Stuart Koehl has an excellent piece up at the Weekly Standard on a Washington Post article that characterized the Army’s Stryker combat vehicle as a “kevlar coffin.” Koehl’s not an unmitigated supporter of the Stryker, but his main point is that criticism of the Stryker’s ability to protect infantry in Afghanistan is misinformed in ways both obvious and subtle.

The first and more obvious point is that the Post provides no information about the number of injuries and fatalities sustained by troops in Strykers as compared with  past alternatives, and appears to proceed on the assumption that every Stryker “lost” is a Stryker that has been totally destroyed instead of one sent to the shop. Without this, it’s hard to know just how well or poorly the Stryker is actually doing.

The second and more subtle point is that some of the destroyed Strykers hit IEDs that were as large as 2,000 pounds. At that size, even a main battle tank would not protect its occupants. As Koehl notes, if it becomes a pure race between the armor makers –- who  have to design vehicles that are actually useable –- and an undisturbed network of bomb makers with access to unlimited quantities of explosives, the bomb makers will win every time.

The U.S. has seen this kind of criticism before: it’s reminiscent of the up-armored Humvee “scandal” of 2004-05. As with that incident, the brief burst of criticism of the Stryker combines a bit of commonsense — yes, of course the U.S. and its allies should seek to provide their forces with ample quantities of the best equipment — with a lot of disguised criticism of the administration.

Now this administration deserves to be criticized. As Con Coughlin and Fraser Nelson point out in the latest Spectator, the Obama administration’s dithering isn’t just hurting the U.S. cause; it’s treating its allies — especially Britain – with “astonishing disregard.” But in the U.S., and especially in Britain, the criticism has tended to focus too much on equipment. In the U.S., it’s the Stryker and the Humvee; in Britain, it’s the British Army’s
shortage of helicopters and mine-resistant vehicles.

It’s certainly true that the British Army could use more of both. But as Koehl points out, “the solution to the IED problem is not technical, but rather tactical and operational.” In other words, since you can’t win the battle with the bomb makers by building an invulnerable vehicle, you have to win it by fighting a counterinsurgency campaign. If you control the ground, protect the people, and gather intelligence, you win not by beefing up your armor, but by making it impossible for the bomb makers to make and plant bombs.

Criticizing the supposed failures of the equipment is an easy way to make the correct point that the government is getting it wrong.  But it has a serious cost: it encourages administrations on both sides of the Atlantic to respond to the criticism as a short-term political issue simply by rush-ordering more equipment, while neglecting the more serious problem of how to fight the war effectively. By all means, criticize the Obama and Brown administrations on Afghanistan. but if the criticism is to serve anything more than a political purpose, it needs to proceed from a realization that even the best equipment can’t rescue bad strategy.

Anthony Sacramone, working from a New York Times report, is tolerably severe about the rise of domestic surveillance in Britain. As always, the Times is late to the party. The House of Lords Constitution Committee issued a lengthy report on this subject in January, following on five years of discussion about the rise of the “surveillance society” in Britain. The committee’s report opened:

Surveillance is an inescapable part of life in the UK. Every time we make a telephone call, send an email, browse the internet, or even walk down our local high street, our actions may be monitored and recorded. To respond to crime, combat the threat of terrorism, and improve administrative efficiency, successive UK governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world. At the same time, similar developments in the private sector have contributed to a profound change in the character of life in this country. The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine, and almost taken for granted. Many of these surveillance practices are unknown to most people, and their potential consequences are not fully appreciated.

The broader connections of all this are worth pausing over. It is easy to say that all the domestic surveillance in the UK stems from concern — in many cases, justified concern — over terrorism. But as the Times, the Lords, and many other authorities have pointed out, most of it is related to commonplace offenses, such as this undercover campaign against “dog fouling” — i.e. dogs making messes on sidewalks — that barely rise to the level of being an offense. In a society where the state has assumed responsibility for preventing all bad things from happening — for that is the promise of the tender embrace of the social welfare state — there is no principled way to object to it all. It is a case of “we know best.”

And that brings me back to the ongoing scandal about Britain’s broader controls or lack thereof. The guiding theme of this scandal is the same: the political elite doing good unto the voters, whether they wish it or not. The latest story to emerge on this front is that the internal report that made the case for Britain’s covert embrace of mass migration was deliberately doctored to “remove details of [immigration’s] possible links to organised crime, street fights and begging.” Of course, there is plenty of domestic criminality in Britain too. But a policy of open borders is a temptation that many ill-doers would find hard to resist.

That’s one more reason it’s a bad policy: if you don’t control your borders, you have to clamp down even harder domestically. The House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs accepted this point when it stated in 2006 that “the focus can no longer remain so heavily weighted towards initial entry and border control. … Far greater effort will in future have to go into the enforcement of the Immigration Rules within the UK.” Of course, the border controls at the time were actually, and intentionally, quite weak. But to all the other reasons for which Labour liked that, add one more: it justified even more domestic surveillance.

The story by now should be wearily familiar. Last week France was caught supplying arms to the dictatorial regime in Guinea, which then used them to brutally suppress protesters. This time, it’s Britain. Amnesty International UK asserts that Guinea also used a Mamba armored personnel-carrier that it bought from a South African subsidiary of a UK-based company.

Amnesty International UK’s arms programme director, Oliver Sprague, followed with the predictable call:

An Arms Trade Treaty that does not prevent international arms supplies to those with a persistent record of grave human rights violations like Guinea’s security forces will be a worthless gesture. At the UN this week, the UK and its allies are proposing new procedural rules for the Treaty’s negotiations that could severely restrict progress towards a treaty that can protect rights, lives and livelihoods.

There is certainly a legitimate question about whether exports from South Africa, even if carried out by a British subsidiary, are not first and foremost a matter for South African action. Still, let us assume for the sake of argument that the responsibility falls to Britain.

But Britain has been the biggest cheerleader for the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty. If it feels so strongly about the treaty’s desirability, why does it not ban or control arms exports by British subsidiaries itself? Why is there this appearance of hypocrisy between Britain’s public support for the treaty and the continuation of this trade? The answer is that the treaty is a deeply unserious undertaking, as the actions of its supporters, such as Britain, France, and — far, far more seriously — Iran, prove every day.

And what, by the way, are those “new procedural rules” that threaten to restrict the treaty’s progress? They are the Obama administration’s demand that the negotiations proceed on the basis of consensus. On that score, Amnesty International can relax: far from slowing things down, the pursuit of consensus will accelerate them. Of course, the resulting treaty will be both fast and bad, because consensus is just another word for watering standards down to the lowest common denominator. But that is not the kind of thing that should worry organizations more concerned with the appearance of progress than with its substance.

Late last week, the Obama administration did what I feared it would do: It endorsed the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty negotiations. The goal is to craft a treaty negotiated and ready for signature by 2012 that would impose standards on the entire conventional arms trade. The projected treaty’s scope is vast. Here, by way of example, is what the United Kingdom believes it should cover:

. . . all conventional arms, ranging from handguns and other small arms and light weapons (SALW), to main battle tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, combat aircraft (including helicopters), warships and conventionally armed missiles. To ensure that such arms are not used in breach of international commitments, an instrument should also cover munitions for the equipment listed above, including ammunition for SALW and larger weapons, the technology to produce and maintain such equipment, and their parts and components.

