in October. "I want to have programs that look at the whole era," he said. "Woodstock and Stonewall and everything else. I want to screen 'The Godfather' and have Coppola come and talk about his screenplay for 'Patton.' " Warming to the topic, he added, "And Joan Baez! We should have Joan Baez come." He paused. "This is my first federal job," he said. "And it may also be my last." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/the_talk_of_the_town_sprucing.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/the_talk_of_the_town_sprucing.php The New Yorker Mon, 08 May 2006 12:00:00 -0500 The Ghost of Purim Past CORRECTION: An Op-Ed article last Tuesday, about Jews living in Iran, misstated a detail of the biblical story of Esther and Mordechai. Mordechai is usually described as Esther's cousin, not her uncle.]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/nyt/the_ghost_of_purim_past.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/nyt/the_ghost_of_purim_past.php The New York Times Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: The Believer The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Welliver, a former newspaperman, was the first "literary clerk" ever to be placed on the White House payroll; he wrote speeches for the subcompetent Warren G. Harding and the ineloquent Calvin Coolidge. The members of the society that carries his nearly forgotten name get together every year or so to remind one another of the maddening yet elating experience of watching the most powerful men on earth rewrite their otherwise perfect sentences. The December, 2002, meeting of the Welliver Society took place at the headquarters of the Motion Picture Association of America, two blocks from the White House. Jack Valenti, the former Lyndon Johnson aide, who was then the M.P.A.A. chairman, provided his dining room for free, which is crucial to any gathering of writers, especially those with money. In attendance that night were writers who had served every President since Harry S. Truman, including Theodore Sorensen, who wrote for John F. Kennedy, and much of the recently decommissioned Clinton speechwriting team. White House speechwriters on active service are not offered membership in the Society, but they are invited to the dinner, mostly to be put on the spot. So there was a good deal of anticipation when it came time for Michael Gerson, then President Bush's chief speechwriter, to address the group. By 2002, it had become the cross-party consensus that Gerson was almost Sorensen's equal in skill and rhetorical ambition. ("George W. Bush's first week as President of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good," Hendrik Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and not a Bush enthusiast, wrote in this magazine in January of 2001.) Gerson has provided Bush with striking expressions, such as "the soft bigotry of low expectations," to describe how prejudicial perceptions affect minority students, and his invocation of the American dream, in June, 1999, when then Governor Bush announced his candidacy: The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbor. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighborhood, a community, a chosen nation. Unlike most speechwriters, who tend to be segregated from policymaking, Gerson has always been an influential figure in the White House, in part because he shares Bush's belief in the power of faith-both men are evangelical Christians-and because he possesses a preternatural ability, his friends say, to anticipate Bush's thinking. There is a "mind meld" between the two men, Bush's counsellor Dan Bartlett told me, adding, "When you bring a West Texas approach to the heavy debates of the world, there has to be a translator, and Mike is the translator." Gerson is known to his friends for his pre-ironic sensibility, and for his soft heart; I once saw him close to tears when he spoke about AIDS patients in Uganda. But he is also a capable operator. In 2002, a senior White House official told me, Gerson outflanked Dick Cheney, who didn't want Bush to declare unambiguously his support for a Palestinian state, as Gerson had urged him to do-and as Bush did, in a speech that Gerson wrote. Gerson is also unashamedly guileless in his search for heroes; when he came to Washington, in the late nineteen-eighties, he would sometimes park outside the home of George F. Will, hoping to catch a glimpse of the conservative columnist. And, even in the Bush White House, he is known for his piety. On display in his office is a book called "Standing in the Need of Prayer," photographs of African-Americans praying. He told the National Journal's Carl Cannon, last year, that the book "moved me no end." Cannon then noted, as if in wonderment, "Gerson really speaks this way." At a Welliver dinner, the remarks of ex-speechwriters tend toward carefully calibrated irreverence; current speechwriters aren't expected to gripe or to disclose confidences. But at the 2002 event, Gerson spoke with immoderate earnestness. According to several people who attended, Safire asked Gerson to tell the group something it didn't know about Bush. Gerson, in a quavering voice, responded with a story that left some of his audience nonplussed. He described a call that he got moments after Bush finished addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Bush thanked Gerson for his work on the speech, to which Gerson replied, "Mr. President, this is why God wants you here." Gerson then related Bush's response, as evidence of his thoughtfulness. "The President said, 'No, this is why God wants us here.' " An uncomfortable silence filled the room, and then one of Bill Clinton's speechwriters said, in a stage whisper, "God must really hate Al Gore." Gerson knows that he is an enigma to the liberal establishment of Washington. He is a churchgoing, anti-gay-marriage, pro-life supply-sider who believes absolutely in the corporeality of Jesus' resurrection. He is also supremely loyal to an ideological President in a city that tends to grant only posthumous approbation to ideologues, particularly conservative ones. Yet among his role models he counts Martin Luther King, Jr., and the radical evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century, and his chief vocational preoccupation is the battle against infectious disease in Africa. He has won the admiration of many AIDS and debt-relief activists, including the U2 singer Bono, who, in an e-mail, said, "Mike is known as a 'moral compass' at the White House. Seems like that compass keeps pointing him in the direction of Africa," where Gerson has "obviously left a part of himself." He is popular with reporters, perhaps because he was once one himself, at U.S. News & World Report. He has a self-deprecating manner that the Washington press corps is surprised to find in the Bush White House. "Mike has his own consistencies that defy the normal consistencies in our politics," E. J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post, said. "For Mike, it's thoroughly consistent to be pro-life and to work for poor people in Africa." Gerson also baffles many Republicans. Unlike the libertarian wing of the Party, he says that the government has a moral duty to help the poor. When Bush, in his first Presidential campaign, criticized small-government Republicanism as "an approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose than 'Leave us alone,' " the head of the Cato Institute suggested that Bush's speechwriter was moonlighting for Hillary Clinton. Gerson defends Bush's tax cuts, which the President's critics believe not only favor those with the highest incomes but have also left less money for important domestic programs; Gerson believes that free markets and free trade are the best means of lifting people out of poverty, and that lower taxes stimulate both. "The part of Mike I have the most trouble understanding, perhaps because we simply disagree, is how he can square his support for pretty substantial spending for the very poorest among us with a defense of Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people," Dionne said. "Maybe Mike just buys supply-side economics in a way that I don't, but most supply-siders don't think like Mike." Jim Towey, who directs the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which steers government funds to religious groups that provide social services, explained Gerson's role in the Bush Administration this way: "There are some people in the White House who are more conservative than compassionate, and some who are more compassionate than conservative. Mike is more compassionate than conservative." Gerson's role as protector of "compassionate conservatism" was evident during a meeting in the first term with Bush and his advisers, who were discussing a proposal to spend fifteen billion dollars to combat AIDS in Africa. According to Dan Bartlett, Bush went around the room and then asked, "What do you think, Gerson?" ("The President just calls him Gerson," Joshua Bolten, the White House budget chief, told me. "Mike isn't the sort of guy who lends himself to silly nicknames.") Bartlett said that Gerson answered with typical bluntness: "The bottom line is that we're the richest nation in history, and history will judge us severely if we don't do this." The room went quiet. Then Bush said, "That's Gerson being Gerson." Although the program's implementation has been sclerotic and not without controversy (critics have faulted it for emphasizing abstinence over condom use), the Administration now spends far more each year to combat AIDS in Africa than the Clinton Administration did. Bolten, a friend of Gerson's, recalled another meeting, in December, 2004, about domestic-spending cuts. There was a skirmish that day between Bolten and Gerson, but neither can remember the details, mainly because Gerson suffered a mild heart attack early the next morning. He was rushed into surgery, and had two coronary stents implanted in his chest. A few hours later, Gerson sent Bolten an e-mail from the intensive-care unit: "I told you that budget was too extreme and shocking. I couldn't take it." Even before the heart attack, Gerson, who is forty-one, was not a picture of stout good health. He is slight of stature and his skin has a tendency to shade gray, as one might expect of someone who spends his life sequestered in the White House, or in a nearby Starbucks, where he frequently writes speeches. Many of Gerson's friends thought that he would quit after the coronary, but Bush asked Gerson to become a senior policy adviser, and he moved to a first-floor West Wing office, two doors down from the Oval Office. While he would still play a role in Bush's speeches, Gerson was told to focus on Africa policy, on democracy in the Middle East, and on domestic social programs, including faith-based initiatives-in short, to be the advocate for such goals. Before he took on this new role, though, Gerson-with his first-term writing partners, Matthew Scully and John McConnell-wrote the speech that is perhaps the best summation of Bush's ideology, the second Inaugural, in which Bush said, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Like many Gerson speeches, the second Inaugural was steeped in the language of faith-and contained utopian promises that will be difficult to fulfill. In that way, it highlighted, perhaps inadvertently, the distance between rhetoric and accomplishment in the Bush Presidency. Gerson is aware that Bush's reputation hinges on the outcome of the Iraq war, and one day in his office we spoke about the Administration's audacious goal of democratizing the Middle East. When I suggested that Bush might live to a great old age and never see the disappearance of totalitarianism in the region, he demurred, saying, "I think in three years this will be seen differently." Gerson's office is windowless, and evidence of his writerly quirks could be seen on his desk, which was littered with violently chewed pen caps and legal pads that were dark with illegible scribbling. Gerson's fidgeting is a source of amusement to his friends; they speak of occasions when he gnawed through pens, leaving his mouth filled with blue ink. At one point in our conversation, he rubbed his eyes so ferociously that I feared he would detach a retina. "I'm a worrier," he said. "I put a lot of pressure on myself. I know people think it's funny, but these aren't charming eccentricities. When I had my heart attack, my doctor was very clear that I had to find a different way to work, without putting so much pressure on myself." The West Wing is no place for tranquil thought, especially as Bush tries to revive his Presidency. Gerson conceded that the current moment is a complicated and testing one for the White House, but he pointed out that Bush had predicted it in his speech of September 20, 2001. "You have a section where the President says, in essence, 'Over time, life's going to go back to normal for all of you, but it's not going back to normal for me,' " Gerson said, quoting Bush quoting himself. "Now, that was written assuming that we didn't have twenty more attacks, and for the first few months afterward we were expecting daily attacks. We had even worked on a set of remarks for a follow-up attack." Gerson argued that the "successful protection of the American people reduces the sense of urgency on these questions of terrorism." When I asked Gerson about the recent domestic-spying controversy, he replied, almost irritably, "These are the appropriate constitutional and necessary methods to defend American liberty." He added, "The President views us as at war, and he'd much rather be on that side of things than have to apologize after an attack. I don't want to write any more 'days of national mourning' speeches." Gerson, like others in the Bush White House, seems to regard the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as somewhat beside the point, but he noted that Bush has now admitted the obvious-that the war has not gone as predicted. "I know that some of my decisions have led to terrible loss-and not one of those decisions has been taken lightly," Bush said in an Oval Office speech in December that was written by Gerson. "I know this war is controversial, yet being your President requires doing what I believe is right and accepting the consequences." Bush did not signal ambivalence, or a change of tactics, but the confessional tone, Gerson said, helped people to hear his argument for war in a new way. "We gained the ability to do the pushback by being realistic on the ground." In December, the Washington Post reported that some senior White House staff members, including Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, opposed this provisionally candid approach, but Gerson said Bush felt that he couldn't respond because of the "unbelievable partisanship" of the Democrats, and because of the press of events-most notably, Hurricane Katrina, which last August destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Gerson told me, in an uncharacteristic burst of spin, "It's amazing how much Katrina dominated the White House staff in terms of time, effort, and energy and emotion." In fact, few believed that Bush demonstrated much leadership throughout the Hurricane Katrina crisis; when the storm made landfall he was on vacation, in Crawford, Texas, and seemingly detached from daily events. His encouraging words to Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency ("Brownie, you're doin' a heckuva job!"), have become a comedic cliche. Bush did not, however, fail oratorically. In a speech from New Orleans two weeks after the hurricane struck, he said, "The people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew-and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature-and we will not start now." The words, which were Gerson's, were seen as hollow against the chaotic backdrop of the federal government's response. Gerson, though, argues for the importance of choosing the right language in a crisis: "In times of national grief, the words really do matter. And, in times of focussing national purpose, the words really do matter." So it was with the second Inaugural. "I think the President believes that one role of his is to be practical, realistic, and effective, but he also believes that he has a second, and maybe more important, role, to set out an ideal," Gerson said. "The President's view is that one of the great soft-power advantages of the United States of America is that we can imagine a different and better world, that we are unique because we are not defined by race or tradition but by a set of universal ideals." Bush's critics, Gerson continued, lack historical perspective. "This is not some Don Quixote thing for the President. This is an odd time to be skeptical about the advance of freedom, given the advances we've made over the past fifty years. There are three billion people now who live in democratic countries." Gerson went on to quote Martin Luther King: " 'The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.' I believe that deeply." Gerson frames issues in stark moral terms. The three most famous words he has ever set to paper are "axis of evil," a phrase referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that made its first appearance in the 2002 State of the Union Message. A speechwriter then on Gerson's team, David Frum, had proposed "axis of hatred," but, according to Frum, Gerson substituted "evil" for its more theological resonance. "Evil exists, and it has to be confronted," Gerson told me. Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Soviet political prisoners later said that the words gave them hope, but the foreign-policy realists associated with the Presidency of Bush's father believed, and still do, that the expression was inflammatory and unwise. As a speechwriter, Gerson said, his conscience is, literally, his guide. "When we're dealing with these questions, it always occurs to me, How would people who are living in that evil experience it?" he said. "How would exiles, and prisoners, and the families of the dead describe it? Now, that's an element of realism. Are you going to take their side or not? When you talk about women being beheaded in soccer stadiums, or women being stoned for adultery, how would they experience it? I think asking this question is a form of realism." He continued, "I think one of the ways Presidents and governments and civilizations are viewed is whether they side with this moral reality or not." Yet Bush and his Administration have sometimes stood with the autocrats-as in China, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The experiment in Iraq is not without hope, but it is a testament to the limitations of nation-building-and to the limitations of the Bush Administration's designated nation-builders. All speechwriters create an ideal character of the Presidents they serve, but the actual Bush has now and then been eclipsed by Gerson's idea of Bush, and not only in foreign policy. What is perhaps Gerson's most extraordinary speech for Bush was a consideration of the legacy of slavery in America. Bush delivered it in 2003, at a former slave-trading station in Senegal: The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet, in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God. These words had no discernible effect on Bush's relations with AfricanAmericans, which could hardly have been worse, and the speech was never given much attention. Gerson acknowledged that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has not helped the relationship between Bush and black America. He said that he had hoped the storm "would open a larger debate on poverty and race in America. But the Republican leadership in Congress has not shown an interest in that. This has exposed something we eventually have to confront." Gerson said that African-Americans might like Bush if they knew him better. "The President I know is a very tolerant man," he told me. "The President I know is a very compassionate man." Gerson was introduced to George W. Bush in 1999. Their first meeting-a job interview-did not begin auspiciously. Gerson had written speeches for, among others, the Presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Bob Dole. But, according to Carl Cannon, Gerson was so nervous about seeing Bush that he was spotted hyperventilating in the hallway of a Washington Marriott, where the meeting was to take place. David Beckwith, a former Bush aide, told Cannon, "There was a Texas Ranger in Bush's security detail. He comes and says, 'There's this guy out there who says he's got an appointment with the Governor, but we're worried about him. He's sweating and breathing heavily.' " When Gerson was brought into the room, Bush, who had read his earlier work, asked just one question: "Mike, did you write these speeches?" Gerson said yes. Bush said, "If this is your work, this is what I want." Gerson doesn't recollect the anxiety attack, but he remembers feeling that he had found in Bush an ideal President. The person whom Gerson first saw as an ideal President, though, was Jimmy Carter. Gerson's father, an ice-cream maker, was a Republican, but his mother was a Kennedy Democrat, and in high school, in St. Louis (the family moved there from New Jersey when Gerson was ten), Gerson, precociously political, became a Carter supporter. To Gerson, whose parents were evangelical Christians (his last name comes from a Jewish grandfather), Carter's candid evangelicalism was thrilling. "He was very straightforward about his beliefs," Gerson said. "It was very exciting." He recalled Carter's embarrassment after telling Playboy that he had committed "adultery in my heart." Secular America found it amusing, but the expression, which came from the Sermon on the Mount, resonated with religious Christians. Gerson still admires Carter, a furious critic of the Bush