Conservative Intellectuals are truly impressive...

[Agua]

At Brooklyn’s GreenPoint Tavern, the conversations range from Polish rants about the problems “viss de niggers” to giggling college-girl arguments about cherry Chapstick. There is a perfect 50/50 split between pathetic old drunks with huge birth defects (remember that article we did called “What the Fuck Is Up With Goiter Guy’s Piss Plate?”) and moronic twentysomethings with no money. What better location, we thought, to bring together the two smartest political scientists in America for a debate about the future of the Western world? Bill McGowan is the author of Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (which earned him the National Press Club Award) and Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka, two books that have solidified his position as one of America’s top intellectuals and caused total outrage in the dumb community. Scott McConnell is the executive editor of Pat Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative. You may know him as the guy who got fired from the New York Post for daring to imply that merging with Puerto Rico might not be a good thing, but his political essays have lent much-needed genius to publications from Fortune to National Review. We don’t really know anything about the third guy, Throatie. He was at the bar when we got there and had been drinking for seven hours, so we gave him the tape recorder and told him to mediate the debate.

   
Throatie: Are you guys gay?
Bill: What?
Scott: I don’t get it.

Throatie: I mean Republican or conservative or whatever?
Bill: I don’t really believe terms like liberal and conservative have the meaning they once did. I mean, I would be considered conservative when it comes to issues of race and immigration, but I am also pro-choice (with certain restrictions) and pro- gun control, and I believe in government involvement in certain recalcitrant markets such as health care. I’m pro-gay-marriage, but I’m against gay adoption. So am I conservative or liberal? I think it’s irrelevant.
Scott: I disagree. Conservative is a useful term that describes a sensibility that is skeptical about radical change in human nature. That’s an important part of politics. Today the conservative movement has been transformed into something that is the opposite of conservatism. You have all these people talking about starting all these wars to democratize the Islamic world or opening the borders until the United States is a universal nation. That’s not conservative. That’s neoconservative, and neoconservative is bastardization. Conservative is a term that’s worth preserving and it’s a term that’s worth fighting for because people identify with terms.

Throatie: Like skinheads vs. boot boys vs. chelseas vs. suede heads vs. scooter boys. People like to be part of a thing.
Bill: Coming of age politically in the early ’80s, there was a real appeal to neoconservatism because it picked up on all the weaknesses of liberalism, and I think all of us were attracted to that kind of swagger and intellectuality. But today, neocon has lost its meaning. Most political labels have lost their meaning.
At this point, we’re in a very deconstructive phase. Like the political equivalent of “the cloud of unknowing.” Everything is so scrambled now that the edges are folding in and touching each other. The Iraq debate is a good example of this. You have both conservatives and liberals passionately protesting an attack on Iraq.

Throatie: Do you guys want another drink?
Bill: Sure, I’ll have another Bloody.

Throatie: What’s a Bloody?
Bill: A Bloody Mary. I think the noninterventionist crypto-isolationism of the paleoconservative camp is naive. The outside world poses no threat? “9/11,” that’s all you have to say. We no longer live in a world where you can pull up the drawbridge and pretend the world isn’t there.
 
   
Scott: I somewhat agree that you can’t pull up the drawbridge, but I do have a problem with invading Iraq. I think 9/11 was a result of America having an array of policies that seemed designed to inflame the Muslim world. I don’t think it serves American interests to be perceived throughout the Muslim world as entirely on Israel’s side and entirely against the Palestinians. Just as it doesn’t serve America’s interests to anger one billion people by invading Iraq. Bill Clinton’s foreign policy was much better than Bush’s in that regard. We have a serious problem with terrorism, yes, but it doesn’t make sense to fight it without allies in the Arab world. Saddam is a garden-variety thug with no link to 9/11.
 Bill: What? Powell made the connection with Saddam and the terrorists. It may not be as fleshed out yet as people want it to be, but intuitively—and increasingly materially—the link he is making seems to make sense. Saddam had all these weapons—really gnarly shit—

Throatie: Ha! “Gnarly shit.” Right on.
Bill: —weapons that he should have been forced to destroy over the last twelve years, and here’s this terrorist infrastructure that’s looking for some kind of home. It’s a natural gravitational force that brought them together. Not to be ignored nor exaggerated is the self-fulfilling-prophecy factor. I’m not saying this is entirely the case here, but you can’t dismiss the possibility that if these two (Iraq and al-Qaeda) aren’t together already, we may push them together. Eventually the two groups get together and say, “Everyone thinks we’re in bed together so we might as well get in bed together.”

Throatie: My girlfriend kept accusing me of fucking this girl I worked with until I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I ended up fucking her.
Scott: That a secular nationalist leader and a religious fanatic are getting together does not seem intuitive to me. It does seem intuitive to me that Saddam is determined to retain his power and would not want to jeopardize that.
Bill: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s as simple is that.
Scott: The only way they could get together is if we force them together.
Bill: We probably already have.
Scott: Attacking Iraq would definitely force them together, and any other potential enemies. The CIA has already admitted that.
Bill: But that’s going to happen anyway. It’s timorous to say, “If we leave them alone they’ll leave us alone.” That’s bullshit. It’s not going to work like that. Saddam is already working with the terrorists and the only missing link is that group up in the Kurdish areas.

Throatie: So what happens after we kill him? He gets AIDS?
Bill: I don’t get that. Is that funny?

Throatie: Precisely!
Bill: The war plan is like this: Saddam will either be killed, captured, forced to commit suicide, or driven into exile. Then we will find the weapons that have already been manufactured or produced and destroy them. We’d have war tribunals and ferret out who was responsible and somehow make sure they have no influence on any successive governments. The real wild card in the Iraq venture is, as Thomas Friedman pointed out, two-sided.
 The good news is that it might be post-war Germany, a unified state where you can impose the niceties of civil administration and cultivate a civil society that fosters democracy.
The bad news, however, is that Iraq could be like Yugoslavia but worse. It’s Yugoslavia with expansionist neighbors like Iran and the Kurds. They are going to be dying to push in on those borders, and we’re going to have to maintain them.
 So it’s a Pandora’s box, and it’s a potential black hole and we’re going to be putting out fires there for quite some time, but I don’t see any good choices here. We have to put him out of business and that’s not going to be easy. This is not going to be another Afghanistan.
Scott: If you invade Iraq, you are taking responsibility for dividing up the borders. I doubt we’re going to be able to guarantee the integrity of those borders. We can’t even guarantee the integrity of our own borders. And then we’re off to Syria and Iran? Ariel Sharon was even suggesting we attack Tehran next.
 Bill: That’s not so unreasonable. We have to come to terms with the fact that Iran is the No. 1 sponsor of state terrorism in the world, and attacking Iran militarily might not be the only option to effect change there. We may have to deal with Syria too, and its sponsorship of terrorism, particularly in Lebanon. Unlike Iraq, there are a lot of multilateralist pressure points in Iran and Syria that make them relatively easy to overthrow.

Throatie: Let’s just kill Saddam. With a sniper. Bang!
Bill: The problem is not just Saddam. It’s the whole ruling party structure. If you take out Saddam, you’re going to have to deal with his sons. The problem is the whole Ba’athist party structure. It’s the dynasty. It’s the gangsterism. We’re going to be taking out a lot more than a single despot. Of course, we should have gone after him a long time ago, immediately after the Gulf War.
Scott: Let me ask you something, Bill. Let’s say we could impose a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq, and Iran too, for that matter. Would they elect leaders who would forgo the development of nuclear weapons? And could we rationally expect them to? Israel has a lot of nuclear weapons, and I think you’d be pretty hard-pressed to convince any Arab person that Israel is not a threat. Would we have to denuclearize the entire Middle East?
 Bill: The desirable outcome would be that you create some kind of economic incentives to forgo the development of nuclear weapons in favor of economic relationships with the West.
Scott: And what about North Korea? Do we attack them, too, after this?
 Bill: Yes, at some level we will have to deal with them, too.
Scott: I think we should be trying to isolate and kill the terrorists, and that is a lot more difficult than isolating and killing Saddam Hussein. It’s going to take years of political overtures to the Arab world and police action and occasional military action, but going after Hussein is like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight even though he lost them half a block away. You ask him why he’s looking there, and he says, “Because the light is better here.” Iraq, the regime, is not our problem. It’s not that bad of a problem for us.
 Bill: Not that bad? What about the VX gas? Where is that? What about the ricin? What about all the anthrax? There’s tremendous amounts of chemical weapons there—weapons their government has not accounted for.
Scott: That a government builds bad weapons is not immediate evidence that it’s a problem for us. Lots of governments have horrible weapons.
 Bill: That that government has built these weapons is evidence, though, because that government is evil in every conceivable way. Weapons of mass destruction are just the icing on the cake.

Throatie: Terrorists are fucking crazy. They don’t care if we do or don’t invade anybody. They want to get us no matter what. We should peg them off one by one. Like real Splatball.
Bill: No, you’re wrong. Terrorists are very rational. What they’re motivated by is probably irrational, but they’re very rational at carrying it out. One thing about this whole debate that nobody mentions is the cultural differences in the Arab world. The truth is, they would recognize our strength if we attacked. I’m not saying that the Arab world is the same as the terrorist world, but I think it is fair to say that the Arab mind is a mind that identifies with the winner. David Pryce Jones lived there for decades, and he wrote a wonderful book that discusses this. It’s called The Closed Circle. It’s going to be good for our policy to be seen as strong. Not necessarily morally good, but strong. I’m sorry, but right now it’s better to be respected than good. To know the culture is to know that the Arab mind is a mind that very much identifies with the winner.
Scott: I don’t agree with that. Israel’s experience with occupation has provoked more terrorism—
 Bill: Because Israel isn’t just occupying. They are taking territory. If the settlements weren’t there, they would have settled that problem a long time ago.
Scott: But we will be perceived as taking territory too. When we install a puppet government in Baghdad that immediately signs oil contracts with American companies, we will be perceived as taking territory. Hamas, the ones who specialize in all the suicide bombings in Israel, said today [Feb. 8], “If America invades Iraq, we will make the American people our target.” That’s probably more symptomatic of the reaction in the Arab world than the reaction you’re talking about, where we get respect because we’re perceived as tough guys.

Throatie: Ha ha. Tough guys.
Scott: An attack is going to increase the number of terrorists tenfold, a hundredfold.
 Bill: That’s going to happen anyway. The segment of the Arab world that would respond like that is heading there anyway. We may accelerate it, but it’s going to happen.

Throatie: You lived there? Are they cool guys?
Bill: The Arab middle class is in an incredibly politically and economically repressed state. I don’t think the cause of spreading democracy should be our No. 1 motivation for invading Iraq. I’m much more focused on our national self-interest in a Kissingerian sort of way, i.e. what’s going to protect us. And if you look closely at the Arab world, you realize a lot of these oppressed electorates could do with some democracy. They could do with a jolt out of the same old dynastic progression. You’ve got dynasties in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, and now Mubarak in Egypt wants to make his son his successor there. It’s pathetic how undemocratic these countries are. It’s not a very big silver lining, but one of the tiny upsides to a war would be upsetting the political inertia of these countries.
Scott: But the unique thing about this war is that we don’t have the support of the rest of the world. The end of WWII is a nice example of how the United States was able to plant the seeds and impose viable democracies on formerly undemocratic countries like Germany and Japan. That was seen throughout the whole world as legitimate—as the result of a legitimate victory. All throughout Asia, the American presence in Japan (rewriting the Japanese constitution, rewriting Japanese property law, etc.) was seen as legitimate and necessary. The world is not with us on Iraq. It’s easier to screw democracy up than to do it correctly, and we’re going to have a lot of serious countries that are going to want to see America fail.
 Also, a whole part of the world that isn’t threatened by America is now going to feel threatened by America. You’re going to see a lot more countries willing to help bin Laden. There’s a lot more places than Iraq that can help him get the bomb.
 Bill: Like who?
Scott: Russia, China, France, Germany...

Throatie: What about Israel? Isn’t that making them want to kill us already?
Scott: That is the first coherent thing you’ve said all day.
 Bill: Are you sobering up? What’s happened here?

Throatie: I’m going to get a beer. Do you guys want anything?
Scott: I’m fine. To get back to that coherent question: I think it’s in America’s interest to tell Israel to get out of the West Bank, and if they don’t want to do it, we should cut off aid. And we should promise to guarantee their borders any way we can.
 Bill: Yeah. For the first time in my life we are seeing many people here and in Europe shift the question from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to Israel’s simple right to exist within the borders set up originally by the United Nations back in the 1940s. They want to just sink it into the sea. That’s scary. All this antagonism has gone way too far.

