Symposium: Older & Wiser?
OLDER & WISER? A symposium on the occasion of THE WEEKLY STANDARD's 10th anniversary The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and...
...The Bosnia and Kosovo missions, for instance, showed how much good "humanitarian" interventions could do, while the slaughter in Rwanda laid bare America's shame for not intervening...
...Rather than treating human beings as economic actors and lauding the entrepreneur as conservatism's paragon, they are discussing the values, assumptions, and mental landscapes that are passed down unconsciously from generation to generation...
...Urban underclass culture and values are still very much alive...
...Should we intervene in Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, or Kosovo...
...in 1976, there was Jimmy Carter, the naval officer who turned into a wimp...
...Based on these experiences—and my own study of our history, undertaken for my 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, which showed that the United States has a far more extensive record of foreign interventions than is commonly believed—I have come to argue for an expansive American role in safeguarding global security...
...Americans were so very obviously angry about the harm done by misconceived immigration policies that some politician was sure to come along and reclaim the issue from the xenophobes, just as Richard Nixon had reclaimed law-and-order from George Wallace in 1968...
...Conservative think tanks like AEI, the Manhattan Institute, and many more (e.g., the Shalem Center in Israel) rank among the most important intellectual centers in the world...
...Just as we did in the late 1990s, we look to American 21-year-olds for excellence and greatness...
...Irwin M. Stelzer Regrets, I've had a few," sings Frank Sinatra...
...Islamic ethics were evolving in a catastrophic direction...
...This view is a caution to conservatives who think that positive trends, from crime's decline to religion's resurgence, have resulted from cultural self-repair...
...editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Max Boot Over the past 10 years, my views on the uses of American power have evolved considerably...
...Tune in to that most politically informed and engaged network, NPR, and listen to the evident relish with which its newscasts and current events programs recount misfortune, inequity, and suffering worldwide...
...Imagine if the United States enforced its drug laws the way it enforces its immigration rules...
...This is Saddam Hussein's regime," Butler wrote, "cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction...
...It was hubristic and immodest, and Republican politicians had their hats handed to them in ways that reverberate still...
...Talk of amnesty and guest-worker programs is not only premature, but profoundly improper...
...Yet my Damascene journey was largely complete by the time The Weekly Standard came along in 1995...
...When a period of above-trend economic growth followed the brief recession, and additional revenues streamed into the Treasury's coffers, they were not used to restore balance to the federal budget...
...Recklessness would weaken us, and we need strength to pursue our ideals...
...Even to be "politically informed and engaged" is probably to be of the devil's party...
...So it is with some discomfort that I must acknowledge that I've changed my mind perhaps more than most in my lifetime...
...They prefer culture to commerce...
...But there have been many other developments...
...How utterly sure I was that it would reveal the naked political perfidy of the Clinton administration, which was resisting important entitlement reforms and spending restrictions that the nation surely wanted and certainly needed...
...Conservatism is not without its own delight in misery...
...I was more sanguine on that count, but we both overestimated the poverty culture's hold on welfare recipients...
...Four years after that, they nominated a hawk (sort of) who turned into a wimp, and got shellacked four years later...
...forces evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, my post-Vietnam diffidence about the exercise of force also disappeared, and I became a firm believer in the liberating power of American arms (and wished that it had been demonstrated all the way to Baghdad...
...Baldly stated, the lesson is that policy matters most...
...You notice that your friends who understand this best and live up to it are the ones with the most fulfilled and satisfied lives...
...He had campaigned and won as a "new kind of Democrat" who could build a bridge to the 21st century, and then coax the donkey across it, as he signed the welfare reform bill and went into Bosnia...
...Refugee admissions should remain generous—the United States, Canada, and Australia have a special role to play as the ultimate refuge for people and groups under threat—but asylum should be focused on situations of true and acute danger and should not be allowed to expand into yet another route around the law, as has happened in Europe...
...Their responses follow, in alphabetical order...
...Four years later, they nominated his veep, a big government dove in love with identity politics, and had the worst defeat ever...
...It is not only peaceniks who believe in peace...
...In truth, of course, not everything changed overnight...
...I thought values would matter most...
...The main conservative magazines (such as this one) have never looked better...
...I recall broad bipartisan support for removing Saddam right up to the eve of the war...
...The grease rubbed off, too...
...When it intercepted a shipment of drugs, it would charge the smuggler—and then release the drugs back onto the market for resale...
...But to be inclusive, culture must be multicultural...
...In 1972, there was George McGovern, a World War II fighter pilot who turned into a peacenik...
...If we believe our own claims about a right to life possessed by all people, then we have a responsibility to help vindicate the rights of those who are unable to protect themselves in instances of genocide, mass killing, and ethnic cleansing...
...That it must be defended at home and abroad with constant vigilance, vigor, and, if necessary, with force...
...They have been numbered, weighed, and found wanting...
...God has made us free men, sovereigns of our own affairs, and sole experts on minding our own business...
...Moynihan had no love for the Clintons, whom he thought much more interested in power than in reality...
...In 1994, Newt Gingrich had received 119,000 votes in a single district in Georgia...
...It was enormously difficult then to stomach the historical nonsense that one often heard from foreign-service officers at the Department of State, from senior U.S...
...and then decides on slowing the economy a bit, and knows how to tap on the brakes—all will be well...
...Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London...
...It wasn't the arrival of regular payments from the Neocon Central Office or the Global Zionist Conspiracy (somehow those checks have never reached my account...
...I recall being particularly affected by the book Butler published in 2000 called The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security, in which the chief U.N...
...You begin to discover that there are deep ties and obligations across the generations...
...If the American way of life (or "Western civilization") is worth defending, and it is, that's not just because we are Americans (or Western in origin or orientation), but because of the substantive content of our way of organizing political and social relations—the classically liberal character of our open, pluralistic, democratic, bourgeois societies...
...But in these 10 years I've come to see better than ever, too, that this nation and its people, ably assisted by my own, will prove equal to the task...
