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NRO Catholicism

I've had a long weekend and don't have time to parse this whole piece myself, but just glossing over it disgusts me and makes me ashamed of my own Catholic background.

NRO is continuing its ignoble effort to argue that abortion is a litmus test for Catholic voters but killing innocent civilians in Iraq who have not provoked attacks is not. Thus, John J. Miller's bishop, in telling his congregation for whom God allows them to vote, notes that:

"If we do not uphold and protect human life in its beginning at conception, there will be no life to uphold and protect thereafter. ... To be a faithful Catholic necessarily means that one is pro-life and not pro-choice. ... No Catholic can claim to be a faithful member of the Church while advocating for, or actively supporting, direct attacks on innocent human life. In reality, protecting human life from conception to natural death is more than a Catholic issue. It is an issue of fundamental morality, rooted in both the natural law and the divine law. ... In our common life together in society, it is sometimes not possible to avoid entirely all cooperation with evil. This may be the case in electing to office our state and national leaders. In certain circumstances, it is morally permissible to vote for a candidate who supports some immoral practices while opposing other immoral practices. This is called material cooperation with evil. In order for material cooperation to be morally permissible, however, there must be a proportionate reason for such cooperation. Proportionate reason does not mean that each issue carries the same moral weight; intrinsically evil acts such as abortion or research on stem cells taken from human embryos cannot be placed on the same level as debates over war or capital punishment, for example. It is simply not possible to serve and promote the common good of our nation by voting for a candidate who, once in office, will do nothing to limit or restrict the deliberate destruction of innocent human life." [emphasis mine]

Disgusting. The sea of blood washing over Iraq is just a niggling "debate." I hope that my former high school masters (Benedictines, they were), haven't descended to this despicable state. Just shameful and regrettable in the utmost.

Preemption

I've been working on a long, long, journal article that is somewhat revolutionary in its conclusions. I'm starting to get scared somebody's going to beat me to the punch.

So I'm sticking a flag in my idea right now, without defending it in the slightest, although it's a remarkably anti-establishment argument.

I'm roughing it out presently, and hope that it will be published in the near term -- weeks, not months. It's an idea that I'm hearing that lots of people are considering, but are unable to do so publicly and openly, because of think tank and foundation politics and the general aversion to radical controversy. But I'm scared somebody's going to steal my idea, so here it is:

Not only might the existence of a nuclear Iran fail to harm the U.S. national interest, but in fact it might help it. In a big, profound, far-reaching, remarkable, historic way.

There you go. Hopefully you'll be reading the comprehensive argument (from me) rather soon.

The Sociology of the George W. Bush Cult

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.—"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

Cut from Slate. Title credit goes to Murray Rothbard.

"The Danger Is, That We'll Get Hit Again" Part Deux

As I mentioned previously, I think this article is the most damning indictment of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror. They turned down 300 al Qaeda members offered to us by Iran just days after the Axis of Evil speech so that they could continue to put pressure on the Iranian regime.

But now the growing consensus is that they didn't worry about Zarqawi until he was massacring Iraqi soldiers and suicide bombing U.S. troops:

News reports—including, most recently, one in the Wall Street Journal this week—make it clear that military leaders and the CIA felt Zarqawi was a threat that could and should be removed. On at least three occasions between mid-2002 and the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon presented plans to the White House to destroy the Khurmal camp. Each time the White House declined to act or did not respond at all.

[...]

What seems evident is that the administration viewed Zarqawi as a lower-tier concern, despite his well-known history of running an Afghan terrorist training camp and conducting terrorist operations in Europe. The White House was unwilling to divert any effort from the buildup for war in Iraq to this kind of threat.

The idea that states are the real issue and terrorists and their organizations are of secondary concern has been present throughout the Bush presidency. Although the 9/11 commission wrote its report in a spare, non-judgmental tone to preserve bipartisan unity, its description of the long, aimless road the administration took to the first meeting of its national security Cabinet on the issue of al-Qaida on Sept. 4, 2001, speaks volumes. By contrast, the first "principals" meeting on the issue of regime change in Iraq took place in January 2001, shortly after Bush's inauguration.

Many of my friends and colleagues have been putting forth this theory: namely that the Bushies are so locked into a state-oriented focus when it comes to terror, that they can't get their heads around how to actually fight. Bush famously proclaimed that he was "sick of swatting flies" when it comes to the anti-terror fight.

But it seems like swatting flies is all one can do and, indeed, all that needs to be done. Just because it feels better to deploy 150,000 troops and go around knocking off regimes doesn't mean it helps us fight terrorism. John Kerry, by contrast, seemed to understand some time ago that states are not the focus.