Throatie: Most of the kids at my school hate Israel so much they sound like Nazis. It’s tense.
Bill: Well, college kids are stupid. What can I say? Mostly it’s because they have stupid PC professors. I was at a New Yorker party shortly after 9/11 and I overheard this fiction writer (a relatively young Ivy League graduate) who was asking, “Do we really need Israel anymore? Can’t we just bring those six million people to America and, you know, give them New Jersey?” and I just thought, “What an idiot.”
Scott: That would actually be better than a world war in the Middle East.
Throatie: Why do we keep going back to Israel? Isn’t this about the Aye-raaabs?
Scott: Israel is a huge factor in the Iraqi debate.

Throatie: How much?
Scott: What do you mean?

Throatie: Out of ten.
Scott: 6.5. The problems in Israel are responsible for 65 percent of the Arab threat.
 Bill: I fundamentally disagree.

Throatie: Okay, what’s your number?
Bill: That’s ridiculous.

Throatie: Okay, so what is it?
Bill: Jesus, I guess I would say it’s 15 percent of the problem.

Throatie: There, now was that so hard?
Bill: If you look at the wellsprings of fundamentalism, it comes mostly from a lack of economic prosperity and [from] political oppression, and that is a direct result of their culture. It’s a cultural problem.

Throatie: Can you give me an example?
Bill: Of what?

Throatie: Give me an example of how their culture is the problem but use a cool example. Like in the animal kingdom or something. No fancy words.
Bill: Okay, how’s this? I go into the Arab grocery store across from my apartment building, and nine times out of ten, they’re standing around chattering about Allah. It’s like a bloody broken record: Allah this and Allah that and Allah in between—all Allah, all the time. Meanwhile, the shelves aren’t stocked, the place is a mess, and the front door opens the wrong way, and I say to them, “You guys talk about God too much. Get some Protestant work ethic.”
Scott: Why is that our problem?
 Bill: It’s not our problem. The point is, nothing is going to change there until they become more, I’m sorry to say it, but Western or universal. They need to evolve towards a division of church and state, the creation of secular institutions.
Scott: And you think that can be done from outside?
 Bill: Maybe not, but I don’t think there’s any hope of it changing without recognizing that the church is their central problem.

Throatie: But they’ll change. I’m from Quebec, where the church used to run everything. Even the worst swear words, like “chalice” and “tabernak,” refer to parts of a church, but we are so over that now. My parents’ teachers were nuns, but me and my brother’s teachers were fucking hippies.
Bill: That’s different from a theocracy. I’m just saying what many political scientists, economists, and sociologists have been saying for years: Cultures embrace economic prosperity to the degree that they create tight distinctions between church and state and embrace secular values and essentially evolve to a more “Protestant” world view. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have things like economic prosperity and Jeffersonian-style democracy without separating church and state.
Scott: I just find it kind of ironic that the most “Protestant” Middle Eastern country, the least fundamentalist country, is probably Iraq, and that’s the one we’re talking about bombing.

Throatie: Bill, are we better than them?
Bill: I don’t know what that means. The Western way is not better morally, but if you want economic prosperity and a certain degree of political freedom, it’s a good route to take. You’re simply not going to get it out of Islamic tradition or African folk tradition or Confucianism. That’s what’s special about the West. My experiences living and working in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan made me see, reluctantly, what is so beneficial about our culture. I’m a reluctant Western chauvinist.
Scott: There’s definitely something to that. Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan have benefited from Westernizing, but it has to come from within. You can’t do it with American GIs and F-16s.
Bill: But what about the threat?
Scott: Look, the fundamentalist flame is about to burn itself out. The Iranian revolution is on its last legs. In 1978 you had hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the street, willing to brave police, and they essentially swept the Shah out of power. They were burning women at the stake and stoning people to death. It was pure chaos. What ever happened to that? It fizzled out. Today you cannot find a twenty-year-old Iranian that thinks of 1978 as anything but total and utter lunacy. There’s less anti-Americanism in Iran than anywhere in the Arab world.
 Bill: I hope you’re right, Scott. For everyone’s sake.

[Now_Im_Not_Banned]

[KING VerbalAssaulta]