...Like Francis Fukuyama, I thought history had ended back then, that we were on a more or less preordained glide path to ever widening political and economic freedom, that the self-evident triumph of our free model was so overwhelming that the big challenges of the future would simply be the costs of managing the transition...
...Remove it from its symbolic grave and rebuild it above ground, and for God's sake add some words of tribute and thanks...
...Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author, most recently, of Snobbery and Fabulous Small Jews...
...On September 20, 2001, I joined many others in another letter to President Bush, in which we endorsed then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement that Saddam was "one of the leading terrorists on the face of the earth...
...a social democrat, I called myself, a believer in the mixed economy at home and a global balance of power and even of ideology abroad...
...They had lost Congress, but they had a president who, whatever his faults, was in touch with reality...
...The leading political figure in Washington was no longer the president, Bill Clinton...
...But the political moment has indeed changed, and so have the responsibilities of being a governing conservative...
...I certainly never based my judgment on American intelligence, faulty or otherwise, much less the intelligence produced by the Bush administration before the war...
...But peace is always a particular peace, the peace of our particular justice, not universal or perpetual peace...
...Politics' insistence upon involvement in every human activity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is more anti-Sabbatarian than golf...
...In 2004, the economic divide between the Republicans and Democrats was greater than in all the previous elections in my lifetime...
...The attack had its preliminaries now visible from hindsight, but nothing seemed to predict the appalling success for evil that occurred...
...I wasn't sure where the merits lay...
...He was no JFK—except in the wrong ways—but at least he seemed headed, if slowly, in that direction...
...Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology...
...I learned one key political lesson from the calamitous confrontation in the fall of 1995, which is this: There is a huge divide in this country between people who follow politics closely, either as an avocation or a career, and the vast majority of Americans who don't...
...They are on the way out...
...Liberal Democrats' decades-old pattern of deficit spending (including massive social spending), their big regulatory regimes and bureaucratic structures (plus new ones birthed by Republicans), and perverse intergovernmental grant-making systems (with their bias against qualified religious nonprofits and grassroots groups) remain...
...To have this, one must go beyond setting aside awkward questions and become non-judgmental—actively nonjudgmental with a compassion that embraces differences in the Other...
...Following the seismic 1994 elections in which Republicans won 52 new seats and control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades—and in which the Senate went Republican as well—political people were sure that the balance of power in Washington had shifted decisively to Capitol Hill...
...David Brooks I've certainly been wrong a lot over the past decade...
...It surprises me a bit that not everyone reacted this way to September 11...
...No one side, left or right, has a monopoly on doubters or straight-ahead men...
...You worry about how to transmit your values to the next generation...
...But the last decade has clarified the relationship between American responsibility abroad and American virtue at home...
...I was never seduced by the siren song of isolationism, but between realpolitik and what might be called "conservative internationalism"—the doctrine more popularly (if perhaps incorrectly) known as "neo-conservatism"—I was effectively neutral...
...But, oh, the implementation...
...Sure, we all like to take refuge in John Maynard Keynes's acid response to a sneering critique of his inconsistency and remark: "When the facts change, I change my mind...
...Instead, a spendthrift Congress and a veto-shy president proceeded to squander the proceeds, and more, on bridges to nowhere and subsidies for—get this—rich corn growers and profit-laden oil companies...
...The New York Times Book Review has changed for the better since then...
...The Social Security system is no way to honor thy father and thy mother...
...Why do some groups succeed and others fail...
...After each loss, they have the same argument, which involves the same gestures, and ends the same way...
...In our time we have those professing faith in enlightenment who want peace at any cost and those professing faith in Islam who want war on every occasion...
...Declare war on al Qaeda following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and some incendiary rhetoric from Osama bin Laden...
...Our natural human desire for justice returns, however, in the dislike of the multiculturalists for those who insist on justice: They are the ones who must be excluded...
...It appeared to many, including me, that an Ataturkist approach— enlightened dictatorship ushering in a secular, democratic, liberal order—was the more likely route for a democratic evolution in Arab countries...
...What a tumble...
...On which we must be clear: Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, along with everywhere else, matter in the first instance not just because of our interests, but because of the people there...
...That's democratic politics for you...
...Techno-optimism turned into techno-fear: We worried that our inventions were coming back to destroy us, and that the destructive power of four conventional airplanes would soon be followed by the apocalyptic power of weapons of mass destruction...
...Odd but politics, that least scientific of human activi-ties—"Political science," my friend Edward Shils used to say, "with the 'science' understood as in Christian Science"—requires the most certainty on the part of its practitioners...
...Over the past decade, the will to enforce immigration rules has collapsed to something close to zero...
...You cannot believe in justice without believing in the viability of justice, and that means justice enforced and justice in peace...
...Contributing editor Tod Lindberg is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review...
...Eeacenik peace is not really for everybody as it claims...
...It said that if nations could not agree that was based on justice they could at least agree on the benefit of trade on universal with one another, putting aside questions on which they could not agree...
...The idea that executive power could be exercised from Capitol Hill was the great delusion that gripped Washington following the 1994 elections...
...Oil money, notably in the form of Wahhabi-funded religious scholarships and stipends, and the strategic eminence that the United States helped give to Saudi Arabia, degraded the Middle East's more humane and forgiving ethics, descended from the Ottoman empire...
...Who ever dreamed that 10 years later, his party would be back where it had been 10 years before him, almost as if he had never existed...
...By the 1990s, the double assault of Wahhabism and Arab nationalism (another historic love of many foreign-service officers in the Near Eastern Bureau) had made the modern Arab Middle East a truly ugly place...
...The Republican takeover—which is to say, political success—dealt the mortal blow...
...That's not the way I recall it...
...On the big issues of the late 1990s, I still think the impeachment of Clinton was a reckless endangerment of the Constitution and that the Haiti and Kosovo wars were exercises in moral self-regard, to little end...
...But the peace liberals of our day are not friendly to commerce, which brings selfish benefit unequally...
...Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times...
...inspector, after years of chasing around Iraq, wrote with utter certainty that Saddam had weapons and was engaged in a massive effort to conceal them from the world...
