Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
The Corner on National Review has been tossing around the idea, now that John Kerry appears to be the Democratic presidential frontrunner, that his Vietnam service may re-ignite old arguments about that war. It's an interesting thought, since the two sides on the original arguments have largely gone on to remain politically opposed, although on different questions.

My view on the question is that the great flaw in the Vietnam war was lack of judgment (the worst of all "ills afflicting men," according to Sophocles.) In retrospect, the decision to fight a war that might have been expected to do more harm than it could have been expected to prevent, the conduct of the campaign, the acceptance of an attritional strategy, and the domestic political considerations that led the Johnson administration to escalate the war were all ill-considered decisions that caused great harm.

But it's not for lack of judgment that the most vocal of the Vietnam protestors, and their latter-day ideological heirs, faulted America for its participation in that war. Rather, they largely defined the war as arising from unjust motives. It wasn't that the decision to fight was ill-considered, but rather that we were on the wrong side. Even Martin Luther King, right on most other subjects, couched his opposition to the war in terms that described America as an aggressor. Others accused the United States of seeking economic advantage (although it would seem that we had all the rice and coconuts we needed).

Part of this problem, I think, went back to McCarthyism and its embarrassment of the anti-Communist cause. The unspoken rationale was that a communist insurgency really wasn't that bad; that it was essentially a revolt against oppression and therefore shouldn't be opposed. (Arthur Schlesinger once remarked that if McCarthy and his merry men had gone after undercover Nazis, nobody would have objected.)

One of the defining distinctions between a conservative and a liberal is that, by and large, the former views Nazis and Communists as equally evil totalitarians, while the latter tends to see some features in Marxism that at least partially mitigate its butcher's bill (which is often attributed to the ideology's never having been "properly applied.") Keep in mind that I'm referring here most to the hard Left, as opposed to the average NPR-listening, PBS-watching conventional wisdom liberal, who probably hasn't thought things this far through.

So the conservative is inclined to think that opposing communist attempts at conquest or insurgency as a good thing in principle, with the degree of opposition to any particular campaign a matter for judgment.

Things get interesting because a nation's exercise of collective judgment is affected by the conduct of individuals, which conduct may be immoral in a way the actual exercise of judgment is not. In other words, government officials may place career advancement or ass-covering foremost, and may be less than truthful in their presentation of facts, or less than forthcoming about the reasoning behind their conclusions. There was enough of this in the 1960s military and government culture that there are individuals who do bear moral guilt for what happened there.

But that moral guilt does not attach to the United States as a whole, because it's hard to see how the ultimate American aim in Southeast Asia was anything but legitimate, even noble, namely, the prevention of the spread of a tyranny with a clear record of inflicting human misery. Maybe the "domino theory" was flawed; maybe communism wouldn't have spread beyond Indochina, or if it had it wouldn't have mattered. (Although the "dominos"in Laos and Cambodia did topple in short order after the fall of South Vietnam, with horrific results in the latter case, and I'd imagine there would have be plenty of Thais, Malaysians, and Indonesians who'd take exception to the idea that it didn't matter if they'd gotten the Khmer Rouge treatment.) Yes, after 1989, it became conventional wisdom that communism was inherently flawed and couldn't endure, but that wasn't clear at the time.

And even if one described the Vietnam war as "somebody else's civil war" (and it was largely a case of one country conquering another, the Viet Cong having been largely destroyed by 1968), it's not as if liberal conventional wisdom opposes intervening in civil wars; witness Bosnia and Kosovo. (Although the hard-core Left is happy to oppose those things, too; witness Michael Moore on Kosovo -- i.e. we were dropping bombs on people who hadn't done anything to us. Of course, he complicates things by endorsing for president Wesley Clark, who commanded the Kosovo expedition Moore once condemned. Keeping up with these people isn't easy.)

Bottom line, after extended unedited stream-of-consciousness ramble -- The problem with the Vietnam war was poor national judgment, not malice or greedy motive. No nation will ever be free from mistakes, although a free nation, by preserving the means of correction from within, will probably make fewer of them.