One obvious problem with this laundry list is that such a broad a treaty will likely – indeed, inevitably– cover nothing in practice by virtue of trying to cover everything in theory. And that would only subvert the U.S.’s export controls, which are widely acknowledged, not least by the administration, to be the best in the world.

So what did the administration do?  It agreed to join the negotiations, but only if they proceeded on the basis of consensus.

And why?  In order, the Washington Post reports, “to forestall criticism from U.S. conservatives that an arms trade treaty would be a first step toward regulating the [domestic] U.S. arms trade.”

Evidently, the Second Amendment is one area – our export controls are another – where even this administration willingly concedes that the U.S. is, in fact, exceptional. Read the rest of this entry »

No, I’m not talking about the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, though some very stinging questions have been raised about just how, exactly, the release was related to BP’s negotiation with Libya about an oil-exploration deal. I’m talking about the 1970s.

I don’t normally place much faith in the Independent as a news source, but this story is backed up by just-released documents from the UK’s National Archives. According to them, Britain, in a personal letter from Prime Minister Harold Wilson, offered to pay Moammar Qaddafi £14 million in return for settling various claims against the UK and ending Libyan military support for the IRA.

Predictably, the offer went nowhere, even as Britain became increasingly desperate to settle up so as to get “a share of the latest Libyan five-year plan.” By the end of the decade, Qaddafi, sensing he had the British on the run, was holding out for £51 million — that’s about £1.5 billion in today’s money — and continuing to carry on just as before.

It’s an all-too-familiar story from the 1970s, one that repeats the theme of Germany’s pathetic collaboration with the PLO, which allowed the escape of the surviving terrorists after the Munich Massacre: don’t hurt us and we’ll give you what you want. Sometimes the bad guys cash the check. Sometimes they just laugh at the offer. But whatever they do, they don’t stop causing trouble. Britain, BP, and the Labour Government — if it lasts long enough — will have occasion to find that out when the returns come in from their latest Libyan adventure.

The Institute for the Study of War has released an outstanding report by Jeffrey Dressler on “Securing Helmand: Understanding and Responding to the Enemy.” The report surveys the province, the enemy, the Taliban’s campaign plan, the British experience in Helmand, and the recent ISAF operations in it. It also contains some excellent maps. There is too much in the report to summarize: anyone interested in the war should read it in full. But it makes three points that are of particular interest to those, like myself, who have followed Britain’s contribution to the war.

First, though the report does not state this explicitly, it is inescapably clear that the UK — and indeed the U.S. — has a serious problem with operational security. In June 2009, Britain and Afghan National Army forces undertook Operation Panther’s Claw in central Helmand, near Lashkar Gah. As the report notes, “[Days] before the launch of the operation, drones monitoring the town recorded scores of residents fleeing . . . the British faces relatively modest resistance as they advanced towards the bazaar [of Babaji]. They soon discovered that the entire area had been abandoned.” It is very hard to see how the UK or the U.S. can follow a course of shaping, clearing, holding, and building if their operations are known to the enemy so far and so clearly in advance.

Second, much of the criticism of the UK’s operations in Afghanistan has centered on the shortage of helicopters and IED-resistant vehicles. There is much truth to this, as the report makes clear: it points out that Britain is so short on helicopters that it had to borrow six Chinooks from the U.S. to launch Panther’s Claw in the first place. But the criticism is not entirely persuasive. The report also makes it clear that Britain’s strategy has moved from “peace support and counter-narcotics” to a “platoon house” approach based on positioning small outposts throughout the province. What it did not try to do was to clear and hold population centers.

In this context, the fact that British forces have taken serious losses from IEDs is not hard to understand: as Sam Kiley writes in his recently published book Desperate Glory, British influence “extends only so far as the soldiers can walk and fight.” Because British forces don’t control the ground, they leave themselves open to repeated IED attacks on their patrols. Britain’s shortage of helicopters and IED-resistant vehicles is real, and a very serious problem — but one that has to be seen in the light of the strategic deficiencies.

Third, the report points out that while Britain has not effectively shaped, cleared, or held the battlefield, it has devoted excessive emphasis to building on it. Of course, building is a good thing. But the report makes it clear that, for Britain, “building” is as much a public-relations strategy, designed to maintain support for the war at home and to achieve victory in Afghanistan through demonstration effects, as it is part of a counterinsurgency campaign that must begin by establishing security. The Kajaki Dam operations in September 2008 are particularly depressing in this regard: Britain mobilized 5,000 troops and numerous planes and vehicles to deliver turbines to the Dam in an effort to restore electrical power  to southern Afghanistan. In a limited sense, the operation worked. But now British forces are pinned down on a hill overlooking the Dam and “the enemy’s control of the battle-space . . . offers it the freedom of movement to conduct coordinated ambushes and IED attacks largely at will.”

Britain can fix these problems if it wants to. But right now, the government — adrift and rudderless in advance of an election it will almost certainly lose — looks as though it is still more interested in denying problems than in addressing them. As Michael Yon — caution, harsh language — warns in one of his latest dispatches, it seems to him as though those in charge in London “wish to separate realities from readers.” And given what the realities say about them, this — though dangerous and depressing —comes as no surprise.

The following message, which I reproduce in its entirety, was forwarded to me in my capacity as a Yale alum by a friend at Yale’s Divinity School. I am assured that it is not a parody. Any other
comment is superfluous.

A Note of Community Concern

Dear Divinity School Community,

On the evening of Friday, September 11th, following the Community
Dinner, there was a food-eating contest in the Common Room. The
contest was between teams of students eating watermelons. The contest
was a painful reminder of past images and painful stereotypes
involving watermelons and African Americans that continue to be used
today, and it should not have happened. To the extent that it happened
at all is a shared responsibility which we all deeply regret and for
which we all deeply apologize. The incident was not the fault of any
one person or group of persons, and it certainly was not the fault of
any two people. It went forward in ignorance of what it represented
and how it would be perceived by others. While we may acknowledge that
ignorance is no excuse for offense, it must also be acknowledged that
neither the ignorance nor the offense was intentional.

Student leaders, in consultation with faculty and administration, will
think together about ways that we as a community can address this
painful occurrence in a constructive and conciliatory manner. One way
this may go forward is with an educational opportunity about our
nation’s history and aspects of that history that often are
inadequately conveyed. We will give notice of this educational
opportunity as plans develop over the next several days. For now,
please note the suggested links at the bottom of this message for
educational information. Other opportunities for community
conversations related to this incident may go forward, as well, and we
will give notice of these opportunities as plans are made.

At our best, we are a community that respects and honors all its
members. At our best, we are a community whose members communicate
with one another directly and thoughtfully. It is our hope that we
might be the best community we can be in this challenging and
difficult situation. May it be said of us that love characterizes our
listening and our speaking, and that honesty and peace shape our
discourse. May we move forward in mutual understanding and justice.
Please know that we and others of the staff and faculty are available
to you for conversation, as needed. Please let us know of concerns you
have and ways we might address those concerns. Our prayers are with
you and this community, as we all seek God’s guidance and wisdom for
the path ahead.