Administration, and many other Democrats as well. One day, I asked him to name his favorite Presidents. He immediately placed Franklin D. Roosevelt at the top of the list. "I have gained a new respect for him in my five years in the White House, for his moral clarity and firmness," Gerson said. I asked him if he appreciated F.D.R.'s frank use of Christian imagery-after all, F.D.R. often referred to the war with Germany as a battle between the Cross and the swastika. Gerson laughed. "We would never use language like that to the extent he did," he said. Also on Gerson's list were Truman, Kennedy, and, "for his vision of democracy," Woodrow Wilson. Finally, he admitted a Republican. "Reagan, to some extent," he said, "for the recognition of a moral dimension of foreign policy." When I asked Gerson why, then, he wasn't a Democrat, he replied that the Party had left him-in particular on the issue of abortion. In 1980, he presented Carter's positions in a mock debate at his Christian high school, but, he recalled, "in the vote afterward it might have just been me for him." By 1984, he was campaigning for Reagan, who was running against Walter Mondale. "In college, I was becoming very active in the pro-life cause, and there was no room for our position," he said. "The Democratic Party, in many ways, abandoned its great tradition of caring for the weakest members of our society. It has elevated a philosophy of choice and individual autonomy above the needs of the unborn, the handicapped, and, on the question of euthanasia, the elderly. These are the very people I thought the Democratic Party should care about." (Carter likes Gerson's writing, but told me that it was a "gross exaggeration" to say that the Democratic Party made itself hostile to anti-abortion activists when he was President. "Tell Gerson he's welcome to come back to the Party, if he wants," Carter said.) Gerson attended Georgetown University for a year, but transferred, in 1983, to Wheaton College, an evangelical school near Chicago. In 1985, he wrote a column for the Wheaton College newspaper in praise of Mother Teresa for her commitment to "the poor and the helpless unborn" and, notably, to AIDS patients. The column was written long before AIDS became an issue of general Christian concern, and it was noticed far from campus. Charles Colson read it and invited Gerson to work for him in Washington at the prison ministry he started after his release from jail, where he served a sentence for his role in the Watergate scandal. After that, Gerson went to work as a writer and adviser to Dan Coats, the U.S. senator from Indiana, who was looking at ways to interest conservatives in issues of poverty. During the 1996 Presidential campaign, Gerson wrote speeches for Forbes and Dole, and then went to work for U.S. News. Steven Waldman, the founder of the religion-oriented Web site Beliefnet.com, was Gerson's editor at U.S. News, where his main journalistic interest, Waldman said, was the world of charities. "Mike was very curious to find out what actually worked" to bring people out of poverty. Gerson is close in spirit to neo-evangelicalism, which grew up in opposition to Protestant fundamentalism, and to Catholic social teaching, which urges greater engagement in the suffering of the world. "Gerson represents a wholly new thing," Michael Cromartie, the vice-president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-of-center think tank in Washington, said. Cromartie, who has studied the role of evangelicals in public life, believes that the first generation of evangelical activists became fixated on a narrow set of conflict-ridden issues, mainly abortion and gay marriage. "Many of the things that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say are contrary to the very core of the Christian message, which is about forgiveness, grace, and charity, not condemnation," Cromartie said, and added, "Michael is very much focussed on the command to love your neighbor, and that means working on poverty, but, unlike Protestant liberals, he does not automatically equate this commandment with increased federal spending." Gerson's life is built around prayer and faith, and so, too, are his speeches. Bush has been criticized for his regular invocations of God, but in that respect he is part of a long tradition. Bill Clinton often invoked the Deity, even referring, on occasion, to Jesus. (Bush frequently mentions "the Almighty," and "the Creator," but a close reading of his speeches shows them to be scrupulous in their nonsectarianism.) "The President can't imagine that someone who is President of the United States could not have faith, because he derives so much from it," Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, said. "I can see him struggle with other world leaders who don't appear to be grounded in some faith," he said. He added, "The President doesn't care what faith it is, as long as it's faith." (Card also called Gerson "a C. S. Lewis type," adding, "I don't want you to think that we're a bunch of amoral people running around here and finally Mike Gerson comes along and sets us right.") Gerson says that he is flummoxed by the debate over religiosity in the White House. "There's an idea that we are constantly trying to sneak into the President's speeches religious language, code words, that only our supporters understand," he said. "But they are code words only if you don't know them, and most people know them." To illustrate his point, Gerson reminded me about the Times' coverage of Bush's first campaign. In April of 2000, after one Bush appearance, Frank Bruni wrote, "Mr. Bush also offered an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle. 'Don't be takin' a speck out of your neighbor's eye,' he told the audience, 'when you got a log in your own.' " Bush, in his inimitable way, was actually making reference to a saying of Jesus, quoted in Matthew: "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" Gerson, smiling, said, "No one at the Times seemed to know that these were the words of the Sermon on the Mount." But Bush's reliance on the language of faith has led some to wonder whether he seeks comfort or actual political guidance from Scripture. Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for President Reagan and the first President Bush, has criticized the second Inaugural, in particular the assertion that America's "ultimate goal" is "ending tyranny in the world," and suggested that the perfection of an imperfect world might better be left to God. "Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon," she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, adding, "This is not heaven, it's earth." Gerson told me that Bush finds no policy prescriptions in Christianity, but he believes that God's desires helped to shape the ideas at the core of the second Inaugural. "The President's views about the universal appeal of liberty come in part from the fact that he is kind of marinated in the American ideal," Gerson said. "They come in part from a view that human beings are created in the image of God and will not forever suffer the oppressor's sword, that eventually there's something deep in the human soul that cries out for freedom. That doesn't mean he believes that God blesses this particular foreign policy or that particular foreign policy." I once asked Gerson to describe the role that the Sermon on the Mount plays in his own life, and in Bush's life. (The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls the Sermon an "impossible ethical ideal" for human behavior.) "The Gospel stands in judgment of all human institutions and ideologies. It's not identical with any one of them," Gerson said. There is a danger, though, in "proof-texting"-searching the Bible for policy instruction. "You can't find the justification for anti-sodomy laws in the Book of Matthew," he said. "There is this idea that you can know what Jesus would think about missile defense or S.U.V.s, but it's wrong. . . . I don't have any moral qualms about saying that free-market economics are the single best way to take millions of people out of poverty that the world has ever seen," but he added that he didn't learn this from the Bible. He said that the Sermon's influence on his writing, and on Bush's thinking, is far more profound than its influence on mere policy. Bush's vision of democratic universalism owes much to Wilson, and Jefferson. But Gerson suggests that Bush is sure of his path because God is the God of justice. He even suggests that Bush's leadership style-and his oratorical ambitions-are informed by the example of Jesus. "The ideal that's set out in the Book of Matthew is a high one," Gerson told me, "and the Sermon on the Mount has played an extraordinarily challenging role in the history of the world. And you notice that it didn't have a realist, pragmatic understanding of what is possible. So maybe this is an attribute of leadership, to help imagine a different world." Imagining a different world is not the same as engineering it, and Peggy Noonan is not the only conservative to have detected a whiff of messianism in Bush's vision. In a column last year, George Will noted that, in the Cold War, "the survival of liberty meant the containment of tyranny. Now, Bush says, the survival of liberty must involve the expansion of liberty until 'our world' is scrubbed clean of tyranny." Speaking about Iraq, Gerson's own pastor, the Reverend John Yates, told me that he "had a hard time justifying this war, but I was so torn internally that I didn't speak out publicly." Yates is the rector of the Falls Church, an evangelical Episcopal church in a Virginia suburb that takes its name from the church. The Falls Church has a venerable history-George Washington was once a warden there-and today it counts among its parishioners the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and several Republican members of Congress. Yates praised Gerson as a devoted worshipper who is at church each Sunday morning with his wife, Dawn, who works on Capitol Hill for a Republican congressman, and their two young sons. "Michael is a person of high morality," Yates said, adding that he understands Gerson's attraction to Bush. "The President's vision of spreading democracy is a wonderful, noble vision, and I'm glad he has it, and I'm glad he has Michael. It's just that often we Americans get into a situation where we find that we're not nearly so knowledgeable about the world as we thought we were. Americans seem to be particularly vulnerable to that. Are there people who are not ready for democracy? I hope and pray that people are, but I don't know." Gerson drafted much of last month's State of the Union Message, sharing the work with John McConnell and the new chief of speechwriting, William McGurn. The speech had its moments-for instance, the tribute to Coretta Scott King-but it was more quotidian than inspiring, and the next morning I found Gerson in a somewhat deflated mood. "It's always a letdown after a speech," he said. It makes him nervous to attend the event in the House chamber; on the night of the speech, "fidgeting on the couch," he watched at home. "I met a playwright who couldn't watch his plays," Gerson said, by way of explanation. He thought that Bush gave an excellent performance-"He looked like he was enjoying himself"-but was surprised that lines he expected to win an ovation were greeted with silence. "We had two paragraphs on foreign aid, about the compassion of America, which is unusual for a Presidential speech, and there was no applause," he said. "I don't know-it could be a bad applause line, or it could be a sign that foreign assistance doesn't sell. It happens." The speech contained several mentions of "compassion." When I suggested to Gerson that there were few ideas to match the sentiment, he disagreed. "There's seventy million dollars to provide more money for people waiting" for AIDS drugs, he said. "There's ninety million for about three million rapid H.I.V. tests, where we're going to focus on the prison population and on I.V.-drug users." But, he went on, "we're living in a different budgetary situation than we were in 2003, when the President could announce a fifteen-billion-dollar AIDS initiative, and that's just a reality. There's nothing that anyone can do about that, and I can't change that." Nor did Bush say much about faith-based programs, to which even some conservatives have argued that the Administration is insufficiently committed. David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House program, wrote on Beliefnet.com last year that, when Bush won the Presidency, "there was every reason to believe he'd be not only pro-life and pro-family, as conservatives tended to be, but also pro-poor, which was daringly radical. After all, there were specific promises he intended to keep." But politics stood in the way, Kuo said, and funding disappeared. "Who was going to hold them accountable? Drug addicts, alcoholics, poor moms, struggling urban social-service organizations, and pastors aren't quite the N.R.A." Kuo quit in 2003, in frustration; his predecessor, John DiIulio, has also said that the program had been politicized. Gerson pointed out that Bush promised "twenty-five million dollars for African-American churches and faith-based institutions to do H.I.V./AIDS awareness." When I noted that the amount seemed slight, Gerson said, somewhat apologetically, "It's a start." Gerson said that he finds backing for his altruistic concerns throughout the Administration-he named Josh Bolten and Karl Rove as allies. Privately, though, he has told friends that he occasionally feels that Bush is his only ally. On such issues as the Iraq war, which occupied a large portion of the State of the Union address, Gerson, like Bush, has never wavered. "The people of the Middle East are not exceptions to this great trend of history, and, by standing up for these things, we are on the right side of history," he said. I once asked Gerson whether he believed that God put George W. Bush in the White House in order to defeat tyranny. "It's a basic evangelical truth that God is interested in our lives and guides us," Gerson replied. "Just because God's hand was guiding us doesn't mean that he's not guiding other people. It's not exclusive. It's just a sense that God is at work in your life, that things happen for a reason." He also believes that God has a plan for him. His heart attack, which might have scared others into semiretirement, helped him focus on important things-his family, most notably, and his work, he said. "God gave me a set of talents, and I want to use them to do what is right." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_bel.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_bel.php The New Yorker Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: Breaking Ranks At eight o'clock on the morning of August 2, 1990, President George H. W. Bush assembled his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Thirteen hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had sent his Army into Kuwait, and the Administration was searching for a response. Brent Scowcroft, the President's national-security adviser, has an unhappy memory of that first meeting. The tone, he says, was defeatist: "Much of the conversation in those early moments concerned the stability of the oil market. There was an air of resignation about the invasion." Shortly before the National Security Council meeting began, General Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told General Norman Schwarzkopf, "I think we'd go to war over Saudi Arabia, but I doubt we'd go to war over Kuwait." For the moment, at least, Powell's assessment reflected the President's mood. Minutes before the meeting, Bush had told reporters that he was not contemplating an armed response. Scowcroft had been listening to the President as he spoke to the press, and the comment immediately struck him as unwise. "Right at the beginning, I believed that it"-the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait-"was intolerable to the interests of the U.S.," he told me recently. At the time, Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general, was notably hawkish on the Iraq question, more so than the Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and perhaps even more so than Dick Cheney, who was Bush's Secretary of Defense. Scowcroft believed that if Saddam's aggression was left unanswered it would undermine the international rule of law; it would also, he thought, compromise America's standing in the world at a moment-the end of the Cold War-that was otherwise filled with promise. Scowcroft is a protege of Henry Kissinger-he was his deputy when Kissinger was Richard Nixon's nationalsecurity adviser. Like Kissinger, he is a purveyor of a "realist" approach to foreign policy: the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best. But Bush and Scowcroft also spoke expansively about the possibilities for America in the Cold War world, about a New World Order built on benign but resolute American leadership and multilateral cooperation. The United States, Bush said in "A World Transformed," a book that he later co-wrote with Scowcroft, had a "disproportionate responsibility" to use its power "in pursuit of a common good." Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a direct challenge to Bush's understanding of America's role in the world. There were initial doubts among some of Bush's advisers. Colin Powell, like many military men shaped by the experience of the Vietnam War, was disinclined to send American troops into battle, and he cautioned the National Security Council against imprudent action. "My first questions had to do with defending Saudi Arabia, and the importance of having a clear political understanding first of what we were doing," Powell told me recently. "Brent immediately saw that the invasion had to be reversed. He was a little further forward on the need to do something." Scowcroft argued unyieldingly for intervention, and his view prevailed. Within days, Bush announced, "This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait"-a burst of fortitude that commentators later attributed to a comment from Margaret Thatcher ("Don't go all wobbly on us, George," she reportedly told him). Scowcroft, whose modesty may be pronounced to the point of ostentation, loyally insists that the President arrived at his decision alone, but several of Scowcroft's former colleagues said that it was Scowcroft's firmness, along with Thatcher's prodding, that strengthened Bush's resolve to confront Saddam. Scowcroft is "not a blowhard," the senior Bush told me in a recent e-mail. "He has a great propensity for friendship. By that I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear, and at the same time he is someone on whom I know I always can rely and trust implicitly." In the six months leading to the war, Scowcroft became indispensable to Bush, subjecting war planners to sharp questioning, and debating those opposed to intervention. It is easy to forget, given the war's stunning speed and its low casualty count on the U.S. side (a hundred and forty-eight American soldiers lost their lives in the fighting), that there was a great deal of domestic opposition to Bush's plan, particularly among congressional Democrats. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, of Georgia, led the opposition. He conducted hearings in which many of the country's most widely respected military and foreign-policy experts prophesied cataclysm: American casualties would be in the thousands, they said, in a war that was unnecessary. Sanctions, it was argued, would be sufficient to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Some of Bush's aides came to refer to Nunn as "Neville." Bush did not let domestic opposition, or the views of Mikhail Gorbachev, who sought a negotiated solution, stand in the way of what he came to see as a moral cause of surpassing importance. On December 31, 1990, he wrote a letter to his five children: "How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier in the late 30s or earliest 40s?" it read. "How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers, or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today's crisis as 'good' vs. 