This brings me to the theme which a lot of Democrats are making with respect to the present war -- i.e. that their patriotism is being questioned for their opposition to the war. I hear a lot more Democrats insisting that their patriotism is not in question than I hear Republicans actually questioning it; in fact, nobody has yet to provide me with an actual example of a Democrat's patriotism being impugned by a major Republican figure. (On the other hand, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean have both explicitly impugned President Bush's patriotism.) Maybe they protest too much; maybe they've found it to be an effective political tactic, or maybe the Left has never gotten the British "Khaki Election" of 1902 (in which the Liberals were characterized as being on the side of the Boers in the Boer War) out of its collective mind.

Most of the Democrats, especially the celebrity kind, who protest this phantom questioning of their patriotism, in fact have nothing wrong with their patriotism. They may be underinformed or sophomoric in their criticisms, but it's entirely possible to be an underinformed and sophomoric patriot; there are plenty of those on the pro-war side. However, I do think there comes a point where a person's criticism of his country becomes so constant, one-sided, and malicious, that to call him a patriot -- a friend of his country -- is to destroy entirely the meaning of friendship.

While a friend may see his friend's faults and strive to correct them, a friend does not automatically take the opposing side every time his friend has a quarrel. A friend does not invariably believe the worst of his friend, and impute to him the worst possible motives in every case. A friend's friendship is not conditional on his friend's conforming himself in every respect to what the first person thinks the friend should be.

So while a dissenter may well be a true patriot, and in many cases one who does his country the highest service, I also think it's fair to say that someone who thinks behaves towards his country as described above, is not his country's friend. Especially when, in ascribing to his country the worst possible motives, he's consistently wrong. I may occasionally misjudge my friend, and do him wrong, suspecting him of some weakness; if so, it behooves me to apologize and try to avoid making the same mistake. But the chronic, self-proclaimed dissidents who wrongly judge America time after time, and will only think kindly and behave decently towards their country if it is a socialist utopia, are not patriots if the word is to have any meaning.

Maybe that doesn't mean anything. Maybe to be patriotic is nothing more morally significant than to like chocolate. A true liberal internationalist might well say that patriotism, far from being something that one should object to have questioned, is actually a negative trait. But then, that person should not object when his patriotism is questioned; if patriotism is a bad thing, then someone who questions yours is paying you a compliment.

Ironically, after having written way too much about this, the practical result of the above is negligible. If a person is actually no patriot, that's his business. I believe patriotism is one of those deeper things that is strongest when least spoken of. Patriotism, or the charge of its lack, should not be used as tactical leverage in political maneuvering or reasoned debate. A democratic country operates best, and makes its most informed and legitimate decisions, when discussion of the country's course is reasoned and deliberative. To accuse a critic of a particular policy of lack of patriotism does nothing to refute the merits of his argument -- and it's the whole point of democratic debate is that it takes all available facts and viewpoints into account. (By the same token, of course, mature Democrats ought to avoid waving the bloody shirt of "you're questioning my patriotism.")

posted by Thomas at 1:31 PM

 
Seems that a Google search of "The Proud Duck" (make sure to include the quotation marks) brings up this blog one step from the bottom of a list of eight, just below some kind of lesbian porn website. What that kind of website has to with ducks, proud or humble, I'm sure I don't want to know.

Nancy Pelosi, in her response to the State of the Union speech, repeated the tired line about the Iraq campaign being "unilateral." Maybe President Bush needed to mention the seventeen other Coalition nations he left unnamed in his speech. (Iceland deserved at least an honorable mention.)

You would think that a party so full of people who pride themselves on their intelligence -- and a representative from the Bay Area, in particular, which place is even intellectually snobbier than most -- would have a hard time calling "unilateral" a campaign that had the support of three of the five most powerful militaries in Europe. That's not to mention a host of other countries that, great or small, are providing real help that a Democratic party that prides itself on respecting the little guy shouldn't belittle.

More State of the Union thoughts: President Bush's speech was generally good, especially the foreign policy section at the beginning, but too much of the domestic-agenda portion reminded me of Bill Clinton -- lots of harmless little feel-good initiatives, each costing a few million or billion hear or there.