Yours truly,

Emilie Townes
Academic Dean

Dale Peterson
Dean of Students

Please note: Background on this stereotype can be found on the links and also by making use of Google:

Does President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen tomorrow to lobby for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics mean that victory is in the bag for the Windy City? Ramesh Ponnuru, for one, believes so, and quite a few others have echoed his thought that the president would hardly dare to go—especially after he said on September 14 that he was too busy to make the trip—and risk looking foolish if Chicago lost.

They may be right, but my take is a little different. The IOC has an enormously swollen ego, believing itself to be the spiritual center of the ideology of Olympism. It very much likes to have world leaders at its beck and call. Tony Blair’s successful in-person lobbying for London’s 2012 bid set the unfortunate precedent, and now this round of bidders must match his standard. What persuaded Obama to schedule the visit to Copenhagen was not an assurance that Chicago had won. What persuaded him was influential Canadian IOC member Dick Pound’s comment that his absence from Copenhagen would “be noticed.” Obama is not going to Copenhagen to win. He is going to avoid losing.

It is depressing that Obama, after notifying the Czech Republic that he was pulling the plug on missile defense in a last-minute, late-night phone call, and after having spoken with his senior commander in Afghanistan only once in 10 weeks, has found time to fly to Copenhagen to lobby the IOC. But the IOC itself is far more depressing. Consider the IOC’s history of the Games, titled Athens to Athens, and published in 2003 by British journalist David Miller. Here is the IOC’s official statement, on page 345, on 9/11 and the 2002 Salt Lake City Games:

Yet again every foreigner was either embarrassed or irritated by the rampant American media chauvinism. George W. Bush breached protocol when declaring the Games open “on behalf of a proud, determined and grateful nation.” In the space of five months the American people seemed wholly to have forgotten what they had temporarily begun to acknowledge on September 11: that while the immense achievements of the nation over two centuries are regarded with admiration and not a little envy, there are many who find U.S. triumphalism unacceptable.

There is a lot that could be said about this disgusting smear. But most repulsive of all is the IOC’s implication that 9/11 was a reply by a few of the “many” offended by unacceptable American triumphalism, and that Americans are too dense to recognize in a permanent way their own culpability in causing the attack. That is the official, published view of the organization that the president of the United States has decided to grace with a personal visit of supplication. And that is the most nauseating part of this entire miserable affair.

Liam Fox, the Tory shadow defense secretary, spoke at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. His admirably concise remarks on the “The War in Afghanistan: Why Britain, America and NATO Must Fight to Win” will be available online shortly. They’re well worth your time if you’re interested in Afghanistan or what the Conservatives are likely to do if they come to power in May, as all the polls indicate they will.

The main takeaways are clear, and welcome. First, the Conservatives remain strongly committed to the fight in Afghanistan. Unlike conservatives in the U.S., they aren’t that much concerned that the current government wants out of the fight: bluntly, Gordon Brown is in too deep for that. Second, the Tories would back an increase in the size of the British forces in Afghanistan if those forces were used to train the Afghan National Army. And third, Fox in particular is concerned about mission creep in Afghanistan and how failure to fulfill all possible aims of the war is sapping public support. As he put it:

The best way to maintain support is to be very clear that we are there for national security reasons. . . . All of these other aims—on human rights, on democratic improvement, on what happens to education for the next generation, especially women—these are important and laudable aims in themselves but they’re not why we’re in Afghanistan.

For my part, Fox’s most interesting comment came toward the end of his remarks, when he pointed out that, while—as in Iraq—there will be many locals in Afghanistan who are reconcilable, there will remain a hard core of fanatics who will never be amenable to negotiation and who must be met with force. The belief that everyone is amenable to negotiation is, he argued, one of our most characteristic modern delusions.

Of course, this conviction is not unique to Dr. Fox. But he will shortly be in a position to act on it. And in the British context, something very much needs to be done. As evidence, I point to the most recent National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom, released in late June. The fact that it is 112 densely spaced pages long is one problem: nothing so wordy can possibly qualify as a strategy. But one of the worst bits is its treatment of ideology, which it describes, correctly if stiffly, as “a particularly important . . . threat driver.” But it then concludes:

Such [belief-based] rivalries can be made less potentially harmful if they are constrained within multilateral systems of rules, at the global level through the United Nations, though international law, through security and defence alliances such as NATO, and through regional organisations, particularly in Europe through the European Union. A rules-based international system is vital to help turn any rivalry into peaceful competition and in turn into constructive cooperation. This is another compelling argument for strong multilateral governance.

Yes indeed: the way to defeat rival ideologies is to invite those possessed by them into the UN, the EU, NATO, and the whole panoply of international institutions, membership into which will convince them to turn to “constructive cooperation.” That is the British government’s official view of how to deal with global ideological challenges. It is hard to imagine a more unserious and dangerous approach, or one more in keeping with the views that Dr. Fox rightly criticizes.

The U.S. Constitution was signed 222 years ago yesterday. But for all the reverence with which the Constitution is treated, Constitution Day isn’t one of the higher-visibility federal holidays. Perhaps that’s because, for most Americans, holidays are days on which you don’t have to go to work. Or perhaps it’s because, until 2004, the day was known—to the few who had heard of it—as Citizenship Day.

I confess to having been somewhat skeptical of Senator Robert Byrd’s initiative that led to the renaming of the day, in part because it requires all publicly funded educational institutions—which is almost all of them, to some extent—to devote part of the day to the history of the Constitution. The idea is excellent in theory, but I tended to think that, in practice, the universities that needed to study the Constitution the most would do their best to pervert any history they offered of it. But credit where credit is due: Yale’s commemoration yesterday included a public address on Lincoln and his faith in the Constitution by a former leader of Yale’s Conservative party. True, such events do nothing to change the political tide in American higher education, but at least they incline in the right direction.

Today, though, I’m more exercised about another constitution, the European one. The so-called Lisbon Treaty—in reality a rewrite of the EU’s abortive constitution—is up for its second vote in Ireland on October 2, the Irish having rejected it the first time, in June 2008. At that point, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned that “there is no plan B.” That, of course, was untrue: the plan, as always in Europe, was to have the Irish vote until they got it right. And this time, the EU might just squeak by: polling shows that support for the treaty has been dropping, but it still has a lead of 46 percent to 29 percent, with 25 percent undecided.

That’s not as strong for the yes vote as it looks: last time round, the no vote was behind by almost 2-to-1 and ended up pulling it out. But facing the EU’s “vote, vote, and vote again” strategy, and Ireland’s economic collapse in the interim, the no campaigners must be less confident this time. As Tony Barber’s EU blog post for the Financial Times suggests, the main asset of the no campaign—apart from Irish anger at the EU’s presumptuousness in demanding a revote—is the sentiment that, since pro-Lisbon politicians made a mess of Ireland’s finances, they should not be trusted with the future of its sovereignty.