'evil'-yes, it is that clear." Scowcroft never engaged in this sort of rhetoric. A line had been crossed, and Iraq needed to be punished; he did not invoke the spectre of Hitler to make his point. The war began on January 16, 1991. An air campaign that lasted five weeks greatly weakened Iraq's military capabilities. On February 24th, General Schwarzkopf, the commander of American and allied forces, unleashed a ground attack that quickly turned into a rout; the Iraqi Army collapsed, and its soldiers fled Kuwait on foot. The road to Baghdad was clear, but, on Bush's instruction, the Americans did not take it. Although Bush had publicly compared Saddam to Hitler, the goal was never to liberate Iraq from his rule. "Our military didn't want any part of occupying that big Arab country, and the only way to get Saddam was to go all the way to Baghdad," James Baker told me recently. Afterward, Bush was criticized for the decision to end the ground war at its hundredth hour. Even some officials of the Administration were unhappy at what they saw as a premature end to the fighting. In "Rise of the Vulcans," James Mann recounts that Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby, who were then aides to Cheney, believed that a coup d'etat might have occurred had the Bush Administration waited to announce that the war was over. At the time, though, no one close to Bush expressed doubts about the ending of the war, much less about its strategic goal. "For a bunch of years, a lot of people who should know better have said that we had an alternative," Powell told me. "We didn't. The simple reason is we were operating under a U.N. mandate that did not provide for any such thing. We put together a strong coalition of Gulf states, and Egypt and Syria, and they signed up for a very specific issue-expelling Iraq from Kuwait. Nor did President Bush ever consider it." A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President. It would have been no problem for America's military to reach Baghdad, he said. The problems would have arisen when the Army entered the Iraqi capital. "At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land," he said. "Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and, once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy'-but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?" Scowcroft stopped for a moment. We were sitting in the offices of the Scowcroft Group, a consulting firm he heads, in downtown Washington. He appeared to be weighing the consequences of speaking his mind. His speech is generally calibrated not to give offense, especially to the senior Bush and the Bush family. He is eighty and, by most accounts, has been content to cede visibility to the larger personalities with whom he has worked. James Baker told me that he and Scowcroft got along well in part because Scowcroft let Baker speak for the Administration. I learned from people who know Scowcroft that he finds it painful to be seen as critical of his best friend's son, but in the course of several interviews prudence several times gave way to impatience. "This is exactly where we are now," he said of Iraq, with no apparent satisfaction. "We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost." The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. "I'm not a pacifist," he said. "I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force." Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force. "I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes," he said. "You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it." The neoconservatives-the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war-believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. "How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize." And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. "This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism," he said. Scowcroft was Richard Nixon's military assistant in the last years of the Vietnam War, and he says, "Vietnam was visceral in the American people. That was a really bitter period, and it turned us against foreign-policy adventures deeply, and it was not until the Gulf War that we were able to come out of that. This is not that deep." But, he said, "we're moving in that direction." In August of 2002, seven months before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, Scowcroft upset the White House with an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. The headline read, "don't attack saddam." Scowcroft would have preferred something more nuanced, he told me, but the words accurately reflected his message. In the article, he argued that an invasion of Iraq would deflect American attention from the war on terrorism, and that it would do nothing to solve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, which he has long believed is the primary source of unhappiness in the Middle East. Unlike the current Bush Administration, which is unambiguously pro-Israel, Scowcroft, James Baker, and others associated with the elder George Bush believe that Israel's settlement policies arouse Arab anger, and that American foreign policy should reflect the fact that there are far more Arabs than Israelis in the world. "The obsession of the region . . . is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Scowcroft wrote in the Journal. "If we were seen to be turning our back on that bitter conflict-which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve-in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us." Scowcroft went on to say that the United States was capable of defeating Saddam's military. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive-with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy-and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses." Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. "There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out," he told me. "But he wasn't really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn't recovered from sanctions." Scowcroft's colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft's best friend's son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protegee; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group. According to friends, Scowcroft was consulted more frequently by the Clinton White House than he has been by George W. Bush's. Clinton's national-security adviser, Samuel Berger, told me that he valued Scowcroft's opinions:"He knows a great deal, and I always found it useful to speak to him." Arnold Kanter, a former Under-Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration and now a principal in the Scowcroft Group, was the one who suggested that Scowcroft set down his thoughts on Iraq. "If Brent had an ongoing dialogue and ready access and felt his views were being heard, he might not have written the op-ed," Kanter told me. "I hadn't heard anyone put Iraq in the strategic perspective that included the Middle East peace process and terrorism, and I thought it was important to hear." By publicly critiquing the Administration's strategic priorities, Scowcroft knew that he risked offending the White House, but clearly he was offended by its posture before the war. "All the neocons were saying, 'Finish the job,' " he said. "In fact, the President said that. He said it before he launched the war." Scowcroft fell silent. I asked him if he was bothered by those statements. He stayed silent, but he nodded. Scowcroft suggested that the White House was taking the wrong advice, and listening to a severely limited circle. He singled out the Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who was consulted by Vice-President Cheney and others after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Lewis, Scowcroft said, fed a feeling in the White House that the United States must assert itself. "It's that idea that we've got to hit somebody hard," Scowcroft said. "And Bernard Lewis says, 'I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.' " Cheney, in particular, Scowcroft thinks, accepted Lewis's view of Middle East politics. "The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend-I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.' " Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism. Colin Powell told me that he was not offended by Scowcroft's public doubts. "The concern is cost-what are we getting ourselves into? That is not an unprincipled concern." But the White House-in particular Rice-saw Scowcroft's op-ed as a betrayal, and as a political problem: Scowcroft has a commanding voice on national-security matters. But there was another, more personal dimension. "What makes it even more awkward is the suspicion that he's speaking not just for himself" but for the elder Bush as well, Robert Gates, who was Scowcroft's deputy at the National Security Council, said. The distancing of Brent Scowcroft dates nearly to the beginning of the second Bush Administration. Scowcroft was appointed chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the first term, but he was not consulted on plans for Iraq. "He's not the only person to be frozen out," one colleague of Scowcroft's from the first Bush Administration told me-a clear reference to James Baker and a number of other officials. "The only thing that is unusual is that Scowcroft was treated like everyone else." His appointment to the advisory board was not renewed at the end of 2004. A common criticism of the Administration of George W. Bush is that it ignores ideas that conflict with its aims. "We always made sure the President was hearing all the possibilities," John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, said. "That's one of the differences between the first Bush Administration and this Bush Administration." I asked Colin Powell if he thought, in retrospect, that the Administration should have paid attention to Scowcroft's arguments about Iraq. Powell, who is widely believed to have been far less influential in policymaking than either Cheney or the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said, pointedly, "I always listen to him. He's a very analytic and thoughtful individual, he's powerful in argument, and I've never worked with a better friend and colleague." When, in an e-mail, I asked George H. W. Bush about Scowcroft's most useful qualities as a national-security adviser, he replied that Scowcroft "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not." The friendship between Scowcroft and the first President Bush extends back more than thirty years; the two became close during the Ford Administration, when Scowcroft replaced Kissinger as national-security adviser and George H. W. Bush was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Their relationship, built on a shared view of the world, a clubby camaraderie, and genuine affection, was exceptionally strong. During his term, Bush established the "Scowcroft Award," for the senior official who fell asleep most ostentatiously during meetings. Scowcroft "earned the award the old-fashioned way," Bush wrote me. "He slept and slept in trying situations." One reason that Scowcroft was so effective as national-security adviser was that the entire Cabinet knew that hearing from him was akin to hearing from the President. David Rothkopf, the author of "Running the World," a history of the National Security Council, said that Scowcroft mastered the bureaucracy while maintaining his position as perhaps the President's closest adviser. He was "a true partner of the President," Rothkopf said. "They knew each other extremely well, and were able to communicate at the level of equals, even if the President's primacy was never in doubt." Even today, Scowcroft, who lives in Bethesda, Maryland, spends many weekends at a condominium he keeps in Kennebunkport, near the Bush family compound. According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, "Forty-three," and his former national-security adviser-to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. "There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren't conducive to talking about substantive issues," a Scowcroft confidant said. Scowcroft would not talk to me about the father's attempts at reconciliation, but he said that he hoped for a better relationship with the son. "Am I happy at not being closer to the White House? No. I would prefer to be closer. I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I'm just crazy about." When I asked Scowcroft if the son was different from the father, he said, "I don't want to go there," but his dissatisfaction with the son's agenda could not have been clearer. When I asked him to name issues on which he agrees with the younger Bush, he said, "Afghanistan." He paused for twelve seconds. Finally, he said, "I think we're doing well on Europe," and left it at that. The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council. Scowcroft found her bright-"brighter than I was"-and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?' " a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say." The two worked closely in the first Bush Administration, although Rice tended to take a tougher line than Scowcroft on Soviet issues. Robert Gates, then Scowcroft's deputy and Rice's boss, recalled how he and Rice would argue with Scowcroft in 1990 and 1991, during the period when Boris Yeltsin, as the elected leader of the Russian republic, became a rival to the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. "Condi and I felt very strongly about reaching beyond Gorbachev," he said. "Brent and Baker believed you could only deal with one President of the Soviet Union at a time." Rice's conversion to the world view of George W. Bush is still a mystery, however. Privately, many of her ex-colleagues from the first President Bush's National Security Council say that it is rooted in her Christian faith, which leads her to see the world in moralistic terms, much as the President does. Although she was tutored by a national-security adviser, Scowcroft, who thought it intemperate of Ronald Reagan to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire," she now works comfortably for a President who speaks in terms of "evildoers" and the "axis of evil." Rice's split with her former National Security Council colleagues was made evident at a dinner in early September of 2002, at 1789, a Georgetown restaurant. Scowcroft, Rice, and several people from the first Bush Administration were there. The conversation, turning to the current Administration's impending plans for Iraq, became heated. Finally, Rice said, irritably, "The world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up." The remark stunned the other guests. Scowcroft, as he later told friends, was flummoxed by Rice's "evangelical tone." Scowcroft told me that he still has a high regard for Rice. He did note, however, that her "expertise is in the former Soviet Union and Europe. Less on the Middle East." Rice, through a spokesman, said, "Sure, we've had some differences, and that's understandable. But he's a good friend and is going to stay a good friend." Yet the two do not see each other much anymore. According to friends of Scowcroft, Rice has asked him to call her to set up a dinner, but he has not, apparently, pursued the invitation. The last time the two had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged. "We were having dinner just when Sharon said he was going to pull out of Gaza," at the end of 2003. "She said, 'At least there's some good news,' and I said, 'That's terrible news.' She said, 'What do you mean?' And I said that for Sharon this is not the first move, this is the last move. He's getting out of Gaza because he can't sustain eight thousand settlers with half his Army protecting them. Then, when he's out, he will have an Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state atomized enough that it can't be a problem." Scowcroft added, "We had a terrible fight on that." They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace." For most of the past hundred years, American foreign policy has oscillated between two opposing impulses: to make the world more like America, or to deal with it as it is. Those who object to what they call "interference" in the affairs of others-today's realists-often cite the words of John Quincy Adams, who in 1821 said that America stands with those who seek freedom and independence, "but she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." By contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the unbounded moralist, said, in seeking a declaration of war against Germany in 1917, that "the world must be made safe for democracy." Wilson told Congress, "We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them." At different times, the isolationist impulse, which would have America withdraw entirely from the affairs of the world, has been felt strongly in Washington-for instance, in the America First movement before the Second World War. Today, few in the Republican Party, or even among liberal Democrats, believe that America has no military role to play in any hemisphere other than its own. The desire to undermine or overthrow brutal regimes-to transform them into democracies-is irresistible for many Americans. The realists argue that these global Wilsonians have an unacceptably high tolerance for the kind of instability that the export of democracy can bring. "The United States . . . must temper its missionary spirit with a concept of the national interest and rely on its head as well as its heart in defining its duty to the world," Henry Kissinger wrote in the third volume of his memoirs. By contrast, the current President, in his second inaugural address, set for America a breathtakingly large mission. "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," Bush said. For Brent Scowcroft, the rhetoric is not matched by reality. "I believe that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history," he says. "This notion that inside every human being is the burning desire for freedom and liberty, much less democracy, is probably not the case. I don't think anyone knows what burns inside others. Food, shelter, security, stability. Have you read Erich Fromm, 'Escape from Freedom'? I don't agree with him, but some people don't really want to be free." Scowcroft is unmoved by the stirrings of democracy movements in the Middle East. He does not believe, for instance, that the signs of a democratic awakening in Lebanon are related to the Iraq war. He sees the recent evacuation of the Syrian Army from Lebanon not as a victory for self-government but as a foreshadowing of civil war. "I think it's something we have to worry about-the sectarian emotions that were there when the Syrians went in aren't gone." Scowcroft and those who share his views believe that the reality of life in Iraq at the moment is undermining the neoconservative agenda. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as Colin Powell's chief policy planner during the first Bush Administration (and who was Scowcroft's Middle East expert on the National Security Council during the first Gulf War) said that the days of armed idealism are over. "We've seen the ideological high-water mark," he said. "I mean wars of choice, and unilateralism, and by that I mean an emphasis, almost to the point of exclusion of everything else, on regime change as opposed to diplomacy aimed at policy change." William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has been a determined advocate of the Iraq war and an equally persistent critic of foreign-policy realism. "I think it's a pseudo-springtime for realism," Kristol said. "When things go bad, realists look good, until things look really bad. Have the mistakes of the last century been ones of too much intervention or not enough? Was it good that we waited to be attacked on December 7, 1941? I would say the same about the Balkans and about terrorism." When I mentioned Scowcroft's assertion that Middle East stability brought America fifty years of peace, Kristol laughed, and asked, "Are we really going to go into the twenty-first century trying to prop up the House of Saud? Is that the goal of American foreign policy? Is that reasonable or realistic?" Kristol noted that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers of September 11, 2001, were citizens of Saudi Arabia, whose government is autocratic and pro-American; the leader of the hijacking cell, Mohamed Atta, was an Egyptian, whose government each year receives roughly two billion dollars in American aid. The President's foreign policy, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer calls "Wilsonianism with teeth," is a rejection of his father's approach. It is certainly a rejection of Scowcroft's sentiment-free pragmatism. "I've been accused of tolerating autocracies in the Middle East, and there's some validity in that," Scowcroft said. "It's easy in the name of stability to be comfortable with the status quo." The status quo has been good for Scowcroft's livelihood, as it has been for Henry Kissinger's; Scowcroft, along with Lawrence Eagleburger, a former Secretary of State, was a founder of Kissinger Associates, which placed in the service of multinational companies the expertise and contacts of its principals. The Scowcroft Group today has a client list of roughly thirty large corporations, many of which pay a six-figure annual retainer. Scowcroft said that he does no business in Saudi Arabia, but has strong friendships there, as he has in Beijing and Ankara and other capitals that benefitted from good relations with the first Bush Administration. Scowcroft became prickly when I asked him if he works as a "door-opener" for American businesses in these capitals. "We give strategic advice," he said. "No one should come to us with that expectation." The status quo, Scowcroft said, is not necessarily a good thing, but it might be better than what follows. "My kind of realism would look at what are the most likely consequences of pushing out a government. What will replace it?" What will replace autocratic but stable governments, neoconservative thinkers say, is whatever the people of the Middle East decide will replace them. Robert Kagan, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Kristol ally, has written critically of the Bush Administration's incomplete adherence to its own anti-tyranny doctrine. Referring to President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Kagan wrote, "Perhaps there is concern that too much pressure on Mubarak might produce a victory by the Muslim Brotherhood, the most popular Egyptian opposition party, which has been outlawed by the government. That's a risk, of course, but if the Bush Administration isn't willing to let Islamists, even radical Islamists, win votes in a fair election, then Bush officials should stop talking so much about democracy and go back to supporting the old dictatorships." Scowcroft believes that the Administration has already gone too far in Kagan's direction. "Let's suppose Mubarak disappears and we have an election," he said. "The good guys are not going to win that election. The bad guys are going to win that election. The bad guys are always better organized. Always. The most ruthless, the tough ones, are the ones who are going to rise to the top in a chaotic society. That's my fear." The Bush Administration does not, as a rule, concede that democratization in the Middle East could lead to a series of Islamist states. One day, I mentioned to Scowcroft an interview I had had with Paul Wolfowitz, when he was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. Wolfowitz was the leading neoconservative thinker in the senior ranks of the current Bush Administration. (He is now the president of the World Bank.) I asked him what he would think if previously autocratic Arab countries held free elections and then proceeded to vote Islamists into power. Wolfowitz answered, "Look, fifty per cent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty per cent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic state." Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts." Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't you think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse." He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature." Scowcroft learned his cynicism by absorbing the ideas of the master of cold-eyed realism, the political theorist Hans Morgenthau, who argued that it is in the nature of states to seek power above all. Morgenthau was suspicious of foreign entanglements (he opposed the Vietnam War), and had seen democracy's failings-he, like Henry Kissinger, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and he watched his Gentile neighbors vote Hitler into power. "Morgenthau was brand-new when I went to graduate school, and I just devoured it," Scowcroft said. Today, he calls himself an "enlightened realist" or, alternatively, a "cynical idealist," but in his early days he was deeply attached to Morgenthau's world view. Scowcroft's path to realism began, in a sense, with a life-threatening accident. It had been his dream, he said, from the age of twelve, to attend West Point. As a child in Ogden, Utah, where he was reared in a Mormon family, he had read a book called "West Point Today" and, he said, "it just captured me." He was still a cadet when the Second World War ended. "I assumed when I went in that I would fight," he said. "I remember when the war ended and we were on cadet maneuvers in upstate New York, and I was manning a mortar, thinking, What the hell am I doing here? The war is over. There aren't going to be any more wars." He graduated from West Point in 1947, in the top quarter of his class, and joined the Army Air Corps, because "all my friends were joining." The accident that altered the course of his life occurred during a dogfighting exercise over northern New England: "I had just taken off, and one of my companions jumped on me and sort of attacked me right off. So I advanced my power to go after him, and the engine governor malfunctioned and the propeller overspun. I didn't know it, but it had broken a piston rod and I was losing my coolant. My power was steadily going down. I was at about fifteen hundred feet, still strapped in. This was New Hampshire, forested, and I looked around-there was a little clearing. The last thing I remember was looking under my wing at the tips of the last trees just under me." Scowcroft's back was broken in the crash, and he spent two years in Army hospitals. When he came out, doctors told him that he wouldn't fly again. He was asked by West Point to teach. In 1959, he was posted to Belgrade, to serve as the assistant U.S. Air Force attache at the embassy there. In Belgrade, Scowcroft learned something about the power of nationalism. "I don't remember ever hearing people call themselves Yugoslavs," he said. "They always called themselves Serbs, Croats, Slovenians." Realists, he noted, tend to believe in the abiding relevance of national feeling, especially when compared with such abstractions as Communist ideology. Scowcroft returned from Belgrade to take a teaching post at the Air Force Academy. The Air Force, which was separated from the Army in 1947, was trying to cultivate its own strategic thinkers, and it sent some of its best young officers to graduate school. Scowcroft attended Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. He went on to a series of strategic-planning posts in the Pentagon. Scowcroft rose steadily in the Air Force, and, soon after he earned his first general's star, he was appointed Nixon's senior military assistant. He was put in charge of many quotidian but indispensable things, including the White House's limousines. This was when he came to the attention of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was watching one day as H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, dressed down Scowcroft for some minor sin of administration. "We were flying on Air Force One," Kissinger told me. "I saw Scowcroft disagreeing with Haldeman, and Haldeman very imperiously tried to insist on his point of view, but Scowcroft disagreed with him, and he was a terrier who had got hold of someone's leg and wouldn't let it go. In his polite and mild manner, he insisted on his view, which was correct. It was some procedural matter, but he was challenging Haldeman at the height of Haldeman's power." At the time, Kissinger was searching for a deputy national-security adviser. "I was looking for someone with character," he said. "I knew a lot of people with intelligence. But I needed a strong person as my deputy, who would be willing to stand up to me if necessary-not every day-but to stand up for what he thought was right." Scowcroft remembered his selection differently. "I heard he wanted me because I was a Mormon," he said. "Mormons were supposed to be loyal and faithful." In the nineteen-seventies, as now, the role of morality in the conduct of foreign policy was the subject of considerable debate. During the Nixon and Ford years, the late Washington senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat (many of the leading neoconservatives, such as Wolfowitz, were once Democrats), and one of the fathers of neoconservatism, was battling Kissinger, the advocate of detente, over his approach to the Soviet Union. Jackson, among others, wanted to punish the Soviet Union for its Jewish-emigration policy, and for its persecution of dissidents like Andrei Sakharov; his criticism intensified when Ford and Kissinger, worried about antagonizing the Soviets, snubbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ronald Reagan took on these causes when he won the Presidency in 1980, and many dissidents, including Natan Sharansky, who went on to become an Israeli politician, were grateful for his condemnation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." Kissinger believed that such confrontations were dangerous to the smooth management of America's relationship with the Soviets. Scowcroft, who served as President Ford's national-security adviser when Kissinger was Secretary of State, recalled the 1976 primary fight between Reagan and Ford: "It got so bad in the campaign that Ford said he wouldn't use the word 'detente' anymore. The Reagan people excoriated Kissinger-they cast the Soviet Union into outer darkness. Now, I was not fond of the Soviet Union, but I didn't think that calling the Soviet Union the 'evil empire' got anybody anywhere." This Reagan-era fight was in some ways a dress rehearsal for the fight today between neoconservatives and realists: only the enemy has changed. During one of our conversations, Scowcroft repeated a saying of Morgenthau's that concerned the overriding importance of "weighing the consequences of alternative political actions." The first Bush Administration, in its four years, weighed these consequences, as it faced several major challenges, and in each instance Bush and Scowcroft chose to apply the lessons of realism, with differing results. In the case of Iraq, Scowcroft was incensed by Saddam's violation of an international border; he did not believe that Saddam's treatment of his own citizens merited military intervention. A month into the war, Bush, in public comments, encouraged Iraq's defeated military, and also its civilian population, to "take matters into [their] own hands" and to rise up against Saddam. "Here's where we fell down," Robert Gates said recently. "It was our hope that the magnitude of the defeat would lead the Iraqi generals to throw Saddam out, but we didn't anticipate those uprisings. When the Kurds and the Shiites rose up, Saddam won back his generals. We speculated that Saddam 'warned' his generals that, without him, they could not control the uprising, and the country would disintegrate." Gates, who went on to serve as director of the C.I.A. from 1991 to 1993, argued that the President never intended to provoke a popular rebellion. "When the President talked about the Iraqis solving the problem, he was absolutely not urging the Kurds and the Shiites to do it. He was talking about the generals taking him out." In the book that Scowcroft wrote with the elder Bush, a passage about the uprising said, "It is true that we hoped Saddam would be toppled. But we never thought that could be done by anyone outside the military and never tried to incite the general population. It is stretching the point to imagine that a routine speech in Washington would have gotten to the Iraqi malcontents and have been the motivation for the subsequent actions of the Shiites and Kurds." In Wolfowitz's view, Scowcroft, "by overestimating the risk of supporting the rebellions that the U.S. had encouraged, bequeathed to George W. Bush a much more complicated situation ten years later." The treatment of dissidents was at the root of Scowcroft's most controversial moment as national-security adviser, during a trip to Beijing six months after the massacre of Chinese students near Tiananmen Square. Like much of the world, the Bush Administration was angered by the Chinese government's actions, but it also cautioned prudence. Bush dispatched Scowcroft to carry a message. "After Tiananmen, we were the first ones to crack down, we cracked down hard on anything to do with the military," Scowcroft said, referring to a suspension of weapons sales announced within days of the massacre. Scowcroft communicated Bush's concerns to the Chinese leadership: "I knew Deng, and I had a wonderful, frank discussion with him, and he said, 'What happened in Tiananmen Square is none of your business-it's a domestic issue, and we do whatever we want,' and I said, 'You're right. It is none of our business. But the consequences of what you did in the world and to our relations are our business. And that's what I'm here to talk about.' " The trip attracted more notice when Scowcroft was filmed at a banquet toasting the Chinese. "We're having the dinner, and the standard part of every formal Chinese dinner is you have a toast at the end," he said. "Just before the toast, in comes the camera crew. So I've got a choice. Do I turn my back on them and walk out and destroy the purpose of the visit, or do I look like a fool, toasting with the Chinese? And I chose that. I knew how it would look. Our interests and the reason I was there were more important than how it made me look." In 1992, Bill Clinton made the Bush Administration's China policy a campaign issue; by 1994, Clinton had put trade, not human rights, at the center of his China policy-a triumph for realism. In August of 1991, when the Baltic states were about to break free from Moscow's control and the Soviet Union itself seemed close to dissolution, Bush visited Ukraine. He used the occasion, however, to warn his Kiev audience about the dangers of "suicidal nationalism." He was ridiculed for this speech-it was labelled the "Chicken Kiev" speech-and it did nothing to slow the Soviet republics' momentum toward independence. Natan Sharansky is now allied with the neoconservative camp, and he cites the Chicken Kiev speech as a typical instance of realist policymaking. A book that he wrote last year, "The Case for Democracy," came to national attention when George W. Bush told the Washington Times, "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's book 'The Case for Democracy.' . . . It's a great book." Sharansky argues that the United States would best serve its own interests by choosing as allies only countries that grant their citizens broad freedoms, because only democracies are capable of living peacefully in the world. In Kiev, "America had missed a golden opportunity," Sharansky wrote in a chapter criticizing the President's father. George H. W. Bush's Administration, he said, "was not the first nor will it be the last to try to stifle democracy for the sake of 'stability.' Stability is perhaps the most important word in the diplomat's dictionary. In its name, autocrats are embraced, dictators are coddled and tyrants are courted." In September, Sharansky was in Washington at the invitation of Condoleezza Rice; he gave the closing speech at a State Department conference on democratization. "Can you believe it?" he said to me just before the session. "Rice gave the opening speech and I give the closing?" Of his complicated relations with the Bush family, he said, "A few days after my book comes out, I get a call from the White House. 'The President wants to see you.' So I go to the White House and I see my book on his desk. It is open to page 210. He is really reading it. And we talk about democracy. This President is very great on democracy. At the end of the conversation, I say, 'Say hello to your mother and father.' And he said, 'My father?' He looked very surprised I would say this." Sharansky went on, "So I say to the President, 'I like your father. He is very good to my wife when I am in prison.' And President Bush says, 'But what about Chicken Kiev?' " Sharansky smiled as he recounted this story. "The President looked around the room and said, 'Who is responsible for that Chicken Kiev speech? Find out who wrote it. Who is responsible?' Everyone laughed." Sharansky paused, and looked at me intently. He had a broad grin. "I know who wrote Chicken Kiev speech," he said. "It was Scowcroft!" Scowcroft may have had a hand in the speech, but when I asked George H. W. Bush about it he answered as if it had been his own idea. "I got hammered on the Kiev speech by the right wing and some in the press, but in retrospect I think the Baltic countries understood that we were being cautious vis-a-vis the Soviet Union," Bush said. "And their freedoms were established without a shot being fired." One day, I asked Scowcroft if he placed too much value on inaction. I had in mind the first Bush Administration's record on Bosnia. Toward the end of Bush's term, Yugoslavia was beginning to disintegrate. The Bush team was hesitant to intervene, or even to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims, who were being murdered by Serbs. Lawrence Eagleburger, the acting Secretary of State, said at the time, "This tragedy is not something that can be settled from the outside, and it's about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it." Scowcroft addressed the question with more delicacy than Eagleburger, but he didn't disagree: there was only so much that the United States could do, he said. "I didn't think it would break up," he went on. "I didn't think the hatred was so deep; I didn't want to stir it up. I would have proposed that we go to the Yugoslavs and say, 'It makes no sense for you to break up. Economically, you're small as it is, but, if you're going to break up, here are the rules. Here are the rules, and we're going to insist on those rules." The Bush Administration, in an echo of Chicken Kiev, was hoping, Scowcroft said, for Yugoslavia to stay together. Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Bosnian peace accords on behalf of President Clinton, saw the Administration's reluctance to take effective action in Yugoslavia as a failure of realism. "When the Cold War ended, the Bush people concluded that our strategic interests were not involved," Holbrooke said. "And they turned their back on Yugoslavia just as it fell to its death. They said they determined that it had no strategic value, but, as it turns out, the Balkans still had strategic value and an overpowering humanitarian case as well." A good foreign policy, Holbrooke believes, ought to "marry idealism and realism, effective American leadership and, if necessary, the use of force." The first Bush Administration did engage in one act of humanitarian interventionism, in Somalia, when it sent American troops to help feed starving civilians in Mogadishu. When I mentioned Somalia to Scowcroft as an example of idealism over national self-interest, he demurred, as if it were an accusation: a true realist does not employ the military for selfless humanitarian operations. The action in Somalia, Scowcroft said-at least in his view-was in America's self-interest. "About four months before we went in, the President and I had a meeting with the U.N. Secretary-General, and he was saying that most of the world believes that the U.N. has become the instrument of Western powers. Here's a chance to set that record straight. Here's an underdeveloped state, a Muslim state, a black state, and here's a chance to show the world that we are not acting in our self-interest." In other words, the United States acted selflessly out of selfinterest. For Scowcroft, the principle is clear: by pragmatic standards, a humanitarian intervention without a strategic rationale is a mistake. And the experience in Somalia was a reminder that an intervention-even with the noblest motives-may end in humiliating failure. In part because of what happened in Somalia, the Clinton Administration did not intervene in Rwanda during a genocide in which an estimated eight hundred thousand people died. "A terrible situation-just tragic," Scowcroft said of Rwanda. "But, before you intervene, you have to ask yourself, 'If I go in, how do I get out?' And you have to ask questions about the national interest." Interventions have consequences, he argues, and Iraq is a case in point. "There are a lot of places in the world where injustice is taking place, and we can't run around and fix all of them." Democrats like Holbrooke take issue with Republican realists. "Support for American values is part of our national-security interests, and it is realistic to support humanitarian and human-rights interventions," Holbrooke said. Such Democrats differ from the Bush-style interventionists as well, particularly on the value of treaties and the importance of multilateral cooperation, although Holbrooke and Paul Wolfowitz have sounded very much alike at times; Wolfowitz, for instance, strongly supported a military option in Bosnia. "It's important to realize how much can go wrong by doing nothing," he said. The experience in Iraq seems to have tempered the Administration's impatience with coalition-building. There is more cooperation with America's traditional allies and more willingness to work with other nations-with Europe in countering the nuclear ambitions of Iran, and with China in countering those of North Korea. The Administration, though, remains committed to the export of democracy, and is publicly optimistic about the future in Iraq. Wolfowitz, a leading proponent of the Iraq war, recently said, "Wilson thought you could take a map of Europe and say, 'This is the way things are going to be.' That was unrealistic, but the world has changed a lot in a hundred years. The fact is that people can look around and see the overwhelming success of representative government." For Scowcroft, the second Gulf war is a reminder of the unwelcome consequences of radical intervention, especially when it is attempted without sufficient understanding of America's limitations or of the history of a region. "I believe in the fallibility of human nature," Scowcroft told me. "We continually step on our best aspirations. We're humans. Given a chance to screw up, we will." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_breakin.