Update: Greetings, Yglesians! Just for the record, I was too humble when I attributed the bit of smartness Matt praises solely to friends and colleagues. Though it's true that I'm just a lowly researcher, I wrote a bit on this idea back in March, about which you can read here.

The Miracle of the Internet

Ha! This is great! From the comments section on Gene's blog, I find that there's a site where swing state voters who want Bush out of office but to also issue a protest vote in favor of Badnarik/Cobb/Nader/whoever can trade their vote with someone in a secure state so they can do both:

Nice...

Times' Op-Ed Page Redeems Itself

The New York Times' op-ed page, categorically the worst op-ed page this side of the Wall Street Journal, redeems itself today by printing the brilliant Robert Wright on George Dubya and faith. Wright doesn't take on the sneering, militantly athiestic tone of many critics of Bush's faith. Read the whole thing, but here's a snippet:

Every morning President Bush reads a devotional from "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of homilies by a Protestant minister named Oswald Chambers, who lived a century ago. As Mr. Bush explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday on Fox News, reading Chambers is a way for him "on a daily basis to be in the Word."

Chambers's book continues to sell well, especially an updated edition with the language tweaked toward the modern. Inspecting the book - or the free online edition - may give even some devout Christians qualms about America's current guidance.

[...]

[W]hence [in Chambers' work is] the optimism that Republicans say George Bush possesses and John Kerry lacks? There's a kind of optimism in Chambers, but it's not exactly sunny. To understand it you have to understand the theme that dominates "My Utmost": committing your life to Jesus Christ - "absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will" - and staying committed. "If we turn away from obedience for even one second, darkness and death are immediately at work again." In all things and at all times, you must do God's will.

But what exactly does God want? Chambers gives little substantive advice. There is no great stress on Jesus' ethical teaching - not much about loving your neighbor or loving your enemy. (And Chambers doesn't seem to share Isaiah's hope of beating swords into plowshares. "Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm.") But the basic idea is that, once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable. "If you obey God in the first thing he shows you, then he instantly opens up the next truth to you," Chambers writes.

[...]

Once you're on the right path, setbacks that might give others pause needn't phase you. As Chambers noted in last Sunday's reading, "Paul said, in essence, 'I am in the procession of a conqueror, and it doesn't matter what the difficulties are, for I am always led in triumph.' " Indeed, setbacks may have a purpose, Chambers will tell Mr. Bush this Sunday: "God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as his saint to get you in direct contact with himself." Faith "by its very nature must be tested and tried."

Some have marveled at Mr. Bush's refusal to admit any mistakes in Iraq other than "catastrophic success." But what looks like negative feedback to some of us - more than 1,100 dead Americans, more than 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the biggest incubator of anti-American terrorists in history - is, through Chambers's eyes, not cause for doubt. Indeed, seemingly negative feedback may be positive feedback, proof that God is there, testing your faith, strengthening your resolve.

This, I think, is Mr. Bush's optimism: In the longest run, divinely guided decisions will be vindicated, and any gathering mountains of evidence to the contrary may themselves be signs of God's continuing involvement. It's all good.

[...]

Chambers himself eventually showed some philosophical flexibility. By and large, the teachings in "My Utmost for His Highest" were written before World War I (and compiled by his wife posthumously). But the war seems to have made him less sanguine about the antagonism that, he had long stressed, is inherent in life.

Shortly before his death in 1917, Chambers declared that "war is the most damnably bad thing," according to Christianity Today magazine. He added: "If the war has made me reconcile myself with the fact that there is sin in human beings, I shall no longer go with my head in the clouds, or buried in the sand like an ostrich, but I shall be wishing to face facts as they are." Amen.

Wright's definitely on to something here. There's nothing inherently scary about a president being religious -- even pretty damned extremely religious. It's the selective reading of Christian scholarship that goes on in this administration that is shocking and, indeed, dangerous. Aquinas's work on just war theory seems to be entirely missing from the White House's bible study reading list, and the early history of Christianity, including the several centuries before Augustine during which Christians were rigorously pacifist, seems to have slipped off the radar as well.

In their place seem to be those Tim LaHaye/Tom DeLay-style armageddon-hastening tomes, a morbid brand of End-Times-Are-Nigh rhetoric, and the darkly pessimistic stuff that Wright alleges is present in Chambers' early work.

Is it getting cold in here?

RTWT.

Target Rich Environment

That's military-speak for what the pages of NRO have been lately. Yglesias stole my victim on this one though.

