Jay Reding.com

Ronald D. Asmus argues that Israel should be made a member of NATO to send Iran a message:

The United States already has a de facto security commitment to Israel. Any future U.S. president would go to the defense of that country if its existence were threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran. And in spite of the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic voices that one can hear in Europe, there is little doubt that European leaders such as Tony Blair, Angela Merkel and even Jacques Chirac would also stand tall and defend Israel against an Iranian threat. Given this situation, basic deterrence theory tells us that it is more credible and effective if those commitments are clear and unambiguous.

The best way to provide Israel with that additional security is to upgrade its relationship with the collective defense arm of the West: NATO. Whether that upgraded relationship culminates in membership for Israel or simply a much closer strategic and operational defense relationship can be debated. After all, a classic security guarantee requires clear and recognized borders to be defended, something Israel does not have today. Configuring an upgraded Israel-NATO relationship will require careful diplomacy and planning. But what must be clear is that the West is prepared to match the growing bellicosity against Israel by stepping up its commitment to the existence of the Jewish state.

I highly doubt that the viciously anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic European bureaucracy would ever allow Israeli membership into NATO, although the possibility of some kind of close operating relationship isn’t out of the picture. Israel will never become a full member of NATO because the Palestinian threat to Israel’s existence would never allow them to invoke Article V of the NATO Charter. Imagine what the European reaction would be if a Palestinian suicide bombing led to Israel calling for collective action in response to an attack. They’d be well within their rights to do so if they were a NATO member, but Europe would certainly not ever wish to be in the position of officially recognizing Palestinian terrorism for what it is.

However, Asmus does lead to a good point. NATO as an institution was designed to fight the battles of the Cold War, a war that is now long since over. In an age of terrorism, close cooperation between Western nations and their allies are as important as ever, if not even more so. NATO worked to dissuade the Soviet empire from pushing into Western Europe, but at the cost of weakening the Europe’s ability to defend itself. NATO became a defense welfare system in which European nations could rely on the strength of the United States military to protect them. With the US military having been dramatically pared down through the post-Cold War period, we can’t continue to cover Europe while fighting terrorism in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa.

The new threats of our time require new thinking about collective action. The threat we face aren’t Soviet tanks racing down the Fulda Gap, but 19 men with boxcutters on civilian airliners. The old doctrines, such as containment and Mutally Assured Destruction don’t work when you have countries that are infected with a virulent fanaticism. The Global War on Terrorism is a war that combines military force with the interception of terrorist finances, the disruption of sleeper cells, and a commitment to preventing failed states from becoming petri dishes for terrorism.

That means that each and every country needs to pull its weight. When President Bush states that you’re either with us or with the terrorists, it was a less than subtle way of stating that neutrality is not an option in this war. Groups like al-Qaeda will find purchase wherever they can, including the West. The September 11 attacks were planned in Hamburg and Kuala Lumpur, along with Kandahar and Quetta. A country that does not take the threat of terrorism seriously could well end up being the spawning ground for the next attack.

NATO’s focus on collective defense needs to shift to meet the realities of the 21st Century. Inclusion of front-line states like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq into a collective defense framework should be a priority for fighting terrorism. If the EU wishes to have a rapid-reaction force that can respond to terrorist incidents, the US should provide them with support towards that end. Front-line countries should be strengthened so that they can fight off terrorist threats and prevent groups like al-Qaeda from reforming in their territories. Countries like Iran should face a unified opposition that stands strongly and firmly against unstable regimes obtaining nuclear weapons. Networks like the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network have destabilized our globe, and we need to ensure that such a network never starts up again.

Asmus is right that the threats of al-Qaeda and a nuclear-armed Iran require a new framework for collective defense. However, NATO is specifically designed to fight the conflicts of the last century. With NATO expanding to include former Soviet bloc countries and even Middle Eastern countries like Turkey, it’s time to rethink the organizational structure of NATO and ensure that becomes an organization dedicated to fighting the threats we face now and the threats that may emerge in the future.

Gerard Baker says that the days of muscular American foreign policy are over:

I can’t answer for Mr Cheney’s hunting etiquette, but when it comes to aggressive and unilateral US foreign policy, you can forget it. It’s over. It was a wild ride for a couple of years, a genuine revolution in foreign affairs, but it’s gone. The revolution has been aborted. America is back to where it was before Iraq, before 9/11, before Bush v Gore: an upstanding member of the multilateralist diplomatic community, piously mouthing the familiar platitudes of international co-operation and stability.

