Joshua Muravchik: Neocon Corner

According to a recent news account, a project called the Christian Observance Index, brainchild of Reverend Ralph Feis,

. . . has been in the works since 2006, with researchers quietly holding behind-the-scenes meetings with scholars, activists and government officials.

“We have been soliciting the opinion of scholars throughout the Christian world, asking them what defines a Christian country, from the point of view of Christian law,” said Feis.

“What are the principles that make a country Christian? We can say among them is justice, protection of religion and minorities and elimination of poverty, and so on.”

By the end of this year, the institute expects to release the results of an unprecedented poll, conducted with the Gallup Organization, that asked people in all of the world’s predominantly Christian lands how well they felt their country complied with Christian principles.

“The COA will create an annual rating, a score to rate countries on how compliant they are,” said Reverend Feis.

“And we’d like to index both Christian and non-Christian countries, because we know some non-Christian countries will score higher than some Christian ones on some principles like justice, protection of minorities and so on.”

Revered Feis admitted the project was ambitious.  Determining Christian principles had been the easy part, he said.

In classical Christian jurisprudence the ruler must be someone who is “wise and upholds Christian law,” he explained.

“Early scholars debated a third point: whether the ruler must also be pious.

“And the answer is no. As long as the ruler is committed to upholding Christian law, piety should not be a hurdle to reigning over people.”

Is it only because I’m a Jew that this makes me uneasy? I doubt it. Even though Reverend Feis comes across as pretty liberal in a number of ways, I would bet that few of my Christian friends will welcome the idea of some organization taking it upon itself to issue a rating of every country in the world on its “Christianness.”

Fortunately, I made all this up. Well, not exactly. The report above is lifted almost word-for-word from an article headlined, “Shariah Index Will Rate Countries’ Islamic Law,” that appeared in July 2009 in The National, an English-language newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates. 

The only things I changed were to substitute the word “Christian” for “Muslim,” and “Christian law” for “Shariah.” Also, the real name of the “Christian Observance Index” is the Shariah Index.  And the real name of “Reverend Ralph Feis” is Imam Feisal Rauf.

Yes, that’s the same imam whose plan it is to build a mosque and Muslim center near “ground zero.” We’ve been told repeatedly that Imam Feisal is a true moderate, the very kind of Muslim leader that we need to encourage. So he may be. But how much is known about what he stands for and what his “moderation” may consist of? On first hearing, an index to measure the “Islamicity” (his term) of every country does not sound like an exercise in tolerance and multiculturalism.

So what? Isn’t his building project a matter of religious freedom, pure and simple? Well, no. Of course, Muslims have the exact same right to practice their faith as any other Americans. But even our most basic rights are not absolute. Freedom of speech does not include the right to yell “fire” if there isn’t one. Freedom of assembly does not mean you can congregate wherever you wish. Freedom of the press does not imply the right to libel. And freedom of worship does not entail building whatever and wherever you wish.

As the percipient Peter Wehner has pointed out, few would say this was nothing but a first amendment issue if the sponsors of the ground zero project were cheerleaders for al-Qaeda. Imam Feisal is nothing of the kind. To the contrary, he told 60 Minutes on the morrow of 9/11 that “fanaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam.” But he added that “United States policies were an accessory to the crime . . . [b]ecause we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”

Before I would endorse the right of the Cordoba Initiative to erect its complex next to ground zero, I’d like to know a lot more about what this center will represent, including more about the beliefs of its mastermind who blamed America for bin Laden and who is ranking the world’s countries according to their “Islamicity.”

Does the legalization of gay marriage contribute to the weakening of that hallowed institution that forms the bedrock of civilization?

The issue is back in the headlines thanks to a California federal court decision overturning the results of a voter referendum denying legal status to such unions. The matter is now headed to the Supreme Court and, reportedly, some Republicans are hoping that it will light a fire under social-conservative voters, adding to their momentum going into this fall’s election.

I will be happy if the Democrats take a pasting in November as a repudiation of Obama’s arrogant and dangerous policies. But I will take no joy in a rally of Americans against gay marriage.

Decades ago, foreign policy, crime, and reverse discrimination were the issues that drove me from the Left, making me a “neoconservative.”  Over decades, I came to see the wisdom of the views of traditional conservatives on other subjects like government spending, welfare, school prayer, and more. But as for opposition to gay marriage