The worst part was that line about immigrants taking jobs that Americans won't do. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Immigrants take jobs that Americans won't do at the low-ball price that employers want to offer. For the right price, you bet I'd pick peaches. No student debt required, for one thing. Does nobody mow lawns, or bus tables, or work construction, or pick produce in New Hampshire, or any of the other states where the illegal immigrant presence is minimal? Of course not. It's just that these things don't get done by the equivalent of an indentured-servant class that you can underpay, and depend on the state government to pick up the slack. posted by Thomas at 7:14 PM

 
OK, so posting every two months probably isn't the best way to cultivate a devoted Net following. Must improve.

I find myself these days having imaginary arguments with the Liberal Partner in my former firm, who I once told that our political differences were accounted for by his growing up among Utah redneck Republicans (and I hasten here to point out that since he grew up in Ogden, the rest of Utah won't take offense or exception to the "redneck" designation), while I grew up within range of the mighty wind that rushes from Costa Mesa north to the great vacuums of Hollywood liberals' minds.

I tend to win the imaginary arguments -- but then I thought I tended to win the real ones. (Have since learned that political arguments with one's boss may not be all that great a method of cultivating job security. Note that I did say "former law firm.") The Liberal Partner's backstop argument, as far as I could tell, was the phrase, "Listen to yourself!", preferably delivered at higher-than-average pitch and volume. I think the expanded translation of that phrase works out to "Every respectable person knows the argument you're making isn't ... well, respectable."

Anyway, the argument I was having (and winning, of course) with the Liberal Partner today was a rematch of one of our real arguments, in which he was trying to argue that bombing Serbia and the odd embassy into rubble over the civil war in Kosovo was a good thing, and using force against Iraq wasn't.

Instead of addressing the merits of the particular question, I examined our argument in terms of someone's definition of a liberal as a man who's incapable of taking his own side in an argument.

Now, the Liberal Partner wasn't the kind of liberal that holds that the United States can't do anything right. (See Chomsky, Clark (the loopy former attorney general, not the mildly loopy candidate), et al.) That kind did, of course, protest bombing Slobodan Milosovic, even if not as loudly as it later protested bombing Saddam and his merry men.

Anyway, my thinking was this: Men are fallible; institutions and nations are human institutions; therefore, no nation will always be right in its foreign policy. The converse is also true; no nation will always be wrong, if only because fallible men must fail to perfect even depravity. Presumably even the Khmer Rouge managed to install a stop sign or two correctly. So the "my country is always right" and the "my country is always wrong" crews are both foolish.

Is it likely that those occasions on which one's country happens to be wrong will always occur within the periods in which the opposing political faction is in control? One party may be more objectively right than the other, but neither party, being a fallible human institution, will always get it right. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that there will be occasions where a thoughtful person will conclude his country is in the wrong of an international quarrel.

That's why I thought the Liberal Partner's fairly enthusiastic support of the Kosovo war, and his absolutely enraged opposition to the Iraq war, was not reasonable. Both wars were, I think, close cases (in a way that the war in Afghanistan was not): Neither had the approval of the United Nations; both were opposed by significant allies and several other nations; both were "optional," in the sense that the world wouldn't necessarily end if they hadn't happened, and there was some ambiguity to the justifications for both conflicts (i.e. in Kosovo, there was "ethnic cleansing," but it was happening on both sides -- and still is being done now, but exclusively by the side we backed, to the rate of about a thousand murdered Serbs a year -- while in Iraq, while the regime murdered hundreds of thousands of people, most of the victims were already safely dead in the regime's crushing of the rebellions of the early '90s; by 2003, the Saddam regime's evil had, as far as I could tell, settled down to "only" an occasional murder of a dissident or a dozen.)

I ultimately came to the conclusion, if a little tentatively, that the Kosovo war was the right thing to do. As for Iraq, the facts seemed pretty simple to me: Evil dictator has been stupid enough to break a cease-fire and give the world legal grounds to get rid of him; we shouldn't let that slide. Now, there was a difference in the intensity of my support for the Democrat-ordered Kosovo war and the Republican-ordered Iraq one, which can probably at least in part be attributed to my political alignment (although 9/11 may have also lowered my willingness to let things slide generally). But it's interesting that this difference is so much less than the difference between the Liberal Partner's "Kosovo is a great humanitarian duty" and "Iraq is an evil, conquering resource grab to be compared to Hitler's aggressions." posted by Thomas at 7:19 PM