I certainly hope that Baker is incorrect. One of the reasons the September 11 attacks occurred was because of America’s weakness abroad. And indeed, I think that Baker is incorrect. What we’re seeing is not some massive sea change in American foreign policy, but the next stage in the process. I don’t see Bush abandoning his quest for democratization, and it would be a repudiation of their own best ideas if they did. The single greatest part of the Bush Revolution in foreign policy is the realization that America’s long-term strategic interests are tied to the democratization of the Middle East. The only way we can win this war is to have a Middle East that no longer acts as a petri dish for terrorism. The way to achieve that end is to prevent the fundamental disconnect between government and civil society in the region. Terrorism rose up so dramatically in the Middle East because the mosque was the only place were someone could talk freely. The idea that “Islam is the solution” as the Muslim Brotherhood proclaims is an idea that has special power in a place where the average citizen has little to no control over their own political destiny.

We can’t do that militarily, and Iraq is less about military control but shaking up the status quo in the region. We have every interest in seeing a free and democratic Iraq, although that is a goal that will take at least a generation to achieve in a truly permanent way. However, what we have done has already begun a process of democratic transformation in the region. The genie of free elections has already been let out of the bottle, and the ripple effects are being felt across that region.

Baker notes that the Administration is sounding much more multilateral than before, but that’s largely because they’ve won the debate on foreign policy. Europe now takes the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism much more seriously then they did before - although sometimes not seriously enough. Madrid and London made it clear that Europe is a target too. The old belief that terrorism was something to be endured and ignored no longer holds nearly as much sway as it does.

Quietly and with little fanfare, the US and the French worked behind the scenes at the UN to investigate the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon. The fact is that Bush’s foreign policy has always been much more pragmatic than is publicly let on. Bush’s biggest foreign policy coups involved the stabilization of relations between the US and Pervez Musharraf, defusing the possibility of an Indian/Pakistani nuclear exchange, and the dismantling of the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. In terms of global geopolitical impact, those difficult and tense negotiations were key towards stabilizing that region of the world. A few years ago two nuclear powers were dangerously close to the brink of war, yet now tensions have eased. The Administration may have been fond of rattling the saber from time to time, but that isn’t the sum total of American foreign policy.

I don’t necessarily think the very real shift in American foreign policy is a sign that Bush is relenting on the Bush doctrine. American “unilateralism” has always been made to be much bigger and more aggressive than it really was - even the invasion of Iraq involved a large amount of diplomatic negotiation, both within and outside of the UN. The reality is that the initial stages of Bush’s foreign policy played out largely as they were supposed to - the Taliban is gone, Pakistan is uneasy but under control, Saddam Hussein is gone, democracy is on the table in the Middle East, and Europe no longer has a lax attitude towards terrorism. That doesn’t mean all is well and the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is no longer a success, but that the initial phase is over and an entirely new phase is beginning that is less about open confrontations and more about subtle moves behind the scenes.

Michael J. Totten has some amazing images from Iraqi Kurdistan. Totten actually travelled to the northern Iraqi city of Erbil to learn firsthand about life in the middle of a war zone, and his impressions are nothing short of amazing.

18 years ago, the face of the Iraqi Kurds was the terrible image of a Kurdish boy, mouth and eyes still open, laying dead in a field in Halabja, the victim of an Iraqi chemical weapon attack. It was the image of the dead mother and the dead child, the mother’s last action to hold her child close as Saddam Hussein’s chemical cloud snuffed their lives out forever.

Today, it’s this:

The image we have of Iraq has always been a place of great suffering, with daily car bombs and the constant fear of terrorist attacks. Yet in the north of the country, the Kurds have created an island of stability. Kurdish peshmerga forces, some of the most trained and effective paramilitaries on the planet, keep the peace and keep groups like al-Qaeda out. Kurdish businessmen are working towards making their “Dream City” a reality, and construction has already began - ironically enough with the help of Turkish construction firms.

The Kurds are fiercely pro-American, industrious, and have made their corner of Iraq into a stable and prosperous place. With all the fighting and terrorism going on in Iraq it seems odd that there’s such an incredibly modern and beautiful city being built in the middle of the desert. Yet that is exactly what the Kurds intend to do, and I’d put good money that they’ll pull it off.

18 years ago, the Kurds were on the run from Saddam’s death squads and chemical attacks. Today, they’re trying to build a better future for themselves and creating ambitious plans to create an island of humanity in a place scarred by decades of man’s inhumanity to man. Given what they’ve gone through, to go from a living nightmare to a dream city is a monumental accomplishment indeed.