...Oh, Lord, how wrong I was...
...In 1968, they split in half over war and values, nominated an old liberal, and the doves all walked out...
...Noemie Emery One thing I changed my mind about in the last 10 years is the Democrats' future...
...What do you do, Sir...
...Since 1995, I have changed my mind on certain welfare, crime, and government reform issues...
...professor of government at Harvard...
...I recall support being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives...
...Anyone who's been paying attention will have felt forced to adjust his view of the conservative movement since then...
...He predicted that doing so would result in millions' falling into abject squalor...
...Apparently, even from the grave, policy rules...
...Waiting for an Arab Ataturk had become a lethal cul-de-sac...
...It is shaped—if I were a Marxist I might even say determined —by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone's been asking what I think about...
...The expansion of NATO was a signal success, while the unwillingness to treat al Qaeda more seriously and to put the American military on a wartime footing was a notable failure...
...It would make it as easy to relabel illegal drugs as legal as it now makes it for illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses and other identity papers...
...There are several new conservative book publishing houses...
...Defending the country against, say, gay marriage or affirmative action (or promoting them, as the case may be) is a second-order issue...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most intelligent man in the United States Senate during the past half century, was asked, at the close of his career, to introduce, and by doing so suggest his support for, Hillary Clinton as the candidate seeking to fill his Senate seat...
...That there is nothing inevitable about its advance...
...Ten years ago it was evident that the Saudis, and the Wahhabi religious establishment to which the family is wed, had gone far to destroy the tolerance traditional in Sunni Islam throughout the Middle East...
...The fact is that the United States has a single immigration policy, of which illegal immigration is regarded by the authorities as simply the lowest-paid component...
...Nor are their equivocations always welcome...
...And, like so many conservatives in Washington, how I had waited for the moment when, at last, there would be a true confrontation between the Big Spenders and the Rugged Individualists that would finally lift the veil of Beltway secrecy on the rottenness of the federal budget...
...To claim that one's political activities are the will of God is to worship Beelzebub, as Osama bin Laden has demonstrated...
...Wrong...
...That letter, too, was signed by Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, Stephen Solarz, Martin Peretz, and many others...
...Their justice, however, tries to overcome the distinction between friend and foe so as to include everybody...
...They had what looked like a great team of horses, with Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, and of course Clinton...
...Back then, I was already concerned that the skill level of legal immigrants had dropped off sharply since 1970...
...Yet despite all of this, it was intellectually difficult to move past the fear of another Islamic revolution...
...What made up my mind...
...Then there is economic policy...
...Twenty-plus years ago, I was a fairly predictable tribune of the British left...
...He and his allies were trying to maintain some kind of threshold of intellectual seriousness, too...
...military officers attached to the Middle East-centered Central Command, and from executives of American oil companies, to wit: The Saudi royal family was a great friend of the United States, and Saudi Islam was a traditional faith that did not threaten its neighbors...
...Barring a massive increase in church-anchored early outreach, I predicted, those bred by this extreme moral-poverty culture might drive crime back up by the middle of the present decade...
...Cultural despair, meanwhile, gave way to cultural resolve: We affirmed that our modern way of life was not only worth defending at home but worth promoting abroad...
...About a year later, the Senate passed a resolution, cospon-sored by Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, providing $100 million for the forcible overthrow of Saddam...
...Books are the center of intellectual life, New York is the center of book publishing, and it seemed insane that conservatives should allow the field to be dominated by two left-liberal weeklies...
...So long as they won elections, U.S...
...I remember listening to Madeleine Albright compare Saddam to Adolf Hitler and warn that if not stopped, "he could in fact somehow use his weapons of mass destruction" or "could kind of become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction...
...On one big question I consider myself a sadder but wiser man this last decade...
...have you changed your mind in the last 10 years-and why...
...Gerad Baker, U.S...
...Instead, there's been a radicalizing of this graduate-degreed class in the Howard Dean/MoveOn.org direction, pulling the Democratic party over to the left...
...I suppose any philosophical tendency, as it acquires power and popularity, will simplify itself, define itself downward...
...Four years later, they nominated a new liberal, and the hawks all walked out...
...And I awaited the moment when some brave politician would stand in front of the Vietnam memorial (a black slab in a pit) and say "Tear down this wall...
...But what he and I and everybody but Bill Clinton seemed to realize was this: In 1992, Bill Clinton had received 45 million votes across America...
...is coauth^^ (with James Q. Wilson) of American Government: Institutions and Policies (Houghton-Mifflin), now in its tenth edition...
...the failure to provide our troops with the proper armor, a problem that persists to this day...
...it is serious but semi-contained in places (like Ehiladelphia) that belatedly instituted targeted youth-violence reduction policies in only some police districts...
...To loudly call for separation of church and state is to miss the point...
...But he did it...
...This is especially true given that, in politics, the Lord who is so loosely sworn by is Mankind...
...I am right behind...
...Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...For the United States to be hit in a manner so viciously effective was quite unexpected, and it put me in an extraordinary anger that has not subsided...
...Without redistribution politics would have no political support...
...Back in 1995, I was only in my mid-20s, and writing primarily about issues like telecom regulation and tort reform for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal...
...Political vanity is unshakable...
...I concluded, mid-brood, that there were really only two regions of the world where the United States had no serious interests: sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia...
...Because of our desire for justice we can never be content with partiality, but at the same time we can never overcome it...
...When the Cold War ended in 1989, so did the last vestiges of doubt I'd harbored about the moral and political superiority of American-led freedom...
...When it comes to having a role in politics, that would be the Other Fellow...
...The sum and substance of politics was expressed in the 1860s by Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a prescient Russian radical: "Man is god to man...
...Late last year, the New Republic's Eeter Beinart urged a purge of the left, and couldn't even convince his own colleagues...
...the doubters make the more charming lunch companions...
...The one looming exception, I thought, was the growing cohort of children living without adequate (or any) adult supervision, and sometimes severely abused, in places where predatory street violence was at record rates...