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_breakin.php The New Yorker Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: Real Insiders Several years ago, I had dinner at Galileo, a Washington restaurant, with Steven Rosen, who was then the director of foreign-policy issues at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group, which is better known by its acronym, aipac, lobbies for Israel's financial and physical security. Like many lobbyists, Rosen cultivated reporters, hoping to influence their writing while keeping his name out of print. He is a voluble man, and liked to demonstrate his erudition and dispense aphorisms. One that he often repeated could serve as the credo of K Street, the Rodeo Drive of Washington's influence industry: "A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." Lobbyists tend to believe that legislators are susceptible to persuasion in ways that executive-branch bureaucrats are not, and before Rosen came to aipac, in 1982 (he had been at the rand Corporation, the defense-oriented think tank), the group focussed mainly on Congress. But Rosen arrived brandishing a new idea: that the organization could influence the outcome of policy disputes within the executive branch-in particular, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Rosen began to court officials. He traded in gossip and speculation, and his reports to aipac's leaders helped them track currents in Middle East policymaking before those currents coalesced into executive orders. Rosen also used his contacts to carry aipac's agenda to the White House. An early success came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a strategic cooperation agreement between Israel and the United States, which was signed over the objections of Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level of intelligence sharing and military sales. aipac is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs, although it is, by comparison, much smaller. (aipac has about a hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more than four million.) President Bush, speaking at the annual aipac conference in May of 2004, said, "You've always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever." aipac is unique in the top tier of lobbies because its concerns are the economic health and security of a foreign nation, and because its members are drawn almost entirely from a single ethnic group. aipac's professional staff-it employs about a hundred people at its headquarters, two blocks from the Capitol-analyzes congressional voting records and shares the results with its members, who can then contribute money to candidates directly or to a network of proIsrael political-action committees. The Center for Responsive Politics, a public-policy group, estimates that between 1990 and 2004 these pacs gave candidates and parties more than twenty million dollars. Robert H. Asher, a former aipac president, told me that the pacs are usually given euphemistic names. "I started a pac called Citizens Concerned for the National Interest," he said. Asher, who is from Chicago, is a retired manufacturer of lamps and shades, and a member of the so-called Gang of Four-former presidents of aipac, who steered the group's policies for more than two decades. (The three others are Larry Weinberg, a California real-estate developer and a former owner of the Portland Trail Blazers; Edward Levy, a construction-materials executive from Detroit; and Mayer "Bubba" Mitchell, a retired builder based in Mobile, Alabama.) aipac, Asher explained, is loyal to its friends and merciless to its enemies. In 1982, Asher led a campaign to defeat Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Springfield, Illinois, who once referred to himself as "Yasir Arafat's best friend in Congress," and who later compared Arafat to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. "There was a real desire to help Findley out of Congress," Asher said. He identified an obscure Democratic lawyer in Springfield, Richard Durbin, as someone who could defeat Findley. "We met at my apartment in Chicago, and I recruited him to run for Congress," he recalled. "I probed his views and I explained things that I had learned mostly from aipac. I wanted to make sure we were supporting someone who was not only against Paul Findley but also a friend of Israel." Asher went on, "He beat Findley with a lot of help from Jews, in-state and out-of-state. Now, how did the Jewish money find him? I travelled around the country talking about how we had the opportunity to defeat someone unfriendly to Israel. And the gates opened." Durbin, who went on to win a Senate seat, is now the Democratic whip. He is a fierce critic of Bush's Iraq policy but, like aipac, generally supports the Administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Durbin says that he considers Asher to be his "most loyal friend in the Jewish community." Mayer Mitchell led a similar campaign, three years ago, to defeat Earl Hilliard, an Alabama congressman who was a critic of Israel. Mitchell helped direct support to a young Harvard Law School graduate named Artur Davis, who challenged Hilliard in the Democratic primary, and he solicited donations from aipac supporters across America. Davis won the primary, and the seat. "I asked Bubba how he felt after Davis won," Asher said, "and he said, 'Just like you did when Durbin got elected.' " Mitchell declined to comment. aipac's leaders can be immoderately frank about the group's influence. At dinner that night with Steven Rosen, I mentioned a controversy that had enveloped aipac in 1992. David Steiner, a New Jersey real-estate developer who was then serving as aipac's president, was caught on tape boasting that he had "cut a deal" with the Administration of George H. W. Bush to provide more aid to Israel. Steiner also said that he was "negotiating" with the incoming Clinton Administration over the appointment of a pro-Israel Secretary of State. "We have a dozen people in his"-Clinton's-"headquarters . . . and they are all going to get big jobs," Steiner said. Soon after the tape's existence was disclosed, Steiner resigned his post. I asked Rosen if aipac suffered a loss of influence after the Steiner affair. A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table. "You see this napkin?" he said. "In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin." Rosen was influential from the start. He was originally recruited for the job by Larry Weinberg, one of the Gang of Four, and he helped choose the group's leaders, including the current executive director, Howard Kohr, a Republican who began his aipac career as Rosen's deputy. Rosen, who can be argumentative and impolitic, was never a candidate for the top post. "He's a bit of a kochleffl"-the Yiddish term for a pot-stirrer, or meddler-Martin Indyk, who also served as Rosen's deputy, and who went on to become President Clinton's Ambassador to Israel, says. Rosen has had an unusually eventful private life, marrying and divorcing six times (he is living again with his first wife), and he has a well-developed sense of paranoia. When we met, he would sometimes lower his voice, even when he was preparing to deliver an anodyne pronouncement. "Hostile ears are always listening," he was fond of saying. Nevertheless, he is a keen analyst of Middle East politics, and a savvy bureaucratic infighter. His views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not notably hawkish; he once called himself "too right for the left, and too left for the right." He is a hard-liner on only one subject-Iran-and this preoccupation helped shape aipac's position: that Iran poses a greater threat to Israel than any other nation. In this way, aipac is in agreement with a long line of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who fears Iran's nuclear intentions more than he ever feared Saddam Hussein's. (aipac lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war, but Iraq has not been one of its chief concerns.) Rosen's main role at aipac, he once told me, was to collect evidence of "Iranian perfidy" and share it with the United States. Unlike American neoconservatives, who have openly supported the Likud Party over the more liberal Labor Party, aipac does not generally take sides in Israeli politics. But on Iran aipac's views resemble those of the neoconservatives. In 1996, Rosen and other aipac staff members helped write, and engineer the passage of, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on foreign oil companies doing business with those two countries; aipac is determined, above all, to deny Iran the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran was a main focus of this year's aipac policy conference, which was held in May at the Washington Convention Center. Ariel Sharon and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, addressed five thousand aipac members. One hall of the convention center was taken up by a Disney-style walk-through display of an Iranian nuclear facility. It was kitsch, but not ineffective, and Rosen undoubtedly would have appreciated it. Rosen, however, was not there. He was fired earlier this year by Howard Kohr, nine months after he became implicated in an F.B.I. espionage investigation. Rosen's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, expects him to be indicted on charges of passing secret information about Iranian intelligence activities in Iraq to an official of the Israeli Embassy and to a Washington Post reporter. A junior colleague, Keith Weissman, who served as an Iran analyst for aipac until he, too, was fired, may face similar charges. The person who, in essence, ended Rosen's career is a fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon analyst named Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who is even more preoccupied with Iran than Steven Rosen. Franklin, until recently the Pentagon's Iran desk officer, was indicted last month on espionage charges. The Justice Department has accused him of giving "national-defense information" to Rosen and Weissman, and classified information to an Israeli official. Franklin has pleaded not guilty; a tentative trial date is set for September. If convicted, he will face at least ten years in prison. I first met Franklin in November of 2002. Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was receiving the Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson award from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a conservative-leaning group that tries to build close relations between the American and Israeli militaries. In the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City, a shopping mall, were a number of American generals and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon. Franklin, a trim man with blond hair and a military bearing, is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve who spent several years as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has a doctorate in Asian studies and describes himself as a capable speaker of Farsi. In addition, he was a Catholic in a largely Jewish network of Pentagon Iran hawks. Franklin was particularly close to the neoconservative Harold Rhode, an official in the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's in-house think tank. Franklin was also close to Michael Ledeen, who, twenty years ago, played an important role in the Iran-Contra scandal by helping arrange meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of the most outspoken advocates in Washington of confrontation with the Tehran regime. The conversation at the banquet, and just about everywhere else in official Washington at that time, centered on the coming war in Iraq. "We may well hope that with the demise of a truly evil and despotic regime in Iraq, we will see the liberation of one of the most talented peoples in the Arab world," Wolfowitz said in his speech. Franklin did not seem especially concerned with the topic at hand. As we stood outside the banquet hall, he said that Iran, not Iraq, would turn out to be the most difficult challenge in the war on terror. Then, as now, the Administration was divided on the question of Iran. Many of the political appointees at the Defense Department hoped that America would support dissidents in an attempt to overthrow Iran's ruling clerics, while the State Department argued for containment. Even within the Defense Department, many officials believed that it would be imprudent to make regime change in Tehran a top priority. "There are neocons who thought Iran should come sooner and neocons who thought it should come later," Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. As for Franklin, Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, said, "It's fair to say that Larry was impatient with Bush Administration policy on Iran." In the Pentagon's policy office, I learned later, it was sometimes said that Franklin inhabited a place called Planet Franklin. Gerecht referred to him as "sweet, bumbling Larry." A year later, on a reporting assignment in Israel, I ran into Franklin at the Herzliya Conference, which is the Davos of the Israeli security establishment. He said that he was there on Defense Department business. We talked briefly about Iraq-it was eight months after the invasion-and, as we spoke, General Moshe Ya'alon, then the Israeli Army chief of staff, swept into the room surrounded by bodyguards and uniformed aides. "Wow," Franklin said. We stepped outside, and he talked only about Iran's threat to America. "Our intelligence is blind," he said. "It's the most dangerous country in the world to the U.S., and we have nothing on the ground. We don't understand anything that goes on. I mean, the C.I.A. doesn't have anything. This goes way deeper than Tenet"-George Tenet, who was the director of central intelligence at the time. He continued, "Do you know how dangerous Iran is to our forces in the Gulf? We have great force-concentration issues now"-the presence of American troops in Iraq-"and the Iranians are very interested in making life difficult for American forces. They have the capability. You watch what they're doing in Iraq. Their infiltration is everywhere." Franklin seemed more frustrated with American policy in Iran than he had the year before. "We don't understand that it's doable-regime change is doable," he said. "The people are so desperate to become free, and the mullahs are so unpopular. They're so pro-American, the people." Referring to the Bush Administration, he said, "That's what they don't understand," and he added, "And they also don't understand how anti-American the mullahs are." Franklin was convinced that the Iranians would commit acts of terrorism against Americans, on American soil. "These guys are a threat to us in Iraq and even at home," he said. Franklin was not a high-ranking Pentagon official; he was five steps removed in the hierarchy from Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. For two years, though, he had been trying to change American policy. His efforts took many forms, including calls to reporters, meetings with Rosen and Weissman and with the political counsellor at the Israeli Embassy, Naor Gilon. According to Tracy O'Grady-Walsh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, he was not acting on behalf of his superiors: "If Larry Franklin was formally or informally lobbying, he was doing it on his own." Franklin also sought information from Iranian dissidents who might aid his cause. In December of 2001, he and Rhode met in Rome with Michael Ledeen and a group of Iranians, including Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, who helped arrange the meeting, told me that the dissidents gave Franklin and Rhode information about Iranian threats against American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Rhode did not return calls seeking comment.) Franklin was initially skeptical about the meeting, Ledeen said, but emerged believing that America could do business with these dissidents. Franklin's meetings with Gilon and with the two aipac men make up the heart of the indictment against him. The indictment alleges that Rosen-"CC-1," or "Co-Conspirator 1"-called the Pentagon in early August of 2002, looking for the name of an Iran specialist. He made contact with Franklin a short time later, but, according to the indictment, they did not meet until February of 2003. In their meetings, according to several people with knowledge of the conversations, Franklin told the lobbyists that Secretary of State Colin Powell was resisting attempts by the Pentagon to formulate a tougher Iran policy. He apparently hoped to use aipac to lobby the Administration. The Franklin indictment suggests that the F.B.I. had been watching Rosen as well; for instance, it alleges that, in February of 2003, Rosen, on his way to a meeting with Franklin, told someone on the phone that he "was excited to meet with a 'Pentagon guy' because this person was a 'real insider.' " Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman met openly four times in 2003. At one point, the indictment reads, somewhat mysteriously, "On or about March 10, 2003, Franklin, CC-1 and CC-2"- Rosen and Weissman-"met at Union Station early in the morning. In the course of the meeting, the three men moved from one restaurant to another restaurant and then finished the meeting in an empty restaurant." On June 26, 2003, at a lunch at the Tivoli Restaurant, near the Pentagon, Franklin reportedly told Rosen and Weissman about a draft of a National Security Presidential Directive that outlined a series of tougher steps that the U.S. could take against the Iranian leadership. The draft was written by a young Pentagon aide named Michael Rubin (who is now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute). Franklin did not hand over a copy of the draft, but he described its contents, and, according to the indictment, talked about the "state of internal United States government deliberations." The indictment also alleges that Franklin gave the two men "highly classified" information about potential attacks on American forces in Iraq. In mid-August of 2002, according to the indictment, Franklin met with Gilon-identified simply as "FO," or "foreign official"-at a restaurant, and Gilon explained to Franklin that he was the "policy" person at the Embassy. The two met regularly, the indictment alleges, often at the Pentagon Officers' Athletic Club, to discuss "foreign policy issues," particularly regarding a "Middle Eastern country"-Iran, by all accounts-and "its nuclear program." The indictment suggests that Franklin was receiving information and policy advice from Gilon; after one meeting, Franklin drafted an "Action Memo" to his supervisors incorporating Gilon's suggestions. Gilon is an expert on weapons proliferation, according to Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Ambassador, and has briefed reporters about Israel's position on Iran. According to Lawrence Di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, it is part of the "job description" of Defense Department desk officers to meet with their foreign counterparts. "Desk officers meet with foreign officials all the time, not with ministers, but interactions with people at their level," he said. The indictment contends, however, that on two occasions Franklin gave Gilon classified information. The issue of Israel's activities in Washington is unusually sensitive. Twenty years ago, a civilian Naval Intelligence analyst named Jonathan Pollard was caught stealing American secrets on behalf of an Israeli intelligence cell-a "rogue" cell, the Israelis later claimed. Pollard said that he was driven to treason because, as a Jew, he could not abide what he saw as America's unwillingness to share crucial intelligence with Israel. Pollard's actions were an embarrassment for American Jews, who fear the accusation of "dual loyalty"-the idea that they split their allegiance between the United States and Israel. For Israel, the case was a moral and political disaster. And there are some in the American intelligence community who suspect that Israel has never stopped spying on the United States. Earlier this month, Ayalon told me that Israel does not "collect any intelligence on the United States, period, full stop. We won't do anything to risk this most important relationship." In any case, he said, there was no need to spy, "because cooperation is so intimate and effective between Israel and the U.S." Ayalon also said that Gilon, who is returning to Jerusalem later this summer, remains an important member of his staff; in recent months, Gilon has attended meetings at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House. In June of 2004, F.B.I. agents searched Franklin's Pentagon office and his home in West Virginia, and allegedly found eighty-three classified documents. Some had to do with the Iran debate, but some pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq. (A separate federal indictment, citing the documents, has been handed down in West Virginia.) According to a person with knowledge of Franklin's case, the agents told Franklin that Rosen and Weissman were working against America's interests. Franklin faced ruin-the documents found in his house could cost him his job, the agents said. Franklin, who did not have a lawyer, agreed to cooperate in the investigation of Rosen and Weissman, although apparently he was not given in return a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was wired, and was asked to contact the two aipac employees. On July 21st, Franklin called Weissman and said that he had to speak to him immediately-that it was a matter of life and death. They arranged to meet outside the Nordstrom's department store at Pentagon City. A month before that meeting, The New Yorker had published an article by Seymour Hersh about the activities of Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin, who held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly told Weissman that he had new, classified information indicating that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh. American intelligence knew about the threat, Franklin said, but Israel might not. He also said that the Iranians had infiltrated southern Iraq, and were planning attacks on American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin hoped, could insure that senior Administration officials received this news. It is unclear whether what Franklin relayed was true or whether it had been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has refused to comment on the case. Weissman hurried back to aipac's headquarters and briefed Rosen and Howard Kohr, aipac's executive director. According to aipac sources, Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give the information to Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East official on the National Security Council. Kohr didn't get in touch with Abrams, but Rosen and Weissman made two calls. They called Gilon and told him about the threat to Israeli agents in Iraq, and then they called Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Post, and told him about the threat to Americans. A month later, on the morning of August 27, 2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him. Rosen quickly called aipac's lawyers. That night, CBS News reported that an unnamed Israeli "mole" had been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the mole had been passing documents to two officials of aipac, who were passing the documents on to Israeli officials. Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman were made public. The F.B.I. informed Franklin that he was going to be charged with illegal possession of classified documents. Franklin was said by friends to be frightened, and surprised. He said that he could not afford to hire a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for a court-appointed attorney to represent him. The lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty to espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence of six to eight years. At about this time, Franklin received a call from Michael Ledeen, his ally in matters of Iran policy. "I called him and said, 'Larry, what's going on?' " Ledeen recalled. "He said, 'Don't worry. Sharansky' "-Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident-" 'survived years in the Gulag, and I'll survive prison, too.' I said, 'What are you talking about?' He told me what was going on. I asked him if he had a good lawyer." Ledeen called the criminal-defense attorney Plato Cacheris. "I knew him from when he served as Fawn's attorney," Ledeen said, referring to Fawn Hall, who was Colonel Oliver North's secretary at the time of the Iran-Contra affair. Cacheris has also represented Monica Lewinsky and the F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for Moscow. Cacheris offered to represent Franklin pro bono, and Franklin accepted the offer. aipac launched a special appeal for donations-for the organization, not for Rosen and Weissman. "Your generosity at this time will help ensure that false allegations do not hamper our ability or yours to work for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a safe and secure Israel," aipac's leaders wrote in the letter accompanying the appeal. But in December four aipac officials, including Kohr, were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. In March, aipac's principal lawyer, Nathan Lewin, met with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Paul McNulty, who agreed to let Lewin see some of the evidence of the Pentagon City sting. According to an aipac source, an eleven-second portion of the telephone conversation between Rosen, Weissman, and the Post's Glenn Kessler, which the F.B.I. had recorded, was played for Lewin. In that conversation, Rosen is alleged to have told Kessler about Iranian agents in southern Iraq-information that Weissman had received from Franklin. In the part of the conversation that Lewin heard, Rosen jokes about "not getting in trouble" over the information. He also notes, "At least we have no Official Secrets Act"-the British law that makes journalists liable to prosecution if they publish classified material. Prosecutors argued to Lewin that this statement proved that Rosen and Weissman were aware that the information Franklin had given them was classified, and that Rosen must therefore have known that he was passing classified information to Gilon, a foreign official. Lewin, who declined to comment on the case, recommended that aipac fire Rosen and Weissman. He also told the board that McNulty had promised that aipac itself would not be a target of the espionage investigation. An aipac spokesman, Patrick Dorton, said of the firing, "Rosen and Weissman were dismissed because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs, and because this conduct did not comport with the standards that aipac expects and requires of its employees." When I asked Abbe Lowell, Rosen's lawyer, about the firings, he said, "Steve Rosen's dealings with Larry Franklin were akin to his dealings with executive-branch officials for more than two decades and were well known, encouraged, and appreciated by aipac." Last month, I met with Lowell and Rosen in Lowell's office, which these days is a center of Washington scandal management. (He also represents the fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff.) Lowell had instructed Rosen not to discuss specifics of the case, but Rosen expressed disbelief that his career had been ended by an F.B.I. investigation. "I'm being looked at for things I've done for twenty-three years, which other foreign-policy groups, hundreds of foreign-policy groups, are doing," Rosen said, and went on, "Our job at aipac was to understand what the government is doing, in order to help form better policies, in the interests of the U.S. I've never done anything illegal or harmful to the U.S. I never even dreamed of doing anything harmful to the U.S." Later, he said, "We did not knowingly receive classified information from Larry Franklin." Lowell added, "When the facts are known, this will be a case not about Rosen and Weissman's actions but about the government's actions." Lowell said that he would not rehearse his arguments against any charges until there is an indictment. Rosen said that he was particularly upset by the allegation that, because he had informed Gilon that Israeli lives might be in danger, he was a spy for Israel. "If I had been given information that British or Australian soldiers were going to be kidnapped or killed in Iraq, I think I would have done the same thing," he said. "I'd have tried to warn them by calling friends at those embassies." He wants to believe that he could return to aipac if he is exonerated, but this does not seem likely. aipac leaders are downplaying Rosen's importance to the organization. "aipac is focussed primarily on legislative lobbying," Dorton told me. Rosen's severance pay will end in September, although aipac, in accordance with its bylaws, will continue to pay legal fees for Rosen and Weissman. Rosen's defenders are critical of aipac for its handling of the controversy. Martin Indyk, who is now the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a think tank within the Brookings Institution, thinks that aipac made a tactical mistake by cutting off the two men. "It appears they've abandoned their own on the battlefield," he says. "Because they cut Steve off, they leave him no choice." Indyk wouldn't elaborate, but the implication was clear: Rosen and Weissman will defend themselves by arguing that they were working in concert with the highest officials of the organization, including Kohr. Until there is an indictment, the government's full case against Rosen and Weissman cannot be known; no one in the Justice Department will comment. The laws concerning the dissemination of government secrets are sometimes ambiguous and often unenforced, and prosecutors in such cases face complex choices. According to Lee Strickland, a former chief privacy officer of the C.I.A., prosecutors pressing espionage charges against Rosen and Weissman would have to prove that the information the two men gave to Gilon not merely was classified but rose to the level of "national-defense information," meaning that it could cause dire harm to the United States. Yet a reporter who called the Embassy to discuss the same information in the course of preparing a story-thus violating the same statute-would almost certainly not be prosecuted. Strickland continued, "Twice in the Clinton Administration we had proposals to broaden the statutes to include the recipients, not just the leakers, of classified information. The New York Times and the Washington Post went bat-shit about this legislation. They saw it as an attempt to shut down leaks." If American law did punish those who receive, and then pass on, or publish, privileged information, much of the Washington press corps would be in jail, according to Lee Levine, a First Amendment lawyer. So would a great many government officials, elected and appointed, for whom classified information is the currency of conversation with reporters and lobbyists. Strickland, who said that he had spent much of his career at the C.I.A. "shutting down" leaks, called the aipac affair "uncharted territory." It is uncommon, he said, for an espionage case to be built on the oral transmission of national-defense information. He also said, "Intent is always an element. If I were a defense attorney, I would argue that this was a form of entrapment. The F.B.I. agents deliberately set my client up, put him in a moral quandary." He added, however, that although a jury might recognize the quandary, the law does not. "Just because you have information that would help a foreign country doesn't make it your job to pass that information." Even some of aipac's most vigorous critics do not see the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage case. James Bamford, who is the author of well-received books about the National Security Agency, and an often vocal critic of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as a cautionary tale about one lobbying group's disproportionate influence: "What Pollard did was espionage. This is a much different and more unique animal-this is the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint." He continued, "Larry Franklin is not going to knock on George Bush's door, but he can get aipac, which is a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the American government to change its policy to a more aggressive policy." Bamford, who believes that Weissman and Rosen may indeed be guilty of soliciting information and passing it to a foreign government, sees the case as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of limiting aipac's long-and, in Bamford's view, dangerous-reach. Other aipac critics see the lobby's behavior as business as usual in Washington. "The No. 1 game in Washington is making people talking to you feel like you're an insider, that you've got information no one else has," Sam Gejdenson, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, says. When Gejdenson opposed a proposal to increase Israel's foreign-aid allocation at the expense of more economically needy countries, aipac, he said, responded by "sitting on its hands" during his reelection campaigns, despite the fact that he is Jewish. "It's like any other lobbying group," he said. "Its job isn't to come up with the best ideas for mankind, or the U.S. It's narrowly focussed." aipac officials insist that the case has not affected the organization's effectiveness. But its operations have certainly been hindered by the controversy of the past year, and the F.B.I. sting may force lobbyists of all sorts to be more careful about trying to penetrate the executive branch-and about leaking to reporters. And aipac now seems acutely sensitive to the appearance of dual loyalty. The theme of this year's aipac conference was "Israel, an American Value," and, for the first time, "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, was not sung. The only anthem heard was "The Star-Spangled Banner." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_real_in.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_real_in.php The New Yorker Mon, 04 Jul 2005 12:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: A Little Learning Douglas J. Feith, who is the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, lives in one of the better Maryland suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome Colonial homes. The interior of Feith's house has space and light, but it is furnished in a mostly expedient manner; Feith and his wife, Tatiana, have four children-ages eight to twenty-one-and the house feels very much theirs. The exception is Feith's library. It is apparent that he has devoted considerable care and money to its design and, in particular, to its collection, which numbers at least five thousand volumes. The floors and shelves are dark oak, and the walls are covered in hunter-green wallpaper. The library is not in the style of the high-station Washington bureaucrat who wants to telegraph his indispensability; there are few photographs of Feith in the company of potentates and prime ministers and presidents. Instead, Feith has filled the room with images of figures who have earned his admiration. Busts of Washington and Lincoln sit on the shelves; Churchill scowls in the direction of Feith's desk. A black-and-white portrait of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, hangs over a green leather couch. In his collection, history has displaced nearly every other subject; fiction-his favorite is Nabokov-has been exiled to the basement. The library is weighted disproportionately to the history of the British Empire, and Feith has spent many hours schooling himself in the schemes and follies of the British on the playing fields of the Middle East. History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. "When history looks back," he told me, "I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment." Feith, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer-he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences-has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Washington. It has been Feith's job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration's campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. "I don't know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush's foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld," William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said. Fifteen hundred people report to Feith in the Pentagon, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been much quoted as calling Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," apparently for ideas he proposed to Franks and his planners. Franks's view is not universally shared by the military. Marine General Peter Pace, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says of Feith, "Early on, he didn't realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways." Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on the Joint Chiefs. Pace, who calls Feith a "true American patriot," said he did not understand Franks's attack. "This is not directed at any individual," Pace said, "but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he's so smart." (A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: "What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?") Feith's most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is "one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He's diligent, very well read, and insightful." Rumsfeld explained Feith's trouble with Franks this way: "If you're a combatant commander and you're in the area of operations and you're hearing from people in Washington, what you're hearing is frequently not on point to what you're worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true." In conversation, Feith is not often on point. The first time we met, I was prepared to ask about his role in the management of postwar Iraq. Feith, though, preferred to discuss the influence on his thinking of Edmund Burke, the political philosopher who feared instability as much as neoconservatives seem to embrace it. I asked Feith to imagine what Burke would have thought about the Bush Administration's experiment in Iraq. "Burke warns in his writings about the danger of political abstractions put forward as universal principles," Feith said. Burke, he continued, "wrote brilliantly and bitterly about the French Revolution and the danger to a society of a bunch of people thinking they could remake society rationally and get rid of all the institutions that have grown up over centuries and reflect the distilled wisdom of numerous people." But the Bush Administration, Feith added, did nothing of the sort. To draft Burke into the Bush Cabinet is typical of Feith: counterintuitive and clever, maybe too clever. He rejected the idea that Bush was seeking to remake Iraq in America's image: "I believe that what makes President Bush's policy of democracy promotion better, wiser, more careful than what one could describe as starry-eyed Wilsonianism is precisely the recognition that we should not be taking the particulars of our political views and our institutions and trying to impose them in places where there is not fertile soil." He also said that the idea of "Shiite democracy," a system in which clerics would play a large role, does not frighten him. "In different parts of the world, clerics play a larger or smaller role in the political process. The idea that there may be a country where clerics play a larger role in the political process than they do in America is not inherently antidemocratic or alarming," he said. "What the President talks about is that it is the nature of man to want to be free. I don't think that violates Burke's warnings." Feith says that he is confident of the Administration's ultimate vindication in Iraq. But he is not indifferent to his current reputation, and during three long interviews and several telephone conversations he was indefatigable in his own defense. "I'm not going to be making some Oprah-like confessions," he told me at the start. Feith is fifty-one, but his face is unlined; his hair is partly gray, but thick and moppish. His glasses magnify his eyes, making him appear owlish, and his mouth is set in an expression of bemusement that can slip into impatient condescension when he hears something that he thinks is foolish, which is often. He has the capacity, however, for self-deprecation. He told me that when Franks's characterization of his brainpower became public he jokingly suggested to his staff that he call a press conference to deny that he was in fact the "fucking stupidest guy" on earth. Feith's first job in government came shortly after he graduated from Harvard, as an intern to a subcommittee chaired by Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, whose office was a locus of neoconservative thought. Apart from tours at the National Security Council and the Pentagon during the Reagan Administration (he was a top aide to the neoconservative Richard Perle, who was then an assistant secretary of defense), he has spent his professional life in the private practice of law-he received a law degree from Georgetown University-and as an insistent advocate of neoconservative causes. One day, Feith showed me around his library. We started at the shelves devoted to Churchill and the lesser occupants of 10 Downing Street in the years before the Second World War. He pulled down a volume about Stanley Baldwin, who served as Britain's Prime Minister in the mid-nineteen-thirties. "Baldwin was considered the most successful politician of his day," Feith explained. "But the only people who have heard of him today see him as a jerk"-because, Feith explained, he dithered while Germany re-armed. Like Neville Chamberlain, he said, Baldwin did not understand the nature of the Nazi enemy. Feith detoured through Disraeli-"He was attacked by many people, the way the neocons get attacked, because he had this fascinating idea that, as he put it, the workingman is a natural conservative"-and then became absorbed in Elie Kedourie's "In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth." He looked up long enough to ask, "You've read the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916, haven't you?" Kedourie set out to prove, through a close reading of letters between Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, and Sharif Hussein, the leader of the Arab Revolt, that the Arabs led guilt-ridden British officials into granting the Sharif vast territory, including Palestine. But what interested Feith especially is the story, embedded in the episode, of an intelligence failure: "British intelligence was told that there were going to be whole units of the Ottoman military ready to defect if the British would only give support to the Hashemites. Well, the Arab units of the Ottoman military didn't defect." Feith smiled. In the Iraq war, it was hoped that the C.I.A. would bring Iraqi Army divisions to the American side, but that did not happen. Feith, like others in Rumsfeld's circle, is disparaging of the C.I.A. Feith has been, for decades, a prolific writer of op-eds and articles. In the late nineteen-seventies, he wrote about America's energy supply, arguing, against conventional wisdom, that oil embargoes could be more damaging to the economies of Arab oil exporters than to the United States. In the nineteen-eighties, as a deputy to Perle, Feith focussed his attention-and skepticism-on arms control and detente. In the early nineteen-nineties, he predicted that the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians would fail. His interests are eclectic, but they are tied together by a single theme: a mistrust of any policy that resembles appeasement-of opec, the Kremlin, Yasir Arafat, or states that sponsor terrorism. He derides the usefulness of treaties struck between democratic and authoritarian states. "If we had mutual trust and real security, you wouldn't need these agreements," Feith said, "and if you need these agreements, then it is an illusion to say that you have mutual trust and security." In the nineteen-eighties, the neoconservatives believed that the Soviet Union could be defeated, not merely contained. "The so-called realist school said that the Soviet Union would never collapse, and that efforts to make it collapse are running the risk of instability," Feith said. "The Reagan, neocon view was considered lunacy. I pride myself that I was on the right side of that debate. The intellectual class was on the wrong side." The intellectual class-a synonym, in Feith's mind, for the liberal elite-misunderstood the Oslo peace process as well, he said, for the same essential reason: the belief that the authoritarian Arafat could be appeased. Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during the Vietnam War. "I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot," he told me. "Chamberlain wasn't popular in my house." Feith's father lost his parents, three brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. "What I was hearing from the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does didn't make sense to me. It's a solipsism. When I took all these nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal 'Cogito, ergo sum,' which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and that all this stuff about working things out-well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn't make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that 'war is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?" He continued, "The surprising thing is not that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are not." Feith's library includes a large selection of books on Zionism, but he did not linger there. "I'm not looking to aggravate a distortion about me," Feith said. The distortion, he said, is that his religion, or at least his longtime support for right-wing Israeli leaders, has affected his policy recommendations to Rumsfeld. Feith dismisses this criticism as a willful misunderstanding of his motives. "My interest in democratization predates the focus on the Middle East," he says. Rumsfeld, for his part, derides the idea that the Administration was manipulated by its sub-Cabinet-level Jewish officials. "I suppose the implication of that is that the President and the Vice-President and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs," he said. One afternoon, I asked Feith what had gone wrong in Iraq. "Your assumption is that everything went wrong," he replied. I hadn't said that, but I spoke of the loss of American lives-more than fifteen hundred soldiers, most of whom died after the declared end of major combat operations. This number, I said, strikes many people as a large and terrible loss. "Based on what?" Feith asked. "It's a large sacrifice. It's a serious loss. It's an absolute disaster for the families. Nobody can possibly deny how horrible the loss is for the families involved. But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise." Before the war, the Administration argued that the overthrow of the Baath regime would prevent a marriage of Al Qaeda terrorists to Saddam's chemical and biological weapons. But after the fall of Saddam the United States and its coalition partners discovered that Saddam had apparently destroyed his stockpiles of unconventional weapons, and the Administration has been unable to prove a close operational relationship between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. I asked Feith if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he knew then what he knows now. "The main rationale was not based on intelligence," Feith said. "It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It's true that he didn't have a link that we know of to 9/11. . . . But he did give safe haven to terrorists." Feith went on, "Given the ease, as everybody knows, with which one can reconstitute stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons if you have the capabilities which he had, I don't think the rationale for the war hinged on the existence of stockpiles." The postmortem reports of C.I.A. weapons inspectors confirm the view that Saddam remained interested in one day reconstituting his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, Feith said, and went on, "There's a certain revisionism in people looking back and identifying the main intelligence error"-the assumption of stockpiles-"and then saying that our entire policy was built on that error." The case against Iraq, he argues today, was only partly about W.M.D.s. One day, I asked Feith to describe the importance to him of Lincoln. He admires Lincoln, he said, for many reasons, but in particular for the stalwart way that Lincoln confronted evil. When I suggested that Feith might also admire Lincoln because Lincoln shifted the rationale for his war in the middle of the fighting, Feith replied, with enthusiasm, "I never thought of that. That's right." His answer surprised me. I had expected him to say something like "The Bush Administration has not changed the rationale for the war." The next morning, Feith telephoned. He had evidently been thinking about his answer, because he had searched out a better one. He found it in an article by Nicholas Lemann, published in this magazine shortly before the beginning of the war, in which Feith was quoted as saying: "When you can think that if we do things right, and if we help the Iraqis, and if the Iraqis show an ability to create a humane representative government for themselves-will that have beneficial spillover effects on the politics of the whole region? The answer, I think, is yes." He read this to me and added, "I must say, I'm damn proud of that sentence. That was right on the nose." Feith, though, had left out part of what he told Lemann. "Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region?" he asked Lemann. "The answer is no." He continued: "What we would be using military power for, if we have to, would be the goals the President has talked about, particularly the elimination of the chemical and biological weapons, and preventing Iraq from getting nuclear weapons." The largest controversy of Feith's Pentagon career concerned his role in the lead-up to the war. Feith created two new units within his policy shop: the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Special Plans was the name given to a new subregional office focussed on Iraq. The Ian Fleming-like label was chosen, Feith said, to obscure its mission; at the time, the Bush Administration was publicly pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Iraq crisis, and the Pentagon did not want to advertise that it was engaged in planning for postwar Iraq. The eighteen members of the Special Plans staff prepared strategies on a range of issues that America would face after an invasion: repairing Iraq's economy and oil industry, the training of a new police force, war-crimes trials, the reorganization of the Iraqi government. The State Department, meanwhile, named its own planning program in a more straightforward way: its Future of Iraq project was also a study of problems anticipated in postwar Iraq. The two programs were not well coordinated; partisans of the State Department have accused the Pentagon of ignoring its planning effort. Feith told me he did not ignore the State Department effort, which he called "a bunch of concept papers." The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was devoted to alternative intelligence analysis; it employed a rotating staff of two people who were asked to read intelligence data provided by the C.I.A. in order to find unexamined connections between state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups. Feith said, "I went to these two guys and said, 'Read the intelligence so you can tell me what I need to know about, so I can develop a strategy and policies for dealing with terror networks.' " Most of the work of this unit was soon focussed on looking for evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The analysts looked at data from old intelligence reports and concluded that the C.I.A. had overlooked or downplayed evidence of an operational relationship; they prepared a presentation for Feith. Rumsfeld instructed Feith to offer the briefing to George Tenet, who was then the director of the C.I.A., and Feith's analysts made the presentation to C.I.A. officials in August of 2002. Several weeks later, the analysts made a more aggressive presentation to White House officials. They included the assertion that the leader of the September 11th hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met with an agent of Iraqi intelligence in Prague shortly before the attacks. Feith's Democratic critics accused the counterterrorism group of providing the Administration with incorrect intelligence to buttress its case that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league. "He was giving the Administration analysis that they wanted to hear," Senator Levin told me. "It was misleading, it was deceptive, it was based on feeble information." Feith's view is that the analysts were simply involved in alternative analysis-an idea that has become increasingly popular as Washington looks for ways to improve its ability to read intelligence. Although the work of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group has been a preoccupation for many opponents of the Bush Administration, Feith's work in Special Plans had far more significance. In his library, I asked Feith what the Office of Special Plans planned. He began by disagreeing with the prevailing wisdom in Washington: that the crises of the past two years-the insurgency, the embitterment of Iraqis toward the United States, the civilian and military casualties-were in many cases preventable. He even disagreed with the notion that they were as serious as many Americans believe them to be. Feith said, "The common refrain that the postwar has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations." The thesis of Administration critics, Feith continued "is that we were a bunch of people intent on going to war with Iraq no matter what. September 11th was a pretext. We believed that it would be easy, that we were linked up to Chalabi"-Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress-"who was arguing that it would be easy and there would not be problems in the aftermath, and so for that reason nobody planned for anything hard, and when it turned out to be hard we were left without a plan." (Chalabi's chief sponsor in Washington has been Richard Perle, Feith's mentor. Chalabi's group told Senate staff members that it had passed intelligence to one of Feith's subordinates in Special Plans; the subordinate has denied it.) Feith went on, "The Marshall Plan didn't get going until 1948. Here we are less than two years after the liberation of Baghdad, and an enormous amount of reconstruction has been done. If you say to me, 'Have errors been made in Iraq?,' I would say yes. Yes, I saw lots of things that I think I would have done-I saw lots of decisions made that I might have done differently. I would say there's not a single person in the United States government, probably including the President, who would not say the same thing." When I asked Feith to describe some incorrect decisions, he said, "A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out." Afghanistan, he said, is an object lesson in the dangers of premature judgment. He pulled out a packet of newspaper articles from late October, 2001, soon after American forces entered Afghanistan, and read from an October 28th column by Maureen Dowd in the Times: "The Northern Alliance was looking ever more feckless, even mocking the American air strikes to a reporter, saying the gazillion-dollar bombs had had no impact on Taliban troops, except to embolden them." She went on to suggest that a quagmire was in the offing. Feith put down the clippings and asked, "Where does she say, 'Oops, I guess I got it completely wrong'?" There's a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: it has been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq; Afghanistan was somewhat pacific a year after the overthrow of the Taliban. But Feith would not yield on that point. When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam's Baath Party to express their emotions openly. "But," Feith said, "they had flowers in their minds." Feith said that the Pentagon carefully considered the possibility that the invasion and its aftermath could be disastrous. He mentioned what he called the "parade of horribles" memo, drafted by Rumsfeld in October, 2002, which listed all the things that could go wrong in the invasion. "Instead of saying, 'How can we conceal from the President those things that would make him reluctant?,' we decided we had to go to him before he makes such an important decision with a list of all those things that could possibly go wrong," Feith said. Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, told me that Feith's office prepared the White House for the possibility of disaster: "We took seriously, and planned for, with the Department of Defense in the lead, a whole host of very chilling contingencies." Feith said that one of those contingencies was the outbreak of looting. I asked him why, then, the military hadn't seemed more prepared. He replied that he had written a memo on this point, one month before the war, arguing that " 'we're going to have major law-and-order problems after the war.' " He went on to say, "We sent it to Central Command. We didn't send it through the Secretary. It wasn't a policy-just spotting problems. If you ask me, 'Did you anticipate problems or did you anticipate a rosy scenario?,' I'm telling you I wrote a memo anticipating problems." When I asked Feith if his memo's message was understood by Franks and his generals at centcom, Feith shook his head and seemed to shrug. A centcom spokeswoman told me that it would be "inappropriate" to comment on communication between the Pentagon and Tommy Franks. In his autobiography, though, Franks wrote, "Rumsfeld never allowed Feith to interfere in my business. I was always thankful for that." General Pace said, "It's unfair to say that Doug was, quote, responsible, because the combatant commander"-Franks-"was responsible for drafting the plan." Feith lost other battles as well. One was a plan to train five thousand Iraqi exiles to accompany American troops in the invasion. Feith and Perle, who supported the idea, claimed that centcom subverted the plan. "Central Command saw the training of Iraqis as a pain in the ass," Perle said. "They take a jaundiced view of the locals." In the end, only seventy Iraqis were suitably trained before the invasion. Feith did not argue that a force of Iraqi exiles would be a panacea, but he said that they could have aided in translating, in guiding, and in vetting local officials. He suggested that the problems in postwar Iraq multiplied in part because the good ideas emanating from his policy operation were ignored. "My inclination was to transfer more responsibility to Iraqis early. The strategic thought was liberation, not occupation. When people say, 'You screwed up the postwar plan,' what people don't understand is that we had all kinds of plans. But when Bremer"-Paul Bremer, who was appointed by President Bush to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq-"went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn't implement. The Secretary didn't want to use the five-thousand-mile screwdriver." Several shelves in Feith's library are taken up by authors whose understanding of the world Feith, I was sure, found lacking. These were books by the great British Arabists, men such as T. E. Lawrence, John Bagot Glubb, and Harry St. John Philby. Neoconservatives, by reputation, have a certain nostalgia for the era of British imperialism, and I asked Feith what he learned from the English Arabists. "There's a paradox I've never been able to work out," he said. "It helps to be deeply knowledgeable about an area-to know the people, to know the language, to know the history, the culture, the literature. But it is not a guarantee that you will have the right strategy or policy as a matter of statecraft for dealing with that area. You see, the great experts in certain areas sometimes get it fundamentally wrong." I asked Feith if he was talking about himself, and he said, "I am talking about myself in the following sense: expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy. George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts." History may one day judge the removal of Saddam Hussein as the spark that set off a democratic revolution across the Muslim world. But if Iraq disintegrates historians will deal harshly with the President and his tacticians, the men most directly responsible for taking a noble idea-the defeat of a tyrant and the introduction of liberty-and letting it fail. Feith, like his superiors in the Pentagon and the White House, is not given to public doubt, but in our last conversation he seemed uncharacteristically humble. "When I was in Vienna," Feith said, "I went to the Ringstrasse, these enormous buildings, most of which were built twenty, twenty-five years before World War One. These buildings were built as the headquarters of a world empire, and they were built for the ages-enormous, imperially scaled buildings. They were built to last. But these people were absolutely on the verge of destruction of their empire, and they didn't see it. And that was a humbling experience. "What I don't believe in, I suppose, is certainty." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_a_littl.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_a_littl.php The New Yorker Mon, 09 May 2005 12:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: The Unbranding Joseph Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, is the Democratic Party's main spokesman on international affairs; he is also a man who, on occasion, seems not to know, when sentences leave his mouth, where they are going or what they are meant to convey. Sometimes, when he thinks that he may shock or amuse his listener, he begins by stating, "I'm going to get in trouble if I say this," or, "This is a really outrageous thing to say, but . . . " And so when I asked Biden, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one of John Kerry's chief advisers on foreign policy during last year's Presidential campaign, what advice he gave Kerry on how to convince voters that he was tough, Biden laughed and said, "I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you." Then he told me. At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger. Since the election, he has become a leader of a modest-sized faction-"the national-security Democrats," in the words of Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton-that includes the most hawkish members in the Democratic Party. Among them are Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards, Senator Evan Bayh, of Indiana, and Governor Bill Richardson, of New Mexico, along with a number of Clinton Administration foreign-policy officials, now in exile at think tanks scattered about Washington. Biden can be eloquent in defense of his party, and in his criticism of President Bush, but his friends worry that his verbal indiscipline will sabotage any chance he might have to win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008. (Biden is an interested, but undeclared, candidate.) On the question of Kerry's mettle in the last campaign, for instance, Biden told me a story that was both entertaining and illuminating but did not capture the matter with complete accuracy. On October 29th, Biden said, he was campaigning for Kerry in Pennsylvania, the state in which he was born, when he heard, on the radio, that Osama bin Laden had issued a videotape in which he belittled Bush and promised to continue to "bleed" America. Biden nearly panicked when he heard about the tape, he said, because he worried that Kerry's reaction might seem tepid or petty. His advice to Kerry throughout the campaign-which, he complained, went unheeded much of the time-was to harden his message, to focus, as Bush was doing, on terrorism alone: to sound, in short, more like the President and less like a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. "I'm listening to the radio," Biden said. " 'Today' "-here he adopted a radio announcer's voice-" 'the President of the U.S. said dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, and he said he's sure Senator Kerry agrees with him. Senator Kerry, unable to resist a dig'-that's what the announcer said, that was the phrase-'said today had we acted'-I'm paraphrasing-'had we acted properly in Tora Bora, we wouldn't have this problem.' " Biden continued, "I'm on the phone, I e-mail, I say, 'John, please, say three things: "How dare bin Laden speak of our President this way." No. 2, "I know how to deal with preventing another 9/11." No. 3, "Kill him." ' Now, that's harsh. Kerry needed to be harsh. And it was-Jesus Christ." Here Biden threw up his hands. "He didn't make any of it. Let's get it straight. None of it. None of those three points were made." This was not quite the case. In Kerry's first comment, made during an interview with a Milwaukee television station, he criticized Bush for missing an opportunity to kill bin Laden at Tora Bora, as he often had during the campaign. But, not long after that, Kerry spoke to the press, saying, "As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They're barbarians, and I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture, or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes, period." Biden, apparently, did not actually reach Kerry until that night, so Kerry made this statement without Biden's help. In any case, Biden failed to recount the denouement; leaving it out better served the point of his story, which concerned the troubles that faced the Kerry campaign and, by extension, the Democratic Party-a party that Biden hopes to see revived. It was then, Biden went on, that he realized Kerry would lose the election. "That night, I got off that trip, from Scranton, I got off the plane, Wilmington airport, only private aircraft, get off, pick up a phone, call a local place called the Charcoal Pit before it closes. They have great steak sandwiches and a milkshake. Triple-thick milkshake. And I hadn't eaten. I'm going to pass it on the way home. They're literally sweeping the floors. A woman, overweight, forty years old, a little unkempt, had a tooth missing in the side, not in the front"-he showed his flashing white teeth, to demonstrate-"walks up to me to give me my steak sandwich. 