I managed to catch reruns of Dick Cheney’s interview with Brit Hume last night, and it was a very different side of the Vice President. Cheney’s always been the Administration attack dog, but he seemed genuinely remorseful about the incident in which his close friend Harry Whittington was accidentally shot.

The media will no doubt be fixated on Cheney’s poor media response, but the only people who care about such things are people in the media. The rest of the country has absolutely no interest in the usual self-important swagger of the media in wondering why they didn’t get to send News Copter 5 in while Whittington was still bleeding on the ground. Cheney’s staffers should have done more to brief the media early on, but the utterly idiotic and self-important whining of the media that they were scooped by a local paper is another example of how the media lives in its own bubble.

As for Cheney, seeing a more human side of him will probably help rather than hurt his numbers - not that the Vice President is the type who gives a damn about approval ratings. He is a lame duck, he has no intention of furthering his political career towards higher office. He isn’t running in 2008 (although I wish he would announce that he would just so Helen Thomas’ head would explode like a watermelon at a Gallagher show). He’s there to do the job, and that’s what he intends to do - which in many ways is a refreshing change from the disingenuous ass-kissing antics of those politicians seeking to leave their slime trails higher and higher along the ladder of government.

As far as I’m concerned, and I’m sure this is true for most of America, this is a personal tragedy for Cheney and Whittington, and not a matter of public concern. Hunting accidents are part of the sport, and a moment’s inattention can have disastrous - even fatal - results. Cheney clearly feels terrible about this event, as well he should, and he’s taken full responsibility for his actions. The media will naturally flog this dead horse until it’s rendered into glue, and the left will continue to act unhinged as Terry McAuliffe’s idiotic and shameful comments demonstrate, but for those outside the media bubble this is just a particularly sad historical footnote.

That’s the advice Mickey Kaus is selling to the Democrats. He argues that theming their 2006 and 2008 campaigns with “a return to normalcy” will provide the message that the Democrats so desperately need.

The problem with this plan begins early:

The essential premise is that Bush has stretched the military, the Constitution and the civility of our politics to the limit in reaction to the threat of future 9/11s. All this fevered straining and leveraging may have been appropriate at the time, but there’s no real need to keep running in hyperdrive. We can routinize the anti-terror struggle the way we routinized the Cold War, when just as much was at stake. We don’t have to make an end run around the Constitution or a duly-passed statute (wiretapping). We don’t have to torture prisoners or hold them forever without hearings. We don’t have to slight disaster relief (Katrina) because the Department of Homeland Security worries only about terrorists. We don’t have to unmask CIA agents in a desperate effort to build a case for war. ** We don’t have to alienate our allies. We don’t have to run giant deficits to finance our armed forces, as if the “Global War on Terror” were a temporary crisis that will be over in three years. It’s not. It’s a semi-permanent part of the landscape. Democrats can contain the terrorist threat the way, for four decades, they helped contain the Russians–while (as during the Cold War) we allow ourselves to turn our attention to domestic problems such as health care and Social Security.

The problem is that once again cements the Democrats as the party of weakness on national security. That and civil values continue to be the Democrat’s two biggest weaknesses. The fact is that Kaus is once again trying to apply Cold War doctrines to an enemy that can’t be contained in the way that the US tried to contain Soviet Communism. Fanatics like Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don’t necessarily worry about mutually assured destruction - besides, who would we nuke in response to an al-Qaeda nuclear attack?

Kaus’ strategy essentially is the Democratic strategy, and it hasn’t worked in the last four years. He’s right that the Democrats are much stronger on domestic issues than foreign policy, but in the post-9/11 world the Democrats have not yet been able to adapt to the fact that the old doctrines just don’t apply anymore. In those rare cases where the Democrats have made serious arguments on national security, very few of them have reflected the fundamental shift in world politics that have occurred in the wake of September 11, 2001.

What can the Democrats do to stop being weak on national security? They have some strong arguments that Bush is not the right person to bring democracy to the Middle East. He’s too tainted in the eyes of the world. The incidents at Abu Ghraib have forever tarred us as torturers. We’re doing a decent enough job militarily (tarring the war hasn’t brought the Democrats any advantage), but Bush is terminally tone-deaf when it comes to winning the larger ideological struggle.

The Democrats should adopt a comprehensive strategy for national security along the lines of the one proposed by General Wesley Clark. Clark’s one of the few Democrats who can say that he earned the endorsement of Michael Moore but still stands a chance of showing a viable and strong Democratic plan for Iraq. The Democrats need to say that they will strongly protect the national security of the United States, they will not allow for failure in Iraq, and they will work to repair the damage done to the American image abroad. In other words, an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.

