The smart politics behind Bush’s new cabinet agency proposal.

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WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T have more than one good reason to do something? Of course, the proposition that disparate federal agencies with homeland security responsibilities should be combined into one massive cabinet department ought first to be judged on the contribution such consolidation will make to security. But if it also happens to be smart politics — a way for a wartime president to get some control over a domestic agenda that was badly adrift — well, what’s wrong with that?

Democrats have been warning since shortly after September 11 that George W. Bush would risk the bipartisan support he enjoys in the war against terror if he tried to leverage his high job-approval ratings to advance a conservative domestic agenda. Meanwhile, Democratic strategists looking at upcoming congressional elections were urging their clients to concede the war to the president and open up differences on domestic policy in areas of traditional Democratic strength. Here again, if Bush opposed Democratic initiatives or propounded conservative policies of his own, he might be vulnerable to the charge that he was trying to exploit the war.

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Unlike the simplistic Europeans.

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AT THE END OF THE DAY, the truest picture of the European response to the war on terror may emerge from, for example, the fact that Germany has dispatched elite special forces troops to fight alongside Americans in Gardez, Afghanistan. That a Social Democratic-Green coalition would send German soldiers abroad to participate in an exercise in “regime change” marks a historic change, one befitting the stakes to which al Qaeda raised international terror on September 11. But it’s a long way to the end of the day, and we must therefore be prepared in the meantime to run a gauntlet of other, far more distasteful European responses.

Leaving aside the hard-core anti-American left, whose musings have become the more feral in inverse proportion to their consequence, the central tenet of mainstream obnoxiousness is the proposition that Americans are “simplistic” (French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine) in their approach to the problem of terror, and that what underlies European sophistication is greater European experience of terror. We were hit on our soil only now for the first time, and we are lashing out in response to this sudden sense of our own vulnerability. Europeans, having long known the scourge of terror, are more realistic both in their expectations about managing it and in their ability to live their daily lives despite the ultimately unavoidable threat of it.

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Valor and victimhood after September 11.

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THERE ARE no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then–can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”?–the yellow ribbon has been pressed into service as a symbol of hope amid adversity, an expression of longing for the return of those who are not home. In accordance with past practice, the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers could surely have been an occasion for yellow ribbons: thousands lost and feared dead, the uncertainty of the families of the missing, the conclusion growing inevitable that even the bodies might never be recovered. And in fact, in the first day or two, one did see a few yellow ribbons, usually in a collage with a photograph of someone missing, held desperately by a loved one still in shock. But then, without comment, the yellow ribbons were gone. All the ribbons now are red, white, and blue.

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The administration’s legal reasoning is open to question (but closed to scrutiny).

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TO DATE, THE BUSH administration’s handling of the war has been superb. Its handling of the law of war has not. From the president’s November 13 Military Order — calling for trial by military commission of certain non-citizens accused of terrorist activities — to the current dispute over the legal status of detainees at Guantanamo, the administration has drawn sustained criticism from civil rights and humanitarian organizations for its handling, proposed or actual, of those caught in the terrorist net the U.S. military has so effectively spread.

There is a sense in which humanitarian and civil rights groups exist in order not to be satisfied. And the administration’s supporters, of whom there are many, have risen to denounce the attackers. But while the ACLU and Human Rights Watch are never going to be friends of the Bush team, their animus doesn’t automatically make their legal arguments specious. As it happens, the administration has made a telling moral and political argument that the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees in Cuba are receiving the treatment they deserve. But legally, while it may have a plausible argument, the administration hasn’t bothered to make it.

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Al Qaeda as an NGO.

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President Bush has described the struggle against terrorism in which we are engaged as the first war of the twenty-first century. Presumably he means more by that designation than a nod to the calendar. He is also referring to a new kind of war. But what kind? Well, the novelty is that the United States finds itself at war for the first time against a non-governmental organization.

