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PATHETIC REPUBLICANS, who can save you now? With all due respect to Ming the Merciless and all due deference to Sen. John McCain’s pending arrival on a Hawk-man rocket cycle in 2008, the answer is that Republicans can, and are going to have to, save themselves. To do that, what’s required is frank acknowledgment that the national majority that brought them to congressional power in 1994 is a thing of the past–no longer there, or no longer theirs.

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THE LEGAL CASE OF ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI, the so-called “twentieth hijacker” and the only person hauled into U.S. criminal court for playing a direct role in the September 11 attacks, has been a morass from the beginning. Prosecutors have struggled to shove the square peg of international terrorism into the round hole of the criminal justice system. With an erratic defendant throwing away due legal protections and at times insisting on acting as his own counsel, extensive wrangling over the use of classified evidence and access to testimony from other al Qaeda detainees, scores of court filings, rulings, and appeals, and finally a judge’s finding of egregious government misconduct during the trial, one must ask: Is this the best we can do?

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 What does Hamas’s victory mean?

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WITH HAMAS’S SMASHING VICTORY IN free and fair elections in Palestine, the case for democracy-promotion that George W. Bush outlined a year ago in his second inaugural address has been taking on water. Do we really want a political process that results in victory and legitimacy for terrorists? As Palestine goes, so might a democratic Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., given the opportunity. All of a sudden, stability–in the form of dictatorial repression keeping a lid on something worse–maybe doesn’t look so bad.

Which makes the Hamas victory an “I told you so” moment for those who have been warning about the dangers of democracy promotion from the beginning–more or less since the end of the Cold War, but especially in relation to the Arab Middle East and in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 enthusiasm for democracy promotion there. Given the rise of Islamic radicalism in the late 20th century, the secular dictators of the region and the stability their authoritarian rule provides look like a preferable alternative, runs the critique. Let people vote, and they will vote the radicals in. Such was the sense of danger in Algeria in 1991, when the army intervened to cancel further elections after the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front ran strong in the first round of balloting.

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About that supposed smoking-gun memo.

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AS LEAKED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS GO, the “Downing Street Memo” is pretty sexy. Not actually a memo but the official notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting in the British prime minister’s office, the document reproduces the thoughts and concerns about Iraq of Tony Blair and his key advisers, including his foreign and defense secretaries, his attorney general, and “C”–code for Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, recently returned from high-level meetings in Washington. Rarely do you find an open window on such a high-level discussion, especially on a matter that will take a country to war a scant nine months later.

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It’s already over, and the neocons won.

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RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the “neoconservatives” of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics’ telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States.

And for this, come November 2004, the neoconservatives must pay. The defeat of George W. Bush by his Democratic opponent–and for purposes of the critics’ argument, any Democratic opponent would do–would mean a repudiation of this neoconservative view of the world. Many Bush critics saw in Iraq a comprehensive discrediting of neoconservative policy prescriptions, including the doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, belief in the efficacy of military power in general, faith in democratization, and unilateralism. It merely remained for voters to administer the coup de grâce at the polls and the neoconservatives would be discredited once and for all.

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What gay marriage won’t change.

The Weekly Standard

IT IS POSSIBLE that at the end of the day, gay marriage will be an enduring reality, at least in some places. This troubles many people, even as others hold it up as an important element in the recognition of equal human dignity. But how much, really, will be changed by gay marriage? With all due respect, I think both proponents and opponents overstate the likely effects. Gay marriage will neither be especially dangerous to marriage as such, as opponents fear, nor will it usher in equal recognition for gay and lesbian couples, as proponents hope.

Some opponents of gay marriage take their position on the basis that homosexuality as such is morally wrong. This position provides an intellectually consistent grounding for opposition to gay marriage, but it is nowadays rarely the basis of arguments made in the public square. Instead, opponents of gay marriage generally argue that the expansion of the use of the term “marriage” to gay couples as well as the extension to them of the legal and customary rights of married couples will diminish the sanctity of marriage and weaken an institution that is of vital importance to the rearing of succeeding generations. In short, gay marriage will have a bad effect on marriages of the traditional man-woman variety.

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The Kay Report suggests he had one, and it almost worked.

The Weekly Standard

DAVID KAY’S interim report on the investigation into Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs leaves open as many questions as it answers. Exactly what was underway and at what stage of development is still unknown. But it does establish to a certainty the critical point that Saddam had every intention of reconstituting chemical, biological, and nuclear programs as soon as he could. And this, in turn, allows us to bring some informed speculation to bear on what has been one of the great puzzles of the war: What was Saddam Hussein’s strategy?

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The special difficulties – and urgency – of freedom for a tyrannized people.

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FROM THE CEASELESS and often disgraceful efforts to tease meaning out of the first two weeks of the Iraq war, two serious lessons stand out. The first is a reacquaintance with the contours of modern tyranny. Saddam Hussein is not merely a dictator; he is the head of a police state administered by an elite cadre whose principal means of control from the top down is terror. The second is a reminder of the difficulty of the larger project of which the war in Iraq is a part: the liberalization of the Middle East and the integration of Islamic society there into the modern world.

No, Saddam did not fall instantly, his military forces and his regime collapsing into shambles. Nor were United States and British forces initially greeted as liberators by smiling Iraqis waving American flags. Iraqi resistance was stiffer than anticipated, with fighters in some skirmishes holding out to the last man despite superior U.S. firepower. Irregular resistance took the form of suicide bombing attacks and fake surrenders. And more U.S. forces had to be deployed in preparation for the assault on Baghdad.

The gloom that attended these developments and the unseemly glee with which they were seized upon by the Bush administration’s opponents are clear indications that somewhere along the line, the hope of a swift Iraqi collapse–which one might expect to be fairly widely shared among all those not actually rooting for Saddam–did indeed become an expectation of swift collapse. We need to take a serious look at what gave rise to that expectation and why it was wrong.

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The case for civilian control over the military and the need for reform in the intelligence community.

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THE FOLLOWING are selected quotations (approximately two-thirds of the total) included by Seymour M. Hersh in his New Yorker article Offense and Defense (cover date April 7, 2003, posted on the New Yorker website March 31, 2003, ten days before the fall of Baghdad):

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Why a war against Saddam is crucial to the future of deterrence.

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THE QUESTION of what to do about Iraq–and moving down the track, what to do about North Korea–typically gets described as a choice between deterrence and preemption (or perhaps better, “prevention”). If Saddam Hussein can be contained and deterred from using weapons of mass destruction, as some contend, then there is no need to go to war against him. If, on the other hand, we cannot be confident that he can be deterred, then preventive action is necessary. Reaching the latter conclusion is generally considered a doctrinal leap–a declaration of no confidence in the theory and practice of deterrence.

This idea of a radical break with past practice and past theory is embraced by both sides–by the advocates of deterrence and by the partisans of prevention. In the case of the former, the movement from deterrence to prevention represents a rejection of time-tested means of dealing with adversaries in favor of the always risky course of waging aggressive war–and losing in the bargain the justification of necessity, thus imperiling the moral legitimacy of our cause. For the advocates of prevention, it’s good riddance to deterrence. Now that an alternative is available, who needs a doctrine that keeps the peace only at a level of utmost precariousness?

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