Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Now it seems everyone, even the left, is enthusiastic for Arab democracy. Fine. Fellow travelers are welcome. But simply being in favor of freedom is not enough. With Egypt in turmoil and in the midst of a perilous transition, we need foreign-policy principles to ensure democracy for the long run.

  No need to reinvent the wheel. We’ve been through something analogous before. After World War II, Western Europe was newly freed but unstable, in ruin—and in play. The democracy we favored for the continent faced internal and external threats from communist totalitarians. The United States adopted the Truman Doctrine that declared America’s intention to defend these newly free nations.

  This meant not just protecting allies at the periphery, such as Greece and Turkey, from insurgency and external pressure, but supporting democratic elements within Western Europe against powerful and determined domestic communist parties.

  Powerful they were. The communists were not just the most organized and disciplined. In France, they rose to largest postwar party; in Italy, to second largest. Under the Truman Doctrine, U.S. presidents used every instrument available, including massive assistance—covert and overt, financial and diplomatic—to democratic parties to keep the communists out of power.

  As the states of the Arab Middle East throw off decades of dictatorship, their democratic future faces a major threat from the new totalitarianism: Islamism. As in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external. Iran, a mini-version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites—Syria, Lebanon and Gaza—and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states. That’s precisely why in this revolutionary moment, Iran boasts of an Islamist wave sweeping the Arab world.

  We need a foreign policy that not only supports freedom in the abstract but is guided by long-range practical principles to achieve it—a Freedom Doctrine composed of the following elements:

  (1) The United States supports democracy throughout the Middle East. It will use its influence to help democrats everywhere throw off dictatorial rule.

  (2) Democracy is more than just elections. It requires a free press, the rule of law, the freedom to organize, the establishment of independent political parties and the peaceful transfer of power. Therefore, the transition to democracy and initial elections must allow time for these institutions, most notably political parties, to establish themselves.

  (3) The only U.S. interest in the internal governance of these new democracies is to help protect them against totalitarians, foreign and domestic. The recent Hezbollah coup in Lebanon and the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza dramatically demonstrate how anti-democratic elements that achieve power democratically can destroy the very democracy that empowered them.

  (4) Therefore, just as during the Cold War the United States helped keep European communist parties out of power (to see them ultimately wither away), it will be U.S. policy to oppose the inclusion of totalitarian parties—the Muslim Brotherhood or, for that matter, communists—in any government, whether provisional or elected, in newly liberated Arab states.

  We may not have the power to prevent this. So be it. The Brotherhood may today be so relatively strong in Egypt, for example, that a seat at the table is inevitable. But under no circumstances should a presidential spokesman say, as did Robert Gibbs, that the new order “has to include a whole host of important non-secular actors.” Why gratuitously legitimize Islamists? Instead, Americans should be urgently supporting secular democratic parties in Egypt and elsewhere with training, resources and diplomacy.

  We are, unwillingly again, parties to a long twilight struggle, this time with Islamism—most notably Iran, its proxies and its potential allies, Sunni and Shiite. We should be clear-eyed about our preferred outcome—real democracies governed by committed democrats—and develop policies to see this through.

  A freedom doctrine is a freedom agenda given direction by guiding principles. Truman did it. So can we.

  The Washington Post, February 11, 2011

  LANGUAGE AND LEADERSHIP

  Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation”—the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of the country.

  Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. In Janet Napolitano’s famous formulation, terror attacks are now “man-caused disasters.” And the “global war on terror” is no more. It’s now an “overseas contingency operation.”

  Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. But the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of “workplace violence.”

  The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others are killed in an al-Qaeda–affiliated terror attack—and for days it is waved off as nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration gone bad. After all, famously declared Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make?

  Well, it makes a difference, first, because truth is a virtue. Second, because if you keep lying to the American people, they may seriously question whether anything you say—for example, about the benign nature of NSA surveillance—is not another self-serving lie.

  And third, because leading a country through yet another long twilight struggle requires not just honesty but clarity. This is a president who to this day cannot bring himself to identify the enemy as radical Islam. Just Tuesday night, explaining the U.S. embassy closures across the Muslim world, he cited the threat from “violent extremism.”

  The word extremism is meaningless. People don’t devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content. The extreme of what? In this war, an extreme devotion to the supremacy of a radically fundamentalist vision of Islam and to its murderous quest for dominion over all others.

  But for President Obama, the word Islamist may not be uttered. Language must be devised to disguise the unpleasantness.

  Result? The world’s first lexicological war. Parry and thrust with linguistic tricks, deliberate misnomers and ever more transparent euphemisms. Next: armor-piercing onomatopoeias and amphibious synecdoches.

  This would all be comical and merely peculiar if it didn’t reflect a larger, more troubling reality: The confusion of language is a direct result of a confusion of policy—which is served by constant obfuscation.

  Obama doesn’t like this terror war. He particularly dislikes its unfortunate religious coloration, which is why “Islamist” is banished from his lexicon. But soothing words, soothing speeches in various Muslim capitals, soothing policies—“open hand,” “mutual respect”—have yielded nothing. The war remains. Indeed, under his watch, it has spread. And as commander in chief he must defend the nation.

  He must. But he desperately wants to end the whole struggle. This is no secret wish. In a major address to the National Defense University just three months ago he declared, “This war, like all wars, must end.” The plaintive cry of a man hoping that saying so makes it so.