...In their great fear of Iran's radical revolution—whose chiliastic appeal had provoked a nearly successful murderous assault upon the royal family in the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979—the Saudis went into hyper-drive promoting Wahhabism, their state creed and the most lethally anti-Shiite and anti-Western form of Sunni fundamentalism...
...We argued that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq...
...O'Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author, most recently, of Peace Kills (Atlantic Monthly Press...
...Greenspan conceived a policy that set the nation on a path to sustainable, non-inflationary growth, and implemented it—and he did it his way, ignoring the inflation-targeters, the model-builders who think they can reduce policymaking to a set of equations, and the politicians who wanted him to raise interest rates faster, or not at all...
...It was blatantly obvious in Iran, where the revolution's democratic and theocratic aspirations were in a death struggle, and the latter were clearly losing, among the people and the clergy...
...No, we must not be reckless...
...Liberalism in its 18th-century phase had a notion of universal peace that was based on universal peace universal commerce...
...We need to attend also to the needs of those who do not have the advantage of living in societies like ours...
...In fact they are much more satisfied than the people who are just following the thin freedoms of mobility and choice...
...David Frum is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD David Gelernter Ten years ago it seemed impossible that conservatives would enter the zoo-house of American culture with hose and broom and put things back into decent shape so a normal person could go inside and not be overwhelmed by the fumes of unregenerate anti-intellectualism, anti-Americanism, and sheer hatred of art, literature, and religion...
...So it was no surprise in 2004 when they came up with John Kerry, their ideal war veteran, famous less for what he did in Vietnam than for what he did after, when he turned against the war and the military, and accused fellow servicemen of terrible crimes...
...Or maybe I have changed...
...Conservatives are far less culturally complacent than I feared...
...If the person who can conceive a policy knows how to implement it—in Greenspan's case, sees a need for liquefying the financial system in the face of a crisis, and knows how to do it...
...I also thought politics would no longer be driven by economic class differences...
...My own thinking, since that's the question here, has evolved in this direction: The immigration laws need to be enforced...
...This thought has obviously occurred to a lot of people all at once...
...But the underlying point is that conservative writers are now spending a lot more time trying to understand the substratum of human behavior...
...But the image has changed from the young entrepreneur building billion-dollar software in his dorm room to the young soldier leading a platoon in the desert...
...The purpose of conservatism is to guard the sovereignty and get out of the capacity's way...
...But the events of the past decade—indeed, of the past 10 or a dozen decades—have proven me wrong...
...and when Clinton and Gore won, it seemed they had traction...
...This bothered me...
...But Sinatra concludes his semi-lament on a high note: "I did it my way...
...So was I (intellectually) fully formed by the time THE WEEKLY STANDARD arrived in 1995...
...We must defend ourselves...
...Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, and the Algerian military junta were all, so it seemed to me, better than the alternative: Islamic militants who would bring an even less liberal order...
...The perversions of these regimes were already evident—all had, through both oppression and support, given rise to nasty strains of Islamic fundamentalism...
...John J. DiIulio Jr...
...advantage in the post-Cold War period, I became a (slightly late) convert to the virtues of the Reagan-Thatcher ideological revolution and was steadily convinced that the United States and Britain were laying the foundations for the triumph of Anglo-Saxon free market economics...
...We were asked what issues we've changed our minds about...
...Comedy aside, "all the trouble in the world" struck me as a pretty good description of what the United States would have no choice but to deal with for the foreseeable future—welcome exceptions duly noted...
...By now, such comparisons are banal, but at the time, there was much fresh in them to ponder as one tried to get a fix on what the world looked like...
...For those of us raised on European, especially Anglo-Saxon, history, which underscored (and esteemed) the slow evolution of democratic institutions and sensibilities, it was particularly hard to see the building blocks for democratic societies in the Muslim Middle East...
...Who could have dreamed it was all an illusion...
...A sudden, successful attack by evil men is always a shock...
...There's a lesson there, I suppose...
...One day later, everything changed, or so we thought...
...Each change suggests the same broader lesson...
...Dictatorships that both encouraged and suppressed Islamic militancy had in great part given us Osama bin Laden and his new diehard holy-warrior creed...
...The peaceniks reveal this in their bumper stickers that say that if you want peace, first get justice...
...The world seems a very different place today...
...How I craved it...
...The Democrats are becoming the party of people who have reason to be anxious about the future—because they are divorced or because they live in shrinking parts of the country...
...It was simply the march of events that was decisive...
...Bill Clinton had his little embarrassments, Al Gore lost his mind in the Florida recount, and Joe Lieberman is perhaps the one man in the universe liberals hate more than Bush...
...Which brings me to Alan Greenspan, the soon-to-be-gone chairman of the Fed...
...And as for adultery, there was, and there may be still, Bill Clinton...
...From a movement that once lauded individual choice, it is now a movement preoccupied with family stability, civil society, and national cohesion...
...Americans' propensity to squabble over partisan trivia has, if anything, grown, particularly on the left...
...At each convention, they have millions of flags, zillions of pledges, and talk a great deal about God, faith, and values, and no one believes them...
...Then came the implementation: the inability to stop the massive looting that followed the successful occupation of Iraq—you remember, the stuff that happens...
...Our colleague E J. O'Rourke published a book in 1995 called All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty...
...In March 2003, I signed a bipartisan letter in support of the war with a number of former Clinton officials, including Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg, Ambassador Peter Galbraith, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Ivo Daalder, Ronald Asmus, and Robert Gelbard...
...I suspect opportunity issues (wage stagnation, dropping social mobility, fights over trade and globalization) will play a bigger role in American politics over the next several years...
...Gerard Baker It's never easy to acknowledge changing your mind on an issue of importance...
...Read Rick Santorum's book, which treats the family, not the individual, as the basic unit of society...
...Although they have their uses, doubters are not finally altogether comfortable in politics...
...My portfolio of political beliefs has changed little, aside from a major sell-off of libertarian absolutism, which this decade has exposed as overvalued...
...Why are some people raised in environments that transmit one set of values while others are raised in environments that transmit another set of values...