'Senator Biden, I'm so glad you're here. I've got a problem.' And I take out a piece of paper, maybe Social Security for her mother, and she said, 'I heard you're for Kerry.' And she said, 'You're so strong and he's so weak.' " Biden looked at me, to make sure I understood what he seemed to think was a point of considerable nuance. "I'm gonna tell you why I'm going to vote for someone," he said, addressing the woman of the story. "Look, you're working here tonight. If the Republicans have their way, you won't get paid overtime. When you stay here tonight, you're already closed. Besides that, what they want to do with your health care." Then he quoted what the woman had replied: "But you're so strong, and he's so weak. And President Bush-he seems strong." In the peculiar vocabulary of Washington, Democrats who wish to be thought of as preoccupied with defense issues-and no one seeking elected office wants to be thought of as anything but firm on matters of national security-are frequently described by their staffs as "muscular," or "robust," or "hard-nosed," or "forward-leaning." Republicans do not often use words like these when describing their leaders, because the muscularity of the President and his partisans is assumed, just as Democrats don't find it necessary to refer to themselves as "compassionate." The opposite of "muscular" is, of course, "weak," and it was, for a moment, surprising to hear Biden suggest-even in his marginally sly, I'm-just-repeating-what-someone-told-me sort of way-that Kerry was weak. After all, he calls Kerry a friend. (The reverse is also true: Kerry told me last week, after I briefly sketched for him Biden's critique, that he "loves" Biden and "welcomes his advice.") But Biden and Kerry are also rivals-for primacy among the forty-four members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate and, presumably, for the Party's Presidential nomination in 2008 as well. "Weak" is a powerful epithet among the Democrats, who are still staggering as a result of last year's election, which, polls suggest, seems to have turned less on such issues as gay marriage and abortion than on the perception that Kerry and the Democrats were not quite up to the task of defending the nation. And most Democrats I've spoken to in the past month have said that this issue will be a determining factor in the next election, too. To paint a rival as weak on defense is to ruin his chance for national office. As Senator Bayh put it, "If the American people don't trust us with their lives, they're unlikely to trust us with much else." Not all Democratic leaders agree that a credibility problem on national security exists. Kerry, for one, believes it doesn't. "The country had concluded that I was prepared to be Commander-in-Chief," he told me last week. The fifty-nine million votes he received, he said, should be proof enough that he was perceived as strong on the issue. "If we'd had a switch of sixty thousand votes"-in Ohio-"you'd have had a better outcome." We met in his Capitol Hill office. In the reception area stood a model, under glass, of the Swift boat that he commanded in Vietnam. Kerry appeared drawn and pale, but he was animated in defense of his campaign. "The bottom line is that, if you look at the data, the appearance of the Osama bin Laden tape had a profound impact. The fact is, we flatlined on that day. I presented stronger arguments, but there was a visceral unwillingness to change Commander-in-Chief five days after the bin Laden tape." Kerry considers himself to be a national-security-oriented Democrat-Holbrooke, too, puts him in that camp-and appeared to take no particular offense at Biden's criticisms. "I'm not going to dissect the campaign," he said. But he seemed displeased when I asked whether the Democrats had a credibility problem on defense issues, and he finally said, "Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding." By this he meant that the Democrats had to do a better job of selling to the American people what he believes is already true-that the Democrats are every bit as serious on the issue as Republicans. "We have to brand more effectively. It's marketing." Most national-security Democrats believe that the Party's problems on the issue go deeper than marketing. They agree that the Party should be more open to the idea of military action, and even preemption; and although they did not agree about the timing of the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush launched it, they believe that the stated rationale-Saddam's brutality and his flouting of United Nations resolutions-was ideologically and morally sound. They say that the absence of weapons of mass destruction was more a failure of intelligence than a matter of outright deception by the Administration; and although they do not share the neoconservatives' enthusiastic belief in the transformative power of military force, they accept the possibility that the invasion of Iraq might lead to the establishment of democratic institutions there. In addition, national-security Democrats try to distance themselves from the Party's post-Vietnam ambivalence about the projection of American power. In other words, they are men and women who want to reach back to an age of Democratic resoluteness, embodied by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. Their mission may have been complicated earlier this year by Howard Dean's victory in the race for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, although Dean, the most stridently antiwar of the major candidates in 2004, has promised to suppress the urge to comment on foreign policy. Biden could find little to say about Dean, other than this: "No goddam chairman's ever made a difference in the history of the Democratic Party." His colleague Joseph Lieberman, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus, said, "Dean was wrong on the war and what he was talking about was bad for the country. We'll see what he does as chairman. If he devotes his energies to building a party at the base, as he talked about doing, good for him. If he continues to be a prominent spokesman on defense policy, I would regret it." Lieberman is a study in the dangers of steroidal muscularity, becoming an outlier in his own party. (He has edged to the right as his running mate in the 2000 election, Al Gore, has moved leftward.) His fate was sealed with a kiss, planted on his cheek by Bush, just after the President delivered his State of the Union address. "That may have been the last straw for some of the people in Connecticut, the blogger types," Lieberman told me. But he is unapologetic about his defense of Bush's Iraq policy, saying, "Bottom line, I think Bush has it right." When I asked if he was becoming a neoconservative, Lieberman smiled and said, "No, but some of my best friends are neocons." For a Democrat who wants to cultivate an image of toughness on national security, the challenge is to adopt positions that, in some cases, are closer to those of Paul Wolfowitz than to those of Edward Kennedy while remaining loyal to the Party. This has become more difficult with the news from the Middle East over the past two months, which raises the possibility that the Bush Administration's core argument-that the antidote to Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism is democracy-might turn out to be something more than utopian theory. It is far too early to claim that the Middle East is moving irreversibly toward tranquillity and freedom. Fifteen hundred American soldiers have been killed, and thousands more have been wounded; the insurgency within Iraq-the assassinations, the car bombings, the hostage-taking-has continued unabated. But, at the same time, something appears to have been shaken loose. The Iraqi election in late January; the election in the Palestinian territories and the rekindling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; the protests of the Lebanese against their Syrian occupiers; and the move by the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, toward more direct elections have given the Bush Administration-and the neoconservatives who contribute much of its expansive ideology-its first good news in quite a while. Some of these events cannot plausibly be attributed to Bush. "This is a very lucky President," Biden said. "Why did Arafat die on his watch? I mean, give me a break." Biden and other Democrats agreed, though, that their party should not appear stingy when the news favors Bush. "The Democrats need to stand with the President when he's right," Bill Richardson told me. "His emphasis on being more pro-democracy in the Middle East seems to have galvanized some movement. The Democrats need to establish their credentials on national security, and we get hurt by reflexive negativism." Hillary Clinton says that she has been "forthright in agreeing with the Administration where I thought we could agree," but she believes that the Administration has taken advantage of Democratic support-particularly in the days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. "Joe and I and others offered our support to the President and stood unified with him in response to these attacks," Clinton said last week, referring to Biden. "The Administration saw our actions as a sign of weakness," she said, adding that it "had a campaign strategy to exploit the legitimate fears of the American people." Clinton also said that the Democrats must criticize the Bush Administration for its foreign-policy failings-of which, she said, there are many-but that they are hindered by their role as the opposition party. "It's hard to describe a Democratic Party foreign-policy position, because we're not in charge of making policy," Clinton said. "We are, by the nature of the system, forced to critique and analyze and offer suggestions." This, she said, is where Biden comes in: he has managed to sound steady on terrorism, while still being able to criticize Bush policy. "He has a good sense of smell and touch about these issues, and so I often find myself wondering what Joe is thinking and saying." Biden says he is reminded of the Party's difficult relationship with Ronald Reagan. "Everybody knew 'Reagan is dangerous,' remember? He talked about freedom, so what do we do? We say it's a bad speech, dangerous speech." Biden was referring to a 1982 speech delivered by Reagan to the British Parliament, in which he spoke of the power of democracy. Today, the Democrats are "making the same mistakes again," Biden said. Antiwar Democrats dislike the suggestion that Bush's policies will lead to a democratic Middle East. Barbara Boxer, of California, who has been one of the most energetic critics of the Bush White House (she questioned Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice aggressively during her confirmation hearing, suggesting that Rice had been dishonest in her arguments for taking the nation to war in Iraq), told me that she took "great offense" at Bush's inaugural speech. "He said that our freedom and our democracy depend on the freedom of other countries," she said. "I think that America is so strong, it has such a strong Constitution and a great history of freedom, that while we must, of course, be deeply concerned about what happens in other countries, what happens to this country is up to us. His words ring hollow because of the mess in Iraq, and all over the world. Every day, another terrible thing is happening." I asked Boxer if events in Lebanon and Egypt had changed her views. "History will judge," she said, but added that in Lebanon "the streets are flooded with protesters today"-a reference to the Hezbollah-sponsored pro-Syria demonstration-"and you wonder if maybe a little quiet diplomacy there might have produced better results." She rejects the notion that her party is not in tune with voters on national-security issues. "We almost won the election," she said, and attributed Kerry's loss to superior Republican organizing and to Republican tactics, most notably the attacks last summer on Kerry's war record. Ted Kennedy has called on President Bush to set an exit date for Iraq. He argued, in a speech delivered the week before the Iraqi election, that the insurgency is made stronger by the presence of American troops on Iraqi soil, and he compared the Iraq war to the war in Vietnam. "Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing-the hearts and minds of the people-and that is a battle we are not winning," Kennedy declared. When I spoke to Kennedy last month, he said that the election did not persuade him that the war was justified. He believes that it was fought under false pretenses, and is unconvinced that democracy can be brought by force to a place like Iraq. "How should democracy be exported?" he asked. "The First Amendment and food. We know how to grow it, and how to deliver it. The First Amendment is a pretty good starting point." Kennedy said that the United States does have national-security interests that must be insured by force, if necessary. "We need to keep Hormuz and the Molucca straits and the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal open." He does not, however, regret his 1991 vote opposing the first Gulf War. "I had not ruled out force, but I thought it was premature," he said. "I thought we ought to have tried economic sanctions. They worked in South Africa. It's breathtaking how fast they worked." (Kennedy, it should be noted, was not alone in opposing the 1991 Gulf War. At the time, he was joined by all but ten of the Democrats in the Senate, including Biden, Kerry, and the defense stalwarts Sam Nunn, of Georgia, and David Boren, of Oklahoma. Gore and Lieberman were two who voted in favor of the resolution.) Kennedy and Boxer-and Dean-are to the left of the Democratic center on foreign policy, but their views are shared by many of the Party's active constituents. According to a recent Pew poll, seventy-four per cent of Democrats believe that it was wrong to go to war; twelve per cent of Republicans opposed the invasion. (The country as a whole, including independent voters, is evenly split on the issue.) Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, the antiwar group that helped propel Dean's campaign for President, told me not long ago, "I don't see how Bush can create a state of fear in our country, and go off in a reckless rush to war in Iraq, and then take credit somehow for exporting democracy, which is a bizarre term, anyway, because democracy is about self-governance." In an e-mail to MoveOn members after the election, Pariser wrote, "It's our party. We bought it, we own it and we're going to take it back." By at least one significant measure, though, it is not Pariser's party. Few of the most frequently mentioned contenders for the Party's Presidential nomination in 2008-including Clinton, Bayh, Edwards, and Biden-belong to the Democratic Party's left. Instead, the most likely would-be nominees are at pains to appear hawkish on defense. Hillary Clinton has been particularly skillful-not only on defense issues but also on such sensitive subjects as abortion rights. While she has been giving speeches in praise of the United Nations and multilateralism, she has been careful to assert the right of the United States to act without the support of allies when necessary. Biden's views on the war have changed somewhat over the last several years-an evolution that reveals some of the dilemmas faced by the Democrats in responding to Bush's single-minded message. In November of 2002, in an interview with USA Today, Biden recalled a conversation with an unnamed chairman of a military service, who told him that a war with Iraq would be "the dumbest thing in the world." In the months leading up to the war, he often questioned the Bush Administration's timing, its planning, and the grandiose scope of its mission. But as the invasion neared-around the time when former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that he had proof that Saddam Hussein was concealing an active weapons-of-mass-destruction program-Biden said, "The choice between war and peace is Saddam's. The choice between relevance and irrelevance is the U.N. Security Council's." Biden, like nearly all Democrats, argues that the Administration's prosecution of the war has been inept. "The decision to go to war was the right one," Biden said recently, "but every decision they've made since Saddam fell was a mistake." In particular, Biden blames Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for the troubles of postwar Iraq-for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, for the failure to anticipate an organized insurgency, and for the difficulties encountered in the training of Iraqi soldiers. He told Condoleezza Rice, at her confirmation hearing, "For God's sake, don't listen to Rumsfeld. He doesn't know what in the hell he's talking about on this." Biden was once better known for his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee than for foreign-policy expertise; he oversaw the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, among others, and had established a reputation as a liberal in the mainstream of his party, and also as something of a grandstander. His run for the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination came to a sudden end when he was accused of borrowing, without attribution, from a television commercial by the former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. This embarrassment did no permanent harm to his standing in the Senate, and he has remained highly visible there. Biden sponsored the Clinton Administration's 1994 crime bill, which funded a hundred thousand new police officers for local communities and helped neutralize the "law and order" issue that had hurt the Democrats in previous years. By the mid-nineties, Biden had become more absorbed by foreign affairs, and he was deeply affected by the cruelty he saw on visits to Bosnia during the war there. He became a missionary in the cause of armed humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and, later, in Kosovo. "I came back to the Republicans and laid out the death camps in Kosovo, the rape camps in Bosnia-I laid it out in stark relief," he told me. "These guys"-the Republicans-"said, 'It's not our business.' What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn't give President Clinton the authority to use force" have now become, he said, moral interventionists. "Give me a fucking break." (In fact, there were Republican senators who supported sending United States soldiers to Kosovo in 1999, including John McCain and John Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.) Biden says that a "small faction" of the Party is mistrustful of even the occasional use of force. "There are some really bright guys and women in my party who underestimate the transformative capability of military power, when coupled with a rational policy that is both preventative and nation-building in nature," he said. He told me about a recent visit to Los Angeles, where he met with a group of wealthy liberals and laid out the following scenario: "Assume you're the President, and I'm your Secretary of Defense or State or C.I.A. director, and I come to you and tell you we know where bin Laden is, he and four hundred of his people, and they're in this portion of Pakistan the Pakistanis won't go into, and they told us not to go in. This is going to cost us five hundred to five thousand lives, of our soldiers, but we can get him. What do you do?" Biden said they had no answer. "The truth is, they put their heads down," he said. Richard Holbrooke suggests that the Republicans have boxed in the Democrats, by stealing their ideas. "The Republicans, who always favored bigger defense budgets-we were the soft-power people, the freedom-and-democracy people-now seek to own both the defense side and the values side of the debate," Holbrooke said. He believes that if the Iraq war actually does bring about the hoped-for results it might help the Democrats. "We'd be better off as a country and better off as a party if Iraq is a success and we get it behind us. The Democrats can then talk about their traditional strengths, domestically and internationally." Senator Clinton said that complaints about a lack of Democratic steadfastness are "always surprising to me, because so many of the disastrous mistakes in foreign policy over the past forty or fifty years have been made by Republicans." She went on, "I don't know all the reasons voters and observers might hold that view. I think a lot of it is unfounded, so part of our challenge is to reassert our voices with clarity in the debate on foreign policy and national security." These days, Biden is touring the country, doing something that he hasn't done since his aborted Presidential campaign, seventeen years ago: meeting wealthy donors to measure their enthusiasm for him, and accepting offers to speak to Democratic groups far from Wilmington. He is now a senior man in the Party-he has served in the Senate for thirty-two years-and, among his supporters, there is the not unreasonable assumption that the statute of limitations on the Kinnock scandal has been reached. He told me that he won't make a decision on a Presidential run for at least two years. "My honest-to-God answer is, I'm not going to go on a fool's errand," he said. "If I think I'm the horse that can pull the sleigh, I'll do it. But if there's someone else out there . . ." He trailed off. But he didn't leave the impression that he sees an overly crowded field. He has come to realize, he said, that many Democrats still haven't grasped the political importance of September 11th, and again he recalled how he had urged Kerry to keep his campaign message focussed on terrorism. Kerry, Biden said, would tell voters that he would "fight terror as hard as Bush," but then he would add, "and I'll help you economically." "What is Bush saying?" Biden said. "Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. I would say to John, 'Let me put it to you this way. The Lord Almighty, or Allah, whoever, if he came to every kitchen table in America and said, "Look, I have a Faustian bargain for you, you choose. I will guarantee to you that I will end all terror threats against the United States within the year, but in return for that there will be no help for education, no help for Social Security, no help for health care." What do you do?' "My answer," Biden said, "is that seventy-five per cent of the American people would buy that bargain." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_unb.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_unb.php The New Yorker Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:00:00 -0500