  The result is visible ambivalence that leads to vacillating policy reeking of incoherence. Obama defends the vast NSA data dragnet because of the terrible continuing threat of terrorism. Yet at the same time, he calls for not just amending but actually repealing the legal basis for the entire war on terror, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.

  Well, which is it? If the tide of war is receding, why the giant NSA snooping programs? If al-Qaeda is on the run, as he incessantly assured the nation throughout 2012, why is America cowering in 19

  closed-down embassies and consulates? Why was Boston put on an unprecedented full lockdown after the marathon bombings? And from Somalia to Afghanistan, why are we raining death by drone on “violent extremists”? Every target, amazingly, a jihadist. Wh
at a coincidence.

  This incoherence of policy and purpose is why an evacuation from Yemen must be passed off as “a reduction in staff.” Why the Benghazi terror attack must be blamed on some hapless Egyptian-American videographer. Why the Fort Hood shooting is nothing but some loony Army doctor gone postal.

  In the end, this isn’t about language. It’s about leadership. The wordplay is merely cover for uncertain policy embedded in confusion and ambivalence about the whole enterprise.

  This is not leading from behind. This is not leading at all.

  The Washington Post, August 9, 2013

  CHAPTER 15

  THE AGE TO COME

  HYPERPROLIFERATION:

  CAN WE SURVIVE IT?

  Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. “I would see people building a bridge,” he wrote. “And I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.”

  Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman’s pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin’s Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb yet never used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either. Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while, dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal.

  But that’s the point. We’re now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.

  We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran’s newest rulers. Then again, we don’t understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant “Death to America”—and Denmark (!)—and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

  This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new—medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects—but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.

  That is why Iran’s arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its president says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi’ism’s version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for “those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink … as if a hand was holding them there and opened their eyes to receive” his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution’s raison d’être is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

  Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.

  That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman’s vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism—a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom.

  Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps—referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.

  Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we’ve had nukes for exactly 61. No one knows the precise prospects for human extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate odds. If he were to watch us today about to let loose the agents of extinction, he’d call a halt to all bridge building.

  Time, March 26, 2006

  DEATH BY DRONE

  The nation’s vexation over the morality and legality of President Obama’s drone war has produced a salutary but hopelessly confused debate. Three categories of questions are being asked. They must be separated to be clearly understood.

  1. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of enemies abroad? What criteria justify assassination?

  Answer: (a) imminent threat, under the doctrine of self-defense, and (b) affiliation with al-Qaeda, under the laws of war.

  Imminent threat is obvious. If we know a freelance jihadist cell in Yemen is actively plotting an attack, we don’t have to wait until after the fact. Elementary self-defense justifies attacking first.

  Al-Qaeda is a different matter. We are in a mutual state of war. Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war on the United States in 1996; we reciprocated three days after 9/11 with Congress’ Authorization for Use of Military Force—against al-Qaeda and those who harbor and abet it. (Such resolutions are the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war, as evidenced in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.)

  Regarding al-Qaeda, therefore, imminence is not required. Its members are legitimate targets, day or night, awake or asleep. Nothing new here. In World War II, we bombed German and Japanese barracks without hesitation.

  Unfortunately, Obama’s Justice Department memos justifying the drone attacks are hopelessly muddled. They imply that the sole justification for drone attack is imminent threat—and whereas al-Qaeda is plotting all the time, an al-Qaeda honcho sleeping in his bed is therefore a legitimate target.

  Nonsense. Slippery nonsense. It gives the impression of an administration making up criteria to fit the president’s kill list. No need to confuse categories. A sleeping Anwar al-Awlaki could lawfully be snuffed not because of imminence but because he was self-declared al-Qaeda and thus an enemy combatant as defined by congressional resolution and the laws of war.

  2. But al-Awlaki was no ordinary enemy. He was a U.S. citizen. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of an American? Where’s the due process?

  Answer: Once you take up arms against the United States, you become an enemy combatant, thereby forfeiting the privileges of citizenship and the protections of the Constitution, including due process. You retain only the protection of the laws of war—no more and no less than those of your foreign comrades-in-arms. (Indeed, David French, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, suggests stripping such traitors of their citizenship, thereby formalizing their extra-constitutional status.)

  Lincoln steadfastly refused to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation. The soldiers that his Union army confronted at Antietam were American citizens (in rebellion)—killed withou
t due process. Nor did the Americans storming German bunkers at Normandy inquire before firing whether there were any German Americans among them—to be excused for gentler treatment while the other Germans were mowed down.

  3. Who has the authority to decide life-and-death targeting?

  In war, the ultimate authority is always the commander in chief and those in the lawful chain of command to whom he has delegated such authority.

  This looks troubling. Obama sitting alone in the Oval Office deciding which individuals to kill. But how is that different from Lyndon Johnson sitting in his office choosing bombing targets in North Vietnam?

  Moreover, we firebombed entire cities in World War II. Who chose? Commanders under the ultimate authority of the president. No judicial review, no outside legislative committee, no secret court, no authority above the president.

  Okay, you say. But today’s war is entirely different: no front line, no end in sight.

  So what? It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?

  We have our principles and precedents for lawful warmaking, and a growing body of case law for the more vexing complexities of the present war—for example, the treatment of suspected terrorists apprehended on U.S. soil. The courts having granted them varying degrees of habeas corpus protection, it is clear that termination by drone (a measure far more severe than detention) would be forbidden—unless Congress and the courts decide otherwise, which, short of a Taliban invasion from New Brunswick, is inconceivable.