...I remember William Cohen appearing on television with a five-pound bag of sugar and explaining that that amount of Anthrax "would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C...
...Its intellectual origins were always in evidence and almost entirely praiseworthy...
...But the most important action of political conservatism is not to politic but to conserve—to save things, in particular people, to preserve them from evil, which is to say politics...
...Eerhaps you become more tolerant and open-minded...
...They say that the West likes life and they like death, meaning that the West is given to peace because it is too attached to life...
...Supposedly, even baby boomers who once trashed traditional morals and ballyhooed big government have learned their lesson (blue-state boomers being slow learners...
...On several occasions in the mid-90s, I addressed newly minted House members on the subject of government reform...
...Republicans learned this lesson again, to their sorrow, in the impeachment drama a few years later...
...I'll admit that Tony Blair, who drove me up the wall from the time he took office in 1997 until the Kosovo crisis in 1999, now strikes me as the towering political figure of our time...
...weapons inspectors, led first by Rolf Ekeus and then by Richard Butler...
...But that's not enough...
...But the emergency seems to have quieted from orange to yellow, or to eggshell pink (or something), and the culture bosses of the left had better enjoy their cultural predominance while it lasts...
...Does it look like God's handiwork...
...For it was not Bill Clinton and the Democrats who were blamed for the shuttering of the government, but Newt Gingrich and the Republicans...
...Then you get more tolerant as you begin to realize people don't always behave as you expect...
...Several big wheels of establishment journalism have made themselves ridiculous (with a little help from conservative blogs...
...Gingrich was one of those political people, as were all the people around him and all the people in the Washington press corps...
...Tocqueville, a doubter, complained in his Souvenirs that almost inevitably when he got up to speak in the National Assembly complexities and qualifications rushed in on him, rendering him indecisive and unpersuasive...
...None of these things ever happened...
...Beginning in the mid-70s, mass opinion about government became progressively more conservative...
...The medium really is the message...
...Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Joseph Epstein I have changed my mind politically over the past 10 years only in not making it up as quickly and easily as I used to do...
...what they had in common was their utter certitude (which, as of the moment, seems much more warranted in Friedman's than in Galbraith's case...
...I still know with some precision what I dislike but have become less certain about what I like...
...The peace liberals have their counterpart in the Islamic fascists, who oppose peace as such, as if they were prepared to enter a perpetual war...
...Expand NATO to Eastern Europe...
...I noted this many years ago when listening to frequent debates staged between Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith...
...The best description of conservatism's evolution comes from David Willetts, the Tory ME He tells the tale as a personal journey, but it really applies to Anglo-Saxon conservatism as a whole: "You start by making your own way in the world and what appeals to you above all is the language of flexibility, mobility, opportunity...
...And while loose talk about revisiting the Great Game of nineteenthcentury empire-building in Central Asia was newly in vogue, it seemed obvious to me that the only sure way to avoid coming out a loser in the Great Game was not to play...
...Needless to say, after 9/11 we realized that we do indeed have interests in Central Asia...
...Back then, the genealogy of the conservative movement was still traceable...
...I know better now...
...But even after Reagan, and Gingrich, and the Republican capture of both the White House and the Congress, and the increase in the number of states controlled by Republicans, and the rise of popular conservative mass media—even after that surge in conservative power and influence—a great deal hasn't changed...
...Today youth crime is back in the news, but the problem is reemerging in places (notably Boston) where such policies, including street-level police-probation-preacher partnerships, have not been fully sustained...
...The total number of immigrants to be accepted should be set in line with the birth rate...
...But many parents—Cindy Sheehan notwithstanding—are proud to see their sons and daughters abroad, bearing responsibilities that a great democracy like America still seems willing to shoulder...
...The unspoken gleeful message is, "More occasions for more politics...
...Witness our enjoyment of the junior senator from New York...
...Marshall McLuhan was righter than anyone ever would have guessed...
...My father recalled for me a line from Thucydides, which Pericles delivered to the Athenians in the difficult second year of the three-decade-long war with Sparta...
...The American belief that technology can set us free remains in force, as we look to embryo research, mood-altering drugs, and genetic self-control to perfect the imperfections of human life...
...Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the well-known omelet chef, when told that they were killing the workers in Germany, replied: "Good...
...But errors are not as important as evolution...
...It seemed to me then, though, that the worst was probably past...
...The reasons to worry about American modernity still exist—divorce is still rampant, human cloning is around the corner, pornography is available on our cell phones, and the elite universities remain havens for mediocre minds with oversized egos and fragile spines...
...From 9/11, the salient event of the last 10 years, I relearned the distinction between friend and foe...
...The optimism was largely technological: the birth of the Internet, the beginnings of the biotech revolution, the age of turning work into play, the promise of great wealth overnight...
...When everybody is included, peace will be universal and perpetual because nobody will have a claim that peace as it stands is unjust to him or to his party.This would be peace with a capital E, and it would super- Liberalism in its sede all the particular peaces 18th-century resulting from particular claims to justice...
...Legal immigration should be reoriented as a way to recruit skilled labor and mitigate shortages in specific labor categories...
...P.J.O'Rourke Politics is evil...
...If you're free for lunch, give me a call...
...It is the economically liberal bit which brings many people to Conservatism...
...No one dared or cared to start a new conservative book-review weekly in New York...
...armed forces to take advantage of a "strategic pause...
...Maybe it would be more accurate to describe it as an opening of the eyes...
...When U.S...
...In the end, I, too, climb on the bus, but with faltering step and usually only after being nudged from behind...
...What a spectacle for theory, what a problem for citizens...
...From a movement that once emphasized economic freedom, it is now a movement emphasizing that economic freedoms must be embedded in a strong society...
...The federal government would forbid private employers to use drug tests, as it now forbids them to ask non-English-speaking employees for proof of legal residence...
...Conservatives seemed to care about politics exclusively...
...For justice demands to be enacted and made good...
...But then, in 1995, I wasn't part of the foreign policy world...
...Yes, for our own sake, we do indeed need to face down those violently opposed to our liberal order...
...They revealed most political stuff as simply not worth getting riled up over...
...It can feel as if you are fighting a battle against not so much the state as an incredibly crude commercial culture that tells them there is no more to life but consumption...
...Bismarck, the very reverse of a doubter, in his twenties given an important diplomatic assignment, exclaimed that he knew his duty, and whether or not he had the understanding to bring it off was not his but God's concern...
...Since the Tribune died in the '60s, the field has been grossly unbalanced...
...The president is great at policy conception, less good at taking the steps needed to see that conception through to birth and maturity...
...Of course we cannot walk away from politics any more than we can take a hike from original sin...
...The crisis began when Saddam blocked U.N...
...That's the social liberalism...
...So, too, the quin-tessentially realpolitik decision to leave Saddam Hussein on the throne in 1991 appeared to be a major blunder...
...Some cold warriors had become isolationists, while others had become realpolitikers with a narrow view of American interests...
...from Clifton White to Dick Morris...
...Presidents always do, because that's how the Constitution was structured...
...Defending the country against, say, bias at the television networks is an irrelevancy that I would not take 20 minutes away from my novel-reading to worry about...
...Eric Cohen Optimism and pessimism were both easy to come by in the 1990s, when this magazine was born...
...The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia...
...New York was meant to have one book weekly on the left (the Times) and one on the right (the Herald Tribune...
...Be sure to click here for my latest...
...The result has been more killing in one century than in all the preceding centuries combined...
...It was the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich...
...I am the same man and do not alter, it is you who change, since in fact you took my advice while unhurt, and waited for misfortune to repent of it...
...Covetousness and stealing define redis-tributive politics...
...Conservative institutions, conceived for combat, have in power become self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists...
...I confess that I was ambivalent about all these issues, which divided so many in the foreign policy world...
...You see the market as one way in which all this diversity can be respected...
...Even as many "neocons" still worry about the problems of modern progress, they rightly embrace America's special obligation to defend modern life against its mortal enemies...
...You won't want to miss my appearance tonight on...
...I thought that conservative Republicans would govern very differently from liberal Democrats...
...The pessimism was largely cultural: Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote of the "de-moralization of society," Robert Bork of "slouching toward Gomorrah," First Things of "the end of democracy," William Bennett of the "broken hearth...
...September 11 opened my eyes to a widespread internal Muslim evolution that I should have seen before...
...If Africa was a slough of incompetent dictatorial government, brutal politics, rampant disease, and outbursts of genocide, well, this was tragic, but it did not greatly impinge on the United States, and we were busy with other problems, such as containing Saddam Hussein, facing down Slobodan Milosevic, securing a Western orientation for the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, keeping China from taking Taiwan by force, coping with Russian backsliding and the problem of loose nukes, maintaining access to oil, and so on...
...the inability to keep the lights on and the air conditioners whirring in Baghdad...
...Culture aside, policy can drive social trends and determine government's trajectory...
...Christopher Caldwell The history of this magazine is cloven pretty neatly down the middle by September 11, 2001...
...Contributing editor John J. Dilulio Jr...
...Ten years ago, I believed that they had one...
...I was concerned too about the rise in illegal immigration, despite the tough new enforcement measures promised as part of the immigration amnesty of1986...
...Andrew Ferguson THE WEEKLY STANDARD was conceived in the mad adrenaline rush that followed the Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994...
...My mid-90s mantra "Build churches, not jails" still applies...
...So: I can't say I have changed my mind on this issue or that issue—though I probably have...
...and senior Clinton administration officials, especially Eresident Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Al Gore...
...I don't think anyone else did, either...
...I had formed my impressions during the 1990s and entirely on the basis of what I regarded as two fairly reliable sources: the U.N...
...President Clinton and his top advisers had declared Saddam's continued rule intolerable, and I recall joining several others in a letter to the president in January 1998 insisting that "the only acceptable strategy" was one that eliminated "the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction...
...If we believe all people have a right to liberty, then we have a responsibility to help them overthrow governments that oppress them and build something better...
...They do not want merely to destroy and expel the West but also to replace it —after which there would be peace of a very different kind from that which we intend...
...The Republicans are becoming the party of those who have reason to be optimistic about the future—^because they are married or because they live in growing parts of the country...
...In the modern era politics has taken the place of mere tyranny...
...So herewith a generic apology, one that covers a multitude of errors: I have confused the ability to formulate sensible policy with the ability to implement it...
...Eoof went the anti-Semites, out went the Randians, the Falangists, the eugenicists, nutters of all kinds...
...Again, the right policy: tax cuts in the face of a recession, and long-term cuts to stimulate risk-taking and work...
...The two agreed about absolutely nothing...
...towards foreign-service officers—who went to school to learn Arabic and could, if so inclined, leaf through the voluminous tracts of Wah-habi literature published by the Saudi government and distributed worldwide—it is harder to be charitable...
...The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that births to immigrant mothers now account for one out of every four American births...
...Everybody knew the complicated and politically treacherous subject of inherited group traits was always down there...
...Just as the Founders intended, representatives in the House speak for local interests in Washington, while senators speak for state interests...
...Observe our national politics...
...Local governments would be building open-air drug markets the way they now build hiring halls for "day labor...
...And that, at least, is reasonable grounds for optimism...
...That meant "a willingness to undertake military action," and it meant eventually "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power...
...Then you have children and you start thinking about the environment in which they will grow up...
...The Democrats nowadays seem like a bad movie, or rather a rerun, with the old script they have played many times...
...John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is a columnist for the New York Eost and author, most recently, of Bush Country...
...The New York art world no longer defines its mission exclusively in terms of fomenting hatred for white American males and Christianity...
...I never imagined they would so quickly revert to the status quo ante...
...It was the 10 years prior to 1995 that changed my mind...
...At a time of political crisis, nonpolitical people will gravitate toward the president and invest their faith in the presidency...
...Was I wrong...
...The big turning point for me, I suppose, was the confrontation between Saddam and the Clinton administration that began in 1997 and ended in the bombing of Iraq at the end of 1998...
...In response, moderates founded the Democratic Leadership Council, to wrest the party away from the liberals who had been losing with such regularity...
...In politics, the non-doubters, the straight-ahead men, get the job done...
...Even as late as September 2002, I remember Al Gore saying, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, that Saddam "has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country...
...Clinton forth as the Democratic party's candidate...
...This is exactly the opposite of what I expected: liberal or dictatorial secularists' leading the way to democracy in the Middle East...
...Within the next generation, some are bound to become full-fledged, degree-granting institutions with graduate students desperate to get in...
...I hope nobody notices that I keep a transfer in my back pocket...
...I would have welcomed a far broader geographical expanse in which the United States did not have to remain engaged, where we were not committed as the guarantor of security or protector of interests vital to us and to others happy to leave us the trouble and expense of defending them...
...Both the realpolitikers arguing against these interventions, and the neo-Wilsonians arguing for them, had good points...
...Over the past decades, conservative thinking has evolved and its center of gravity has shifted...
...Nothing has changed with the Democrats for 37 years...
...I visited both the United States and the Soviet Union for the first time in the space of a single year in the mid-1980s, and any temptations toward political or cultural relativism were instantly swept away by the experience...
...Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr...
...A symposium on the occasion of THE WEEKLY STANDARD's 10th anniversary The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of1994...
...It was not, however, chiefly on the calculation of national interest that my thinking then was wrong...
...But 20 years later, they're still wrestling away, locked in trench warfare...
...Harvey Mansfield At my age it is difficult to learn, but it's still possible to relearn...
...It implies that the Islamic fascists have a notion of justice, too, and therefore a notion of peace...
...but conservatives didn't seem to care...
...And the problems posed by "failed states," such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, loomed newly large as well...
...But something more corrosive is also at work...
...culture could go hang...
...I begin to resemble, I fear, the man who is vehemently against picketing but doesn't know what to do about it...
...While my economist friends predicted the steady attrition of the U.S...
...Especially significant was the change in once-great religious schools like al Azhar in Cairo, a onetime staunch and successful opponent of the hatred that marauding Saudi warriors and their missionaries had always brought with them for two centuries...
...And if one bothered to look, the same process, not as far advanced, was happening in the Sunni Muslim world...
...Seen government spending numbers lately...
...It is not easy to reason with unreason, but let me try...
...Times were good, but many good conservatives felt miserable...
...Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the "author" on the cover...
...Before 1970, foreign-born Americans on average earned higher wages than native-born over their lifetimes...
...Now it is pretty much unavoidable...
...Buckley's purges weren't merely for the sake of ideological purity...
...The distinction between friend and foe arises from human partiality, from our bias on behalf of our own...
...And so, I was wrong...
...P.J...
...Those, I now know, are two different things...
...the unwillingness to back tough talk with sufficient troops...
...In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I rightly argued that certain policies (incarceration of chronically violent adult felons, "broken windows" policing, tighter probation and parole requirements, tough-love prevention practices, and related community and faith-based programs for youth), in tandem with target-hardening measures (increased private security, gated communities, and so on), would bring crime rates way down and, if sustained, keep them down...
...Clinton had only elided the splits, not resolved them...
...More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any...
...The policy remains the right one, in my view, but I no longer confuse that with our ability—perhaps willingness is a better word—to implement it...
...John Podhoretz Oh, Lord, the government shutdown of 1995...
...And even as many virtue-loving Americans lament the excesses of freedom in our everyday lives (the "right" to abortion being paradigmatic), they rightly celebrate the benefits of freedom in our political regime...
...Neither side gains, neither side loses, and neither side gives up an inch...
...But the attacks on the World Trade Center lowered the temperature of almost all my political beliefs to way below boiling...
...Politics could hardly function without bearing false witness...
...David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Reuel Marc Gerecht Ten years ago, I believed reluctantly in the unavoidability of dictatorship in the Middle East...
...These people really hate President Bush and the religious, corporate class (their natural rivals within the elite) he represents...
...Certain of the battles fought in the pages of The Weekly Standard in the half-decade before have been revealed as irrelevant in the half-decade since...
...We all had the same information, and we got it from the same sources...
...I had generally conservative instincts—anti-Communist, pro-military—^but I did not have strong opinions on many specific foreign policy and national security issues facing the post-Cold War world...
...Which is worse, selfishness or inequality...
...It's ironclad...
...Even as many conservatives oppose excessive modernism at home (seeing Judeo-Christian religion as a corrective), they rightly celebrate the birth of modernism abroad (seeing many radical Islamic institutions as the problem...
...This is what Thomas Sow-ell, Charles Murray, Samuel Huntington, and even Bernard Lewis, in their different ways, have been writing about...
...The point is the ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power...
...Unexceptional, to Reaganites and latter-day Keynesians alike...
...Abolishing the federal holidays to honor Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays was a mistake and should have been undone...
...That a brilliant literary critic should have devoted nearly all his time to politics symbolized the long-lasting political state of emergency...
...after 1980, they began to earn substantially less...
...Talk radio was already important then and is vastly more so now...
...You recognize how wide is the range of human motivation and how much knowledge and wisdom is dispersed...
...For example, I wrote a book in 2000 called Bobos in Paradise in which I predicted that the highly educated upper middle class suburbanites in places like Palo Alto, California, and Westchester County, New York, would lead us into an age of Clintonian, Third Way politics, reconciling left and right...
...But the Saudis had played a special role...
...The Bush foreign policy, based on protecting America by encouraging the spread of democracy, and by taking the fight to the terrorists is, in conception, terribly attractive, especially when personified in its early days by the swashing of Don Rumsfeld's buckle...
...September 11 demolished this view (which, admittedly, was pretty shaky...
...Wrong...
...In the useful division of political thinkers between those who are certain of their positions and those whose clarity is clouded with doubt, I fall among the latter...
...But the drop was far greater in places (like New York) that adopted and stayed with effective anticrime policies than in places (like Baltimore) that did not...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD David Frum Ten years ago, I thought of immigration as a technical and law-enforcement issue, easily dealt with...
...Graven image is as good a name as any for the fiat money by which politics operates...
...Ten years ago I thought politics was misguided...
...By dying for the freedom of others, Americans might recover an understanding of the public burdens of freedom as well as the private opportunities...
...David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times...
...It is also at odds with what the late, great Daniel Eatrick Moynihan taught about culture's primacy over both politics and policy...
...The current story of Jack Abramoff's lucrative self-dealing, involving as it does such movement stalwarts as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, may seem lunatic in its excesses, but the excesses aren't the point...
...Like wine with food, immigration is splendid as an accompaniment to natural increase, dangerous as a substitute...
...Eric Cohen is editor of the New Atlantis and resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...But in truth we'd like to think that our insight into human events is broad enough not to be undone by the arrival of inconvenient new facts...
...But Moynihan, like me, was wrong to oppose restricting welfare benefits and instituting work requirements...
...Observe politics through the ages...
...Not only does it interrupt the routine and rhythms of peace (which include of course much partisan infighting), but it also challenges our belief in justice...
...Though Clinton had taken only 43 percent of the vote in that election, and was not a particularly strong president, in direct person-to-person combat against Newt Gingrich he had an incomparably stronger hand to play...
...The political and social impact of the government shutdown was completely the reverse of what I had expected...
...It is the president, and the president alone, who serves as the representative of all the people in the nation...
...Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well...
...But well-enforced welfare policy changes nonetheless cut the welfare rolls and elicited a rise in pro-social behavior...
...A democratic reformation of Shiite thought was well underway...
...On September 10, 2001, the cover of this magazine declared "Farewell to American Greatness," with little reason to believe that "compassionate conservatism" would inspire its return...
...Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Robert Kagan Today, if you read even respectable journals, it appears that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq...
...Today the cultural mainstream is still left-liberal, but things are changing fast...
...Whatever this is, it isn't progress...
...It would be nonsense then to talk about "illegal" drugs, wouldn't it...
...The 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has kicked this democratic discussion into high gear...
...It passed with 98 votes...
...In the end, Pat Moynihan got on the bus...
...births to illegal mothers, for one out of every ten...
...Americans wanted the federal government up and running, and they didn't like the image (admittedly fed to them by the liberal media) of a petulant GOP having a temper tantrum because it couldn't get its way...
...The commitment to the non-enforcement of the law is so strong that not even 9/11 could shake it...
...And so today the United States is debating yet another amnesty and a guest-worker program that would in effect open the borders to pretty much anybody who wished to enter...
...How difficult it must have been for him to put Mrs...
...From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation...
...There's a new conservative newspaper in New York (who would ever have believed it...
...Defending the country against attack is a first-order issue...
...that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago...
...Ten years ago, I thought they could change, or I thought Clinton could change them...
...Fox has made it safe to watch TV news again...
...More recently, I have developed strong views on many of these subjects...
...No doubt many decent suburban parents would rather see their child at home, flush with opportunities...
...Decrease the size of the U.S...
...We are endowed with an individual capacity to improve our understanding, better our circumstances, and laugh at Howard Dean...
...Is this a change of mind...
...from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman—all in little more than a generation's time...
...Lucky him: only a few...
...The obvious thing Willetts is saying is that the Burke and Oakeshott side of conservatism is just as important as the libertarian, free market side, if not more so...
...This should not be terribly surprising because in that time the world situation has changed and my own situation has changed...
...After all, the big split between the parties, it seemed, was between those who went to church and those who didn't...
...Likewise, without taking the Lord's name in vain...
...To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead...
...As in Shiite Iran, in Sunni Arab countries democracy will eventually succeed if the traditional community—particularly the religious classes and what is often called, somewhat inaccurately, the fundamentalist movement—becomes part of the great democratic debate...
...In fact, both adult and juvenile crime rates continued to fall after 1995, just as they had in the early 1990s...
...The time always arrives in politics when one must swallow one's doubt, get in or out, stay on or get off the bus...
...Conservative blogs like Power Line and many others have knocked the news game sideways...
...You might say, to borrow a phrase, that The Standard was "right from the beginning...
...and it's doing fine...
...Adlai Stevenson, during his 1952 and '56 presidential campaigns, caused many a plane to circle airports over and over because he couldn't get the speech he was composing just right...
...And Norman Podhoretz has published a book about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible...
...Observe politics around the world...
...Worse is better [for the Revolution...
...There is more than a little truth in this criticism, but again it goes too far...
...The magazine seemed like a good idea at the time, and— you can decide for yourself how much to discount for self-interest here—even now it seems like a good idea, maybe now more than ever...
...Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Tod Lindberg I remember walking down by the Capitol one day in 1999, brooding about empire—specifically, the power position of the United States on the eve of the new millennium as compared with that of the Roman Empire 2,000 years before...
...For 40 years William F. Buckley and his colleagues at National Review had undertaken the periodic and exhilarating work of mucking out the stables...
...Why is there never a call for separation of state and coven...
...Oil company executives and military officers who rarely know Arabic or much Islamic history can be forgiven their views...
...inspectors' access to various suspect sites, and the Clinton administration launched a campaign to prepare the nation for war...
...American creativity seemed boundless, but the American character seemed questionable...
...The signatories included Francis Fukuyama and Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, among others...
...It's a lucky stroke for conservatives that we never believed in progress anyway...
...As acts of Congress, they stand as the supreme law of the land, and state and local governments cannot be allowed to ignore and defy them...
...By October 8, 2001, the cover of this magazine was already making "The Case for American Empire," with growing reason to believe that President Bush would embrace the twin tasks of regime change and nation-building that he had rejected one year earlier as a candidate...
...The editor's invitation to set down the issue or issues on which I have changed my mind is followed, mercifully, with an order to keep the apology to 500 words...
...A decade ago several problems seemed representative...
...And politics violates the other nine commandments as well...
...Under the circumstances, it's not much of a surprise that the threshold Buckley tried to maintain has collapsed...
...I know that freedom is as vulnerable as it is precious...
Vol. 11 • September 2005 • No. 1