James Robbins tries to argue that the Semtex we refused to look for retroactively justifies the war. (Jim Glassman makes the same dumb argument over at TCS.) Not so fast, says Yglesias:

Here's the thing -- all this stuff was under seal by the IAEA before the war. They were remnants of Iraq's pre-1991 WMD programs that had been seized by inspectors years ago. None of that stuff is relevant in any way to the administration's pre-war assertions about Iraqi WMD activities. More to the point, this is a proliferation threat that the war created rather than forestalled. The reason the IAEA lost control of these facilities is that the United States invaded. The reason the IAEA's loss of control became problematic is that the United States didn't act swiftly to destroy them. That's the reality-based community's story and it's perfectly straight. Unfortunately, NRO's readers will walk off today, as they so often do, with their heads full of misinformation.

The disturbing thing to me is that they let this Robbins fellow teach IR at the National Defense University. He is, you might be interested in knowing, the same fellow who smugly suggested at a recent Cato Conference that the U.S. officially disavow the entire Westphalian system of international relations.

Honestly, they let him teach?!? At NDU?

From the "It's About Frickin' Time!" File:

The LA Times reports that some Christians are wondering whether the right to life might apply to innocent Iraqis who never did anything to us:

...Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

"It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said.

"I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war."

[...]

At Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Mel Lawrenz, the senior pastor, said he planned to remind parishioners that the more than 6,000 people who pray there each Sunday exceeded the margin of Al Gore's victory in Wisconsin four years ago. Bush lost the state by 5,700 votes.

But even for Lawrenz, who attended the Republican National Convention and delivered the opening prayer when Bush visited the Milwaukee area recently, the decision to vote for the president was not an easy one.

Lawrenz said he wished Bush was more contrite about the difficulties of the war in Iraq.

"I want to know that my president is troubled about the war," he said. "Otherwise, we would in our future far too easily launch into international conflicts."

Might not want to hold your breath waiting for proof on that one, Mel.

Christopher Hitchens, Meet Philip Giraldi

Hitchens' latest stab at reality in Slate is so wildly dishonest that it resembles a Deroy Murdock piece. In typical sneery Hitchens fashion, the piece argues that someone would have to have his head in the sand to believe that Saddam wasn't supporting anti-American terror in the form of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

As though on cue, today's issue of the American Conservative includes a briefing (not online) by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, who notes:

The undeclared warfare between the CIA and the Bush administration has continued despite the arrival of Porter goss as Director of Central Intelligence. On Sept. 28, at the Vice President's request, the Agency provided a special briefing on the subject of Jordanian terrorist Mu'sab al-Zarqawi. The CIA's Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) reviewed all of the available intelligence on the subject and based its briefing on a just completed comprehensive intelligence analysis. The CTC concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi's infrastructure in Iraw before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad's reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president's stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president's outburst, and the incident was reported back to Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president's staff regarding it. [This, of course, sets a good tone for the beginning of his tenure as DCI, no? -JL] Goss was sent to CIA by the president with instructions to get the place under control and stop the leaking. The White House had earlier been upset by the leak of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate stating that things were not going well in Iraq. The choice of Goss as director was opposed by some of CIA's management, who claimed he was too political. As a result of the sniping, Goss will have to navigate carefully between protecting the integrity of the intelligence process and serving his boss, the president. Reform of the Agency, once seen as a hot-button issue, though only embraced tepidly by Goss, will be seen as a secondary consideration.

Anybody for a vodka martini?

Dipshits for Bush

The Program on International Policy Attitudes is continuing its excellent work in...well...in exposing how inexcusably stupid a lot of people who'll be voting for Bush are. This is, I think, largely attributable to the Fox News factor, about which I've blogged before. PIPA's latest survey (full report here (.pdf), press release here) reveals that, among other things:

-"Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program."

-"75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda [20% of whom believe that Iraq was "directly involved" in 9/11], and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission."

-"[A] key reason why Bush supporters may hold to the beliefs that Iraq had WMD and supported al Qaeda is that it is necessary to their support for the decision to go to war with Iraq. Eighty-five percent of Bush supporters say that going to war was the right decision. However, asked what the US should have done “If, before the war, US intelligence services had concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not providing substantial support to al Qaeda,” 58% of Bush supporters said in that case the US should not have gone to war. Furthermore, 61% express confidence that in that case the President would not have gone to war. To preserve the belief that that going to war was the right decision, it appears necessary for Bush supporters to believe that Iraq that the assumptions that prompted going to war were correct."

This last point seems to indicate that Jim Henley's hypothesis that the hawk position has moved from "I support the War for the sake of this reason," to "I support this reason for the sake of the War" is correct.

Also, can informed, intellectually honest conservatives explain away this phenomenon? Do they find it disturbing? Does it matter? Are Bush voters ashamed at all of being associated with such people? (National Review types, I'm looking in your direction.)

Update: Kate O'Beirne seems blissfully ignorant that the ignorant will be voting for her guy.