Such conflicts are not entirely without precedent. Governments have often fought guerrilla movements bent on their overthrow, for example. And history also offers examples of conflicts in which military force has been systematically deployed against non-state actors, for example in the suppression of piracy and the slave trade, or, more recently, in the “war” against drug trafficking. But still, the current war against terrorism is different.

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There’s no reason to stop fighting during the Muslim holy month.

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ON NOVEMBER 16 begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and some Muslims and Islamophiles at home and abroad are suggesting that its arrival ought to mark a pause in the U.S.-led coalition’s war on terror: Finish what needs doing in Afghanistan by then, they say, or risk offending Muslims worldwide.

It would indeed be a fine thing if we could get Osama bin Laden, roll up his al Qaeda network in its entirety, and otherwise successfully complete the prosecution of the war on terror by November 16. Given that this does not seem terribly likely, however, we are left with the question of what, if anything, to do differently come Ramadan.

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The McVeigh case and the triumph of victims’ rights.

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OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a federal prison in Indiana, the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty law. Another first: Families of McVeigh’s victims and survivors of the attack received an invitation from federal authorities led by Attorney General John Ashcroft to watch a live closed-circuit broadcast of the execution. As of the May 1 deadline, some 285 (of about 3,000 eligible) had indicated they would turn out.

Everything about the Oklahoma City bombing resists efforts to put matters into context: the spectacular quality of the crime, its unique devastation as an exercise in mass murder, its utterly unrepentant perpetrator, and his grotesque ideological motivation. For an illustration of the exceptionalism, note that 22 percent of Americans in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll both believe that McVeigh should be executed and oppose the death penalty. Some death penalty opponents have insisted that McVeigh’s is exactly the sort of hard case that requires opponents to stiffen their resolve against capital punishment. On the other hand, there is nothing obviously irrational about opposing capital punishment in general while allowing for an exception in the case of someone who murdered 168 of your countrymen.

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All those lawyers on Team Gore ended up litigating their way to defeat.

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AN ENDLESSLY FASCINATING topic of conversation about the 2000 presidential election has been why Al Gore wasn’t winning big as the nominee of the incumbent party in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He had four aces, and he still couldn’t rake in the pot. An equally fascinating question, it turns out, is how he lost the postelection legal maneuvering. Although the thought will be an awful one for Bush supporters to contemplate, there, too, Gore might have had a winning hand — and certainly had a better hand than he played.

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Gore and Lieberman continue to lead the Democratic Party, ever so cautiously, to the right.

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From the time he emerged as a serious presidential aspirant in 1991, Bill Clinton consciously set himself to the task of remaking the Democratic party, cracking it loose from the ossifying ideological liberalism of FDR and LBJ in an effort to broaden its political appeal.  Clinton was a New Democrat in 1992. And notwithstanding a few major political missteps along the way, most notably a health care initiative that was too big for his own party to chew in Congress, he remains a New Democrat to the end, the first and foremost practitioner of the Third Way politics that has brought left-leaning parties back to power all over the world.

From the beginning, the politics of the Third Way has been greeted by skepticism from both left and right — as one might expect, since Third Way adherents define themselves at least in part in opposition to both left and right. Conservatives have sometimes refused to take it seriously as anything but old-style liberalism flying a false flag. Liberals have wondered whether it was anything more than a slogan providing political cover for an unwelcome lurch to the right.

Does the Third Way have content in its own right? Or is it primarily a strategy of political positioning aimed at carving out an electoral majority from the center-left to the center-right?

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House Republicans, it seems, won’t be punished at the polls after all.

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IT SEEMED LIKE a pretty big deal at the time, the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton. And so it was, as political spectacle, as a search in the U.S. Constitution for its fundamental meaning, as the climax of a long-running clash between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president. It will rank as one of the great political stories of the twentieth century. Yet now — not even 18 months later, as the first election since Clinton was acquitted fast approaches — it’s all but impossible to find so much as a lingering wisp of the Sturm und Drang of impeachment. In the 2000 elections, impeachment is the dog that isn’t barking.

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