What else could the Democrats do? Purge the MoveOn.org crowd. Fire Howard Dean. Replace Harry Reid in the Senate with a moderate like Joe Lieberman (which of course, the Democrats wouldn’t even consider doing). If Lieberman won’t do, make Evan Bayh the Majority Leader. Get someone who can speak to Middle America in their own terms. Get rid of Nancy Pelosi in the House. A San Francisco liberal has many strikes against them from the beginning. Start positioning the Democratic Party as a party that will not back down from a fight.

If the Democrats want a return to normalcy, they also have to act normal. The Democrats should send a memo to every Democratic member of Congress. No more attacking Bush. It alienates anyone who doesn’t share their ravenous dislike of the President. There are 40% of the people who are die-hard Bush supporters. There are 40% of the people who hate Bush with a passion. Whichever party can reach out to the 20% that are in between will win. In 2004, Bush improved his position in regards to nearly every demographic because it became a contest between Bush and not Bush. Any race where your own side becomes nothing more than a negation of the other side is a losing race. Hatred of Bush does not win elections.

If 2006 becomes an election where voters choose between the status quo and a Democratic Party whose primary focus is a politically-motivated impeachment of President Bush, the Democratic Party will lose. The politics of personal destruction didn’t work for the Republicans in the 1990s, and it won’t work for the Democrats this year or in 2008.

The Democrats should continually focus the center of political attention away from Bush and towards domestic issues. The more the Democrats harp on NSA wiretaps, Valerie Plame, Iraq, and other issues of national security, the more they cement themselves as party of weakness on national security issues. Those issues may matter to the Democratic base, but they alienate everyone else.

The Democratic left wants to push their party harder and harder towards the “progressive” left. If the “netroots” take control of the Democratic Party, they’ll lose. No matter how much the Democrats try to “frame” issues to appeal to their caricature of the American voter, they can’t win if they’re a party dominated by a secular, liberal elite.

While the partisan in me relishes the idea of another Democratic defeat, the Republicans need strong competition to keep from getting complacent. We need a Democratic Party able to prod the Republicans towards fiscal responsibility. We need a party that can help push democratization and temper some of the diplomatic blunders of the Bush Administration. We need an effective, capable, and sane opposition. Right now, the Democratic Party is none of those things. For the good of their own party and the nation, the Democrats need to be able to effectively challenge the Democrats. While the weakness and continued partisanship of the Democrats is the political godsend of the GOP at the moment, having one political party in a two-party system dive off an ideological cliff is not healthy. If the Democrats want to win, Democratic moderates must seize control of their party before the radicals steer it further and further away from the American mainstream.

The Wall Street Journal has a bitingly satirical piece on the media reaction to the Cheney hunting accident. The idea that Cheney himself wouldn’t personally call Dana Milbank while Mr. Wittington lay bleeding on the field apparently sends the press into fits of apoplexy.

What happened in Texas was an accident. Cheney is an avid hunter, and the law of averages states that sooner or later an accident will occur even with the most safety-conscious hunter. Jeff Greenfield of CNN astutely finds this incident to be a political Rorschach test:

Look, I have never hunted in my life (assuming you don’t count hunting for a parking place in Manhattan). I have no more knowledge of the rules that govern a quail hunt than I do about the topography of Neptune. But the same massive level of ignorance doesn’t seem to be stopping a whole lot of people from explaining why the vice president was innocent, careless, criminally negligent, or homicidal. Similarly, it seems all but impossible to separate your judgment of the White House’s response — perfectly appropriate, sloppy, or an inexcusable attempt at cover-up — from your broader view of the president.

The media’s petulant response to the incident reflects the arrogance of the media today. Their biggest concern is that Dick Cheney didn’t notify them right away, and the first media outlet to be notified was a local paper rather than Dana Milbank. Could the Cheney camp have handled the situation better? Certainly the very last thing that they should have been considering was coordinating the media response, instead they should have been doing what they did, getting help to Wittington and working with local officials to properly investigate the accident and file the necessary reports.

For all the talk of the “political consequences” of this terrible event, the fallout will likely fall more on the media’s overreaction rather than Cheney’s momentary lapse in gun safety. The way in which the media has reacted with predictable hysteria explains why the last JFK Center survey shows the media as the most distrusted actor in American society today. With all the important and momentous events in the world, the media’s fixation on Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident indicates how far out of whack their priorities are.

Frank J. looks at ways in which we can extricate ourselves from an unwinnable quagmire…