But there are other troubles ahead for the EU’s constitution. One of them is in the Czech Republic, where President Klaus has yet to sign—and shows no intention of doing so. The more formidable one, though, is in Britain. If by chance Ireland votes no, and presuming it wins the May general election, the Conservative party will hold a referendum on the constitution, which will destroy it. The trickier question is what the Tories will do if Ireland votes yes. This remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but there are some valuable straws in the wind. The first is the simple political reality that 90 percent of all Tory candidates want to reduce the EU’s hold on Britain. That is not a bloc of future Tory MPs: it is virtually the entire party.

The second is Dan Hannan’s recent statement, after a meeting with the Tory shadow minister for Europe, that “I am increasingly confident that Britain will get its referendum. I’m not in a position to explain why at this stage, but our hand is stronger than is generally supposed.” Right now, that remains just a tantalizing hint, but as the results of the June European elections show, there is a good deal of anger at the political establishment in Britain, and nothing is more establishment than the European Union.

The party that challenges that establishment, and Labour’s steady centralization of power into it, will not win power simply on an anti-EU vote, but resisting the EU will be essential to the coherence of the appeal. And that—apart from the EU’s failure to serve British national interests, of course—is the fundamental reason to believe that Hannan is not just indulging his hopes, and to believe that this constitution, unlike the American one, will not make it 222 days—much less 222 years.

Yale has a World Fellows Program. When launched, it was talked about on campus as a kind of mid-career equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship: bring the rising thinkers and doers of the world to Yale for a semester (people with careers, unlike newly minted undergraduates, usually can’t afford to take more than four months off), expose them to American higher education and all its wonders, recruit them into the Yale cadre, and toss them back into the lake to fructify and rise to run the world.

The scheme hasn’t been a complete failure, but, predictably, it has made only a limited impact on Yale—partly because the university lives an almost self-contained life and has little interest in visitors with a four-month tenure, and partly because Yale tends to select World Fellows who mirror its own prejudices. In other words, if you already think that America—and all the ills for which it is supposedly responsible—is the world’s biggest problem, Yale doesn’t have much to teach you.

So what were the World Fellows doing midmorning on 9/11? They were listening to the following program, offered, as part of a regular series, by one of their own:

Meltdown: Eye-witness Accounts of Catastrophic Climate Change Arctic explorer, environmental scientist, and World Fellow Tim Jarvis presents dramatic eye-witness evidence of melting polar ice-caps. His presentation will be supplemented by short accounts of the effect of catastrophic climate change on front-line countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. The discussion will focus on what has already occurred and is demonstrable, and what the consequences of further climate change will be.

I don’t demand that on 9/11 Yale focus only on 9/11. I don’t even object, too much, to the obviously propagandizing nature of the event—even though a scientist should be willing to accept that eyewitness anecdotes are no substitute for data. But would it be too much to ask that the World Fellows, living for the time in the United States, on one morning focus on the actual and demonstrated dangers posed to the U.S. and many other nations by Islamist mass terrorism? Yes, it evidently would be. Get back into the memory hole, 9/11.

Last month, the story broke that Yale University Press was censoring one of its own books—by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon controversy—out of fear that if it published the cartoons in question, it would, in the words of John Donatich, the press’s director, put “blood on my hands.” In other words, there would be riots and murders by outraged Islamists.

Since then, there have been several developments that are worth following up on. Martin Kramer has done sterling detective work assembling circumstantial—but plausible—evidence that Yale’s decision had at least as much to do with its desire to win a big donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as it did with cravenness. Particularly significant in this connection is the fact that Yale named Muna AbuSulayman, executive director of the Alwaleed Bin Foundation, as a Yale World Fellow—a sort of midcareer equivalent of the Rhodes Fellowship—for fall 2009.

As Kramer puts it, “Imagine, then—and we’re just imagining—that someone in the Yale administration, perhaps in President Levin’s office, gets wind of the fact that Yale University is about to publish a book on the Danish cartoons . . . Whooah! Good luck explaining to people like Prince Alwaleed that Yale University and Yale University Press are two different shops. The university can’t interfere in editorial matters, so what’s to be done? Summon some ‘experts’ who’ll be smart enough to know just what to say. Yale will be accused of surrendering to an imagined threat by extremists. So be it: self-censorship to spare bloodshed in Nigeria or Indonesia still sounds a lot nobler than self-censorship to keep a Saudi prince on the line for $20 million.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, a colleague and I published a substantial paper on the faults inherent in the UN’s efforts to negotiate an arms-trade treaty. These faults are many and serious, but they come down, fundamentally, to the fact that too few states enforce their existing laws, or live up to their existing responsibilities, on the import and export of arms. A treaty will do nothing to remedy this disinterest, incapacity, or—in far too many cases—malfeasance.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal and other papers reported a case that illustrates these faults. In August, the UAE seized a shipment of military hardware from North Korea aboard a vessel bound for Iran. This is, needless to say, a violation of the UN Security Council ban on military exports from North Korea, but that did nothing to stop Iran from seeking to import them.

But Iran and North Korea were not the only nations involved. The weapons were carried on an Australian vessel, flying under a Bahamian flag. The exporting company was an Italian firm, working out of Shanghai, China, and the parent company of the Australian shipping firm is based in France. So all together, at least seven nations are implicated in this effort to breach the sanctions on North Korea. We can have confidence that Australia, at least, will treat this failure with appropriate seriousness. But it is much less easy to be sure of Italy, with its enormous trade ties to Iran, never mind China.

Fortunately, the weapons were not nuclear. The Wall Street Journal reports that they were “detonators and ammunition for rocket-propelled grenade launchers.” But that is bad enough: take a look about halfway down the page at one of Michael Yon’s latest dispatches from Afghanistan if you want to see what an RPG does to a professionally constructed military barricade. There is a very good chance that those North Korean RPGs were headed for Afghanistan, to be used by the Taliban against British and American soldiers.

Needless to say, Iran proclaims—in its submission on the projected UN treaty—that it “has enforced and continues to enforce measures to prevent and curb the illicit trafficking and transfer of such weapons.” This is a blatant lie. It has, further, the gall to claim that “the major problem of the developing countries” rests in the culpability of “certain major exporters of . . . [small] weapons,” i.e., “certain Western countries.” Like the other nations involved in this case—though in Iran’s case, the problem is evil intent, not a lack of attention—Iran is engaging in activities that violate its own laws and existing UN Security Council resolutions. Another UN treaty will not cure this problem—it will only give the bad states more cover to hide behind.

And that is something the UN specializes in. Indeed, since the UN works for all its member states—the bad ones as well as the good ones—it can scarcely do anything but incline toward covering up malfeasance. Yesterday, French officials harshly criticized IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, who called the Iranian nuclear threat “hyped.” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner replied that “it is clear on reading the IAEA documents that not a single question has been answered,” while another French official, speaking off the record, said “ElBaradei has been watering things down for a very long time and now we’ve had enough. . . . [IAEA inspectors have gathered] whole series of pieces of evidence, of proof.”

Proof indeed. It’s too bad that the French back the UN’s projected treaty. Their own complaints about the IAEA, and their circumstantial and perhaps unknowing involvement in the shipment of North Korean weapons to Iran, illustrate the fallacies inherent in believing that a UN treaty will be effective.

Van Jackson, founder and executive editor of Asia Chronicle, has written a column titled “Principles impede progress for Burma,” attacking those—like a colleague of mine here at the Heritage Foundation—who have the temerity to argue that U.S. policy toward Burma should be based on principles. Jackson, by contrast, prefers the meaningless criterion of effectiveness devoid of any actual objectives.

In his pursuit of steely-eyed utilitarianism, Jackson makes the amusing claim that “British philosopher John Stuart Mill would turn over in his grave at the idea of allowing such a failed policy to continue.” Jackson appears to know just enough about Mill to be dangerous, i.e., that Mill was a utilitarian. True indeed—at least until Mill suffered from a nervous breakdown at the age of 20 and turned to the poetry of the Romantics as a relief from the dust-dry pursuit of utility. Partisans of policy without principle might take a lesson from that.

But we needn’t rely on Mill’s love of Wordsworth to make the case. One of Mill’s greatest essays was “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” originally published in 1859. What might Mill have said about the idea that the U.S. should engage its way to good relations with a lawless dictatorship?

“To suppose . . . the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into, however it may be with those who, from a safe and unresponsible position, criticize statesmen. . . . [T]he rules of ordinary inter-national morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate.”

Reciprocity is fundamental to diplomacy, and to international affairs more broadly. But reciprocity cannot reliably exist if one side is not governed by law. And that is why engaging with dictators is a recipe for diplomatic failure, as well as a disgrace to decent principles.

Michael Barone has an article in today’s Washington Examiner that is—like all he writes—thought-provoking and worthy of a read. Titled “Obama’s lyrical Left struggles with liberalism,” it argues that Obama is a member of the “lyrical Left”—basically, a dove. But it wasn’t a dovish foreign policy that made the state big, argues Barone: it was the undovish liberals like Wilson and FDR who fought wars, because wars grow the state. As Barone concludes, “A big-government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.”

Well, maybe. I doubt Obama is learning any such thing: he doesn’t seem like the type much interested in fighting big wars, or in learning. The term “lyrical Left” is new to me, and while it makes sense, I’ve always thought of Obama not as a dove but rather as a college professor. He has the cool, above-it-all, slightly condescending attitude of a tenured member of the Harvard faculty. Not so much lyrical as holier than thou.

But Barone is definitely right about the “lyrical Left.” His case study is Randolph Bourne, a writer for the New Republic who opposed U.S. entry into the Great War on the grounds that it would give too much power to the state to interfere in private enterprise and private opinions. Indeed, that was largely the reason that Wilson himself delayed and delayed going to war, so Barone’s characterization of him as part of the “unlyrical warlike Left” is not precisely right, though fair enough as a retrospective summary.

What Barone is writing about is Gladstonian liberalism: averse to war abroad and averse to the big state at home. Not that the Grand Old Man didn’t fight and legislate, of course. But the liberal argument in the 19th century had it that the purpose of state action was to remove restraints it had previously imposed, be it on trade or voting rights, usually at the behest of powerful vested interests. The problem, in other words, was the state itself, and its capture by the aristocracy. Liberals then were the optimists.

But that is not today’s Left. The generation of the 1960s may have been pacifists abroad, but while they were supposedly in favor of freedom at home, they defined freedom as liberty from inherited morality. The past was a nightmare from which, at least rhetorically, they were trying to escape. And that attitude dovetailed perfectly with a massively expanded state, which existed not to undue its previous errors but to remedy the inherited wrongs of society at large. Skeptical and pacifist about the U.S. abroad, skeptical and interventionist about it at home. It isn’t Gladstonian or lyrical, but it’s undeniably coherent. Liberals today are the pessimists.

It would be wonderful if Barone were right. If so, the Left today would either be pacifist abroad and libertarian at home, or activist abroad and activist at home. Neither of those would be entirely to my liking, but in any case it would at least be one out of two, and that’s not bad. But the fact that the Left has existed for more than 40 years as pacifist abroad and activist at home suggests that the “basic contradiction” Barone sees between the Democratic party and liberalism is really a contradiction between the old liberalism and the new—even if the latter is now more than two generations old.

I hope that everyone listens, though there’s not much chance of that. On Wednesday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a new study—”What Will They Learn?”—accompanied by a very spiffy site of the same name. The study, timed to hit the market as the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings appear, grades colleges and universities not by easily manipulated and subjective criteria but by doing what is most damaging to academia: taking it at its word.

ACTA presents the “mission statement” of each institution it grades and assesses whether it has strong general-education requirements. This is not the same, it is careful to note, as having distribution requirements: almost every institution has those, but they are usually so broad as to require no common core of knowledge. The results, for anyone who has followed higher education, are depressingly predictable: lots of F‘s, especially for the nation’s liberal-arts colleges and elite universities.

My own undergraduate institution, Grinnell College in Iowa, gets a well-deserved straight F for requiring nothing whatsoever. Frankly, that was one big reason I went there, which only goes to show that most 19-year-olds are entirely unqualified to assess the merits of the argument for a core curriculum. But I did enjoy ACTA’s quote from Grinnell, that “the heterogeneity of good critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas militate against any single answer” to the question “What should the liberally educated person know?” Read the rest of this entry »

Newspapers around the world are reporting that an Islamist Internet site affiliated with supporters of Abdullah al-Faisal—Jamaican-born Trevor William Forest, who was deported from Britain in 2007 after serving a jail sentence for soliciting the murder of Jews, Americans, and Hindus—is promising “spectacular attacks” in Britain, to be launched by “home-grown terrorists.”

By itself, this is hardly the “astounding revelation” that the newspapers suggest: home-grown terror in the UK is sadly nothing new. And, though MI-5 is undoubtedly paying attention, these reports say nothing particularly useful about the threat of terrorism in Britain in the near future: Islamist sites have predicted 50 of the last three attacks.

But I am interested to read that, at least on this particular site, Islamists are now arguing that Britain and Europe pose a more serious threat to their future prospects than the United States. Perhaps that reflects nothing more than pique at al-Faisal’s deportation: it is certainly hard to think of much that continental Europe has done recently to merit the honor of being Islamism’s worst enemy.

On the other hand, the contention does have a logic. The Islamist thesis—most closely associated, for obvious reasons, with Osama bin Laden—that they should attack the U.S. first never made much sense, based as it was on a feeble analogy between the U.S. and the USSR’s defeat in Afghanistan.

Attacks on targets in Europe, though less damaging than 9/11, have been more politically fruitful, as illustrated by the impact of the Madrid bombings. An Islamist focus on Europe, and on Britain in particular, might open up extremely painful gaps between the U.S. and its NATO allies about the conduct and continuance of the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, unless the terrorists acquire WMDs, this is probably the best way for them to achieve a political victory that would be out of all proportion to their actual strength. Let us hope that they are not as strategically minded as these reports suggest.

I’m not afraid of Islamists. As long as we in the liberal West don’t browbeat ourselves into submission, and as long as we take sensible measures to defend ourselves from the threat of mass terrorism—especially from WMDs—there is no reason for free, modern, and enterprising societies to fear losing to medieval Islamism. What makes me nervous is that there are too few leaders today willing to follow Reagan’s example from the Cold War in saying this, and that there are too many “opinion leaders” and officials who are eager to split the difference between good and evil.

Consider Yale University Press, which decided not to publish the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in a forthcoming book entitled The Cartoons That Shook the World. Not only that: it also pulled “a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell” from the same volume. The director of the Yale University Press, John Donatich, followed the usual line of saying that the decision to censor his own press’s book was “difficult”—but that when “it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

So the press accepted a book on the cartoon controversy, then decided at the last moment not to reproduce the actual cartoons on the grounds that if any riots resulted, the press would be responsible for the results. That’s a messed-up editorial process and a silly mutilation of the resulting book. But note who is not held responsible: the potential rioters, who are apparently automatons and spring uncontrollably and unstoppably into action whenever a Westerner dares to offend them. Thus, as part of our relentless quest for a quiet life, the press must avoid causing offense to anyone. If that is not appeasement, I don’t know what is.

As usual, though, Britain leads the way when it comes to this sort of dangerous foolishness. Earlier this month, three female police officers in South Yorkshire participated in an “In Your Shoes Day” exercise. They spent a day walking around in public in hijab, headscarves, and niqab veils, accompanied by four Muslim women, who were then treated to a tour of the custody suite and the CCTV office in headquarters. The point of all this: to teach the police officers about the pervasive racism of British society by revealing to them all the oppression and insults they would encounter when wearing a burka.

Actually, nothing much happened, so the point of the experience was rather lost. Or perhaps it wasn’t: one of the police officers reported that the day “had given her a greater appreciation of how Muslim women feel when they walk out in public in ‘clothing appropriate to their beliefs.’ ” Yes indeed, the police in South Yorkshire are being taught—and happen to accept the lesson—that the most conservative style of female dress is the one “appropriate” to Islam, and that anyone who protests this is illiberal at best and racist at worse.

Thus, explicitly, the police are taught to sympathize with the most radical Islamists and to regard with suspicion any Muslim liberal who dares to resist their intimidation. And, as Yale University Press has shown, intimidation persists for a simple reason: it works.

Jacqui Smith was Britain’s Home Secretary from late June 2007 through early June 2009. She was ultimately forced to resign when, as part of the ongoing scandal of parliamentary-expense claims, it was discovered that her husband had requested reimbursement for pornographic movies.

Quite enough has been said about this episode, which reflected poorly not on Ms. Smith but on her husband and the expense system. But recently, the BBC reported that she has given a thoroughly depressing interview to Total Politics magazine. She admits that she had “never run a major organization” before taking over the Home Office, and that if she did a good job, it was “more by luck than by any kind of development of [my] skills.”

When asked if she ever worried whether she was up to the job, she replies, “Well, every single time that I was appointed to a ministerial job I thought that.” When London and Glasgow airport were attacked by terrorists in July 2007, her first reaction, she now admits, reflected her detachment from her responsibilities: “I’m not sure I understood, I’m ashamed to say, when I first heard it, quite how serious it was.” More broadly, she argues that the system of Cabinet government, in which ministers are placed without much in the way of preparation or training at the top of immense government departments, is “pretty dysfunctional in the way that it works.”

There is no point in criticizing Ms. Smith for any of this, because none of this mentality is unique to her. It has all been said before, and it will probably be again. The difficulty is what to do about the problem. Relying on the civil service, while obviously necessary to some extent, is no solution, because it defeats ministerial direction and, ultimately, democracy itself. Bringing in ministers from outside government — who then have to be placed in the House of Lords — sounds appealing (and it’s a solution Gordon Brown’s increasingly resorted to), but such outsiders have a poor track record and are not subject to questioning in the Commons.

Ms. Smith opts for the easy out of “better training,” but it’s hard to have faith in this: It presupposes that training works, and that the PM will pick those who have aptitude for suitable jobs. In reality, as the entire Blair/Brown era reveals, quite a few other factors enter into ministerial selections. Some of these are inglorious but inevitable — internal party politics — while others are a good seal less inevitable, such as Labour’s enthusiasm for treating women as tokens by putting them in high-profile ministries regardless of whether they were qualified or not.

The actual remedy is simple to state but difficult to achieve. Government ministries are now almost impossible to manage, even given a steady supply of willing and able talent, because they are enormous and because there are so many of them that the coordination problems are insuperable. The Cabinet system was born in an era when government was inconceivably smaller than it is now. (The entire personnel list of the Foreign Office for 1900, for instance, fits very comfortably on three sheets of paper.) It may be true that politicians were better educated and better trained then, but a department of 75 is inherently a lot easier to manage than one of 75,000.

Getting back to an FO of 75 is a pipe dream, of course. But that’s not to say that the government shouldn’t try to do a good deal less and at the same time try to push some of what it does back down to the counties and cities. Limited government and localism are not just good for efficiency. More important, they’re also good for Cabinet government, for accountability before Parliament, and thus for democracy.

Michael Barone has a column today at Real Clear Politics that’s summed up by its title: “Britain and United States Go In Different Directions.” His thesis is cogent, and to an extent correct: The Obama administration is trying to drag the U.S. to the Left (he might well have said that the administration is trying to Europeanize it), whereas in Britain, the next government looks likely to be Conservative and to be more interested in shrinking the state (or at least restraining its growth) than expanding it.

This divergence is limited only by the consideration that it’s not easy to change the direction of politics: Whatever the situation, no matter what the crisis, the status quo has inertia on its side.

Arguing with Michael Barone about U.S. politics is a losing proposition. But he does miss an important piece of the British context: Labour lost the 1992 general election, an election it arguably should have won. This marked the start of a divergence of U.S. and British political cycles that is unprecedented in the postwar era. The cycles do not line up precisely, of course, but consider Ike (1952) and Churchill (1951), or Wilson (1964) and Kennedy (1960), or Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980).

When John Major pulled it out in 1992, he set the Conservatives up for a pretty miserable five years in power — there may be an analogy to George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 lurking here — that saw the Tories crushed by the collapse of the pound in September 1992, a deep recession, and splits over Europe. If Labour had won in 1992, that would have been their inheritance, and they likely would have responded in the same way and suffered the same unpopularity. The narrow defeat of 1992 set them up for a crushing win in 1997.

That victory was premised on any number of arguments, but central to Labour’s win was their case that the mean old Tories had systemically underfunded Britain’s public services. After a few years of restraint, Labour took advantage of the strong economy they’d inherited from the Tories to start spending. As Barone notes, the result was that they drove the size of the British state up to close to 50 percent of the entire economy, without substantial improvements in public services, at precisely the moment when a global recession was hitting in Britain with particular severity and pushing government borrowing to over 14 percent of GDP over the year to come.

So it’s not that Britain and the U.S. are diverging. They did that 17 years ago. What we’re seeing today is the result of that divergence: If you spend the kind of money Labour has over the past 10 years, there will sooner or later be a reaction against it. It’s happening in Britain now, and it’s happened on the continent, which in the past few years has moderately clamped down on the state and is now not keen on growing it again to fight the recession.

Why? Because in the short run, voters like promises of benefits more than they resent taxes, but in the long run, when the benefits do not materialize and the costs of pursuing them become obvious, they change their minds.

Obama is trying to double-time his way through the Labour experience: Skip the few years of restraint and get to the massive spending increases as fast as possible. If Britain’s experience is any guide, that may be the best way to close the Anglo-American divergence in double-time as well.

In the latest Times Literary Supplement, Sir Michael Howard, in the course of a largely admiring review of two recent works on Winston Churchill, makes a claim that made me pause. According to Sir Michael,

The myth of the “special relationship” that Churchill invented and that so many of his admirers on both sides of the Atlantic continue to propagate is briskly demolished. . . . Throughout the war the United States consulted her own interests, as any state is bound to do: and these did not extend to helping Britain either to remain solvent or to retain any part of her empire once the war was over.

I am, I suppose, one of those propagating admires. Personally, I had the great privilege of studying under Sir Michael when he was the first Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale. If nothing else, that taught me that one does not disagree lightly with Sir Michael Howard: very few have put more sense about war into shorter compasses than he, and perhaps none have more experience with fighting, advising about fighting, writing about fighting, and establishing the institutions to promote the study of fighting.

But Sir Michael’s comments are worth pausing over. From one point of view, he is quite right. The U.S. was much more Anglophobic during, and even after, World War II than we now recall, and we do have Churchill, among others, to thank for that. It was not until shortly before the end of the war that Britain surpassed the USSR – Stalin’s USSR – as the ally that Americans liked more. And the interchanges between the British and the Americans during the creation of the GATT, for example, are remarkable for the cold willingness of the U.S. to use the hammer of its economic might against Britain, and the equally stubborn unwillingness of Britain to give in to U.S. pressure.

There is, though, another side to the story. Churchill may have invented the term “special relationship,” but he did not invent the concept. As the son of an American mother and a British father, he was a product of it, of the late 19th century reconciliation between the U.S. and Britain. This was ultimately not, quite, as enduring a relationship as the one forged during the Second World War, as various Anglo-American spats – and sometimes more than that – in the interwar years reveal. But it was vital nonetheless: without the earlier reconciliation, the later alliance would not have been possible.

And while the U.S. remained Anglophobic, in places, into the mid-1950s, the strength of that sentiment must be judged against the burning nationalist resentment against Britain that flourished in the U.S. through much of the 19th century, for obvious historical reasons. So while it is easy to forget the enduring strength of U.S. Anglophobia, it is even easier to forget how much it had ebbed even by the time the war came. As with U.S. hostility to Britain during and after the war, or the frictions in the highest councils of the Western Allies, it is a matter of degree.

For myself, I am impressed not by the frictions, which were inevitable, but by the fact that the U.S., born of a rebellion against British rule, nonetheless decided it was necessary to come to Britain’s aid – and by the fact that, ultimately, its hostility faded away completely. Of course that took leadership on Churchill’s part. What great political achievement does not?

As Sir Michael acknowledges, it is a truism to claim that the U.S. consulted its interests in its relations with Britain. And, slightly contrary to Sir Michael’s point, the U.S. did not simply let Britain sink after the war was over. There was the post-war loan, for one, and the Marshall Plan, for another. It’s quite plausible to argue that the U.S. did not handle the former with great grace, and that the latter was in the service of anti-Communism, but I am not sure why that counts against them. After all, the fact that both Britain and the U.S. were anti-Communist liberal democracies, and recognized each other as such, was a sensible basis for a close alliance. Nor did the U.S. just kick the British Empire to the curb. The causes of decolonization will be debated endlessly, but few historians of it would assign more than secondary importance to U.S. pressure.

Sir Michael’s point about interests raises a somewhat more fundamental issue. Interests, like relationships, and indeed like nations themselves, are not a God-created given. They are shaped, yes, by current needs, but more by politics, by ideas, by history, by culture, and by society.  They are all, in a sense, invented. The U.S. and Britain came together in part, because of Churchill’s leadership, in part because of World War II, but more fundamentally because they decided that they had more in common (with the possible exception of Britain’s relationship with the Old Commonwealth) than any other two nations out there. After all, the U.S. and Britain both needed Russia’s help in the war very badly indeed, but that did not create a special relationship. The deeper basis for such a relationship simply did not exist.

So if the special relationship was invented, what of it? It was, and is, no more a myth because it was a political creation, with deep historical and cultural roots, than anything else in our world. Neither Britain nor, especially, the U.S., was the same country in 1945 that it was in 1845. Their interests had changed because their identities had changed, and both identities and interests pulled them together. Churchill both partook of that change and drove it onwards. If one believes that the causes he sought to serve in doing so were noble ones, as I do, then that achievement redounds to his great benefit.

The point of view that Sir Michael espouses has latterly become very popular with those – and I do not attribute this argument to Sir Michael – who are fundamentally hostile to the U.S., and wholeheartedly in favor of deeper and faster British integration into the EU, which is too often presented as the “natural” alternative to the artificial Americans. But if anything is an invention, it is the EU. Before about 1945, the U.S. was the awkward partner in the Anglo-American relationship. But today, it is Britain that is the awkward one, because its sense of its own identity is shifting.

From that point of view, claims like Sir Michael’s are the mirror image of the forces that created the special relationship. In presenting it as a myth, the claim, for political purposes, seeks to change Britain’s identity, and thus its interests. If that change is for the better, then it deserves support. But if, as I believe, it is a change for the worse, in the direction of submergence in the EU and weakening support for the values of historically liberal Britain around the world, then it deserves to be considered with the greatest of caution.

Yesterday, in response to a question from Sen. Coburn (R-OK) asking whether “there is no authority for a Supreme Court justice to utilize foreign law in terms of making decisions based on the Constitution or statutes,” Judge Sotomayor gave what appeared to be an unambiguous answer. As the Post’s transcript has it:

Foreign law cannot be used as a holding or a precedent or to bind or to influence the outcome of a legal decision interpreting the Constitution or American law that doesn’t direct you to that law.

On the face of it, this appears to be a repudiation of her statement to the ACLU in Puerto Rico in April 2009, that:

to the extent that we have freedom of ideas, international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system.

But in reality, the two statements are compatible, and Judge Sotomayor has repudiated nothing. It is important to observe that, by its very nature, the Supreme Court deals with “unsettled issues” in the U.S. legal system: well-settled matters never reach the Court. So her original claim was that international and foreign law do not supply controlling precedents, but “will” affect how Justices think about the cases before them.

Thus, most of her statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee was merely a rephrasing of her remarks to the ACLU: her only apparently concession was to rule out using foreign law to “influence” the outcome. But, moments later, she again stated that, while foreign law does not compel a conclusion, judges should use it to “build up a story of knowledge about legal thinking, about approaches that one might consider.” That is a pure restatement of her ACLU statement.

Furthermore, in keeping with Sen. Coburn’s question, she restricted her comments yesterday to the use of “foreign law,” and did not allude to “international law,” which offers another — and for liberals often more promising — avenue for achieving the same result.

But, more fundamentally, her claim is that it is correct to use foreign law — and, one must presume, international law — as a holding, a precedent, or an influence on a decision interpreting either the Constitution or U.S. law, if the judge is directed by that law itself to consider foreign law. The weakness in this argument is that it is the position of liberal legal activists that the Constitution does require considering international — though not necessarily foreign — law.

This conclusion is difficult for mortals to follow, but since the 1980s, what is known as “customary international law” — the Law of Nations — has controversially come to be considered as part of Federal Common Law, and thus part of the Laws of the United States under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. Thus, the argument goes, judges are right to consider international law. Indeed, they are obligated to do so. Thus, Judge Sotomayor’s argument that judges must use this law when directed to do does not repudiate the liberal argument that Sen. Coburn was criticizing: it repeats it.

Regrettably, Sen. Coburn did follow this rabbit down the hole. Let’s hope that he, or another member of the Committee, asks a solid follow-up. It’s not likely that any answer Judge Sotomayor gives will persuade the Committee to vote her down, but she should at least be asked a clear question that exposes the issue at stake.

There are two traditional ways to mark Bastille Day. First, parades. This year’s festivities were noteworthy for the inclusion of 400 Indian troops, to celebrate, as AFP put it, France’s “strategic relationship with the world’s biggest democracy.” Personally, I thought Clive of India pretty much put an end to Franco-Indian ties, but it turns out that AFP is referring to India’s appetite for France’s nuclear reactors and world-beating military technology (insert joke here). Why is it that European “strategic relationships” are mostly about money?

The other way to celebrate is by burning cars and attacking the police. It’s in keeping with the spirit of the original, but is now considered bad form. That doesn’t stop “disaffected youths,” as AFP politely describes them, from going on the rampage to “express their frustration with high unemployment rates and what they see as France’s failure to integrate ethnic minorities”: the eve of Bastille Day alone saw 300 cars burned and 13 police officers wounded.

Of course, it’s in the name of integration — at least, as understood by the traditional French model — that President Sarkozy has on the warpath against the burqa. It’s an approach that would never work in the U.S., but it accords well with the Rousseauian spirit of 1789, the sense that unwelcome elements of the existing social order can and must be remade by the state, acting as the secular embodiment of the popular will. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, there were many roads to modernity: France took one, the U.S. took another. France sought to promote social equality by force of the state; the U.S. sought to secure social opportunity by restricting the state’s reach.

As long as each nation is secure in its own history, there is no great problem with this. But the Obama administration’s been getting into the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” spirit. Just today, Judge Sotomayor, in replying to a question by Sen. Kohl on racial discrimination and diversity, argued that “equality requires effort.” If this is simply a way of saying that acting in a way that acknowledges the equality of God-given rights is not easy, then it is a fair reflection. But if it is a way of arguing that ensuring equality of outcome requires judicial effort, then it is in keeping with her judgment in Ricci v. DeStefano, but it’s out of step with the American tradition.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings are now as much a forum for concealing opinions as expressing them, so we are unlikely to learn more about the judge’s real views on the subject until she receives her up or down vote. But President Obama has been speaking out on the subject as well, and his views are clearer. As he said in Strasbourg:

We spend so much time talking about democracy…[b]ut democracy, a well-functioning society that promotes liberty and equality and fraternity, does not just depend on going to the ballot box.

The latter reflection is certainly true: one only wishes Obama would apply the insight to Honduras, where ousted president Manuel Zeyala was engaged in an effort to use the ballot box to subvert democracy. But is democracy really the same as “a well-functioning society that promotes liberty and equality and fraternity”? That is the French definition, to be sure, and of course, Obama was speaking in France.

But that is no reason to adopt France’s terms: surely, an American president, whether speaking in France or elsewhere, should — without being rude about it — celebrate the uniqueness of the American definition of democracy, which has a great deal to do with liberty, but not much at all with the societal promotion of equality or fraternity. One has the feeling that this slip — like the Judge’s reply — is only a gaffe in that it reveals an inconvenient truth about the President’s beliefs. Perhaps if he had to contemplate those “disaffected youths,” he might think again about the virtues of the American road to modernity.

David B. Kopel, the Research Director of the Independence Institute, and two of his colleagues related a fascinating and depressing story about the disarmament process in Sudan. In 2005, the U.S. brokered the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which is supposed to devolve most power in southern Sudan to an autonomous government. Part of thisprocess was the disarmament of civilians, and of militias that were not to be incorporated into the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

So the UN set out to work. The Lou Nuer tribe was targeted for disarmament first, but the SPLA pillaged the tribe’s cattle in the process, while neglecting its need for security against its tribal rivals. The Lou Nuer tribe formed its own army and attacked the SPLA. It was eventually defeated, at the cost of over 2,000 lives. Only 3,300 guns were collected, and the tribe ultimately rearmed, since the army was obviously uninterested in and incapable of protecting it. Even the Small Arms Survey (SAS), among the most vociferous advocates of gun control, thought the process was a fiasco. The response fromJan Pronk, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sudan, was that while civilians had been killed, “Mistakes have definitely been made but they have to learn the lesson.” It’s not clear if the “they” at stake were the dead civilians or the murderous army.

The process has been repeated throughout southern Sudan: an incompetent, corrupt, or criminal administration, with an equally malign army, is being cheered on by the UN as it tries to carry out a process of civilian disarmament, in the context of guns are sources of security against both tribal rivals and the predations of the army itself. Kopel’s conclusion is that “people in the region are understandably reluctant to disarm asymmetrically. Moreover, they remember that thecentral governments of their nations have committed genocide against them in the recent past, and so are unwilling to make their survival dependent on the government’s good will.” The SAS’s conclusion is almost equally apt: “Donors and governments continue to prioritize, even fetishize, the gathering of hardware.”

Why, apart from common humanity and the fact that we are, through the UN, helping to pay for this slaughter, does this matter to us? Well, sitting comfortably on the Obama Administration’s Treaty Priority List is the “Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other RelatedMaterials,” commonly known as CIFTA, its Spanish acronym. And in New York, negotiations for a UN brokered Arms Trade Treaty proceed apace. Both treaties have at their core the same fetishization of hardware, and the same assumption that it’s the guns, not the political and ethnic hatreds that lead to their use, that are the problem. But the UN, pleased with how well its approach has worked in southern Sudan, is eager to take its act worldwide. After all, while mistakes have been made, everyone has learned a lesson.

From her upcoming Sunday interview with the New York Times:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe [v. Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

I leave it up to you to interpret that pronouncement. But it prompts two thoughts from me. First, that if any conservative said this, no matter what they meant by it, they would be immediately exiled from polite and political society, and subjected to the unremitting scorn of the New York Times and all other left-thinking fora.

Second, we tend to forget that enthusiasm for coercive birth-control was associated not with conservatives, or with “the right,” but with Progressives, for whom it was an element of scientific, expert-driven, modernity. In its heyday, progressivism did not map easily onto Democrats v. Republicans: both Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson were progressives, as was Herbert Hoover. Progressivism became associated with liberalism only during FDR’s time.

The supposed “modernity” of expert manipulation of the population appealed to self-consciously modern places, which is why the U.S. and the Scandinavian countries initially led the movement—both in theory and in practice. But as Walter Lippmann stated in a letter to Yale psychologist Robert Yerkes—one of the leaders of the American progressive movement—”your data are insufficient and your definitions altogether too broad. Such statements, made with the prestige of science, leave you open to the gravest misunderstandings.”

A grave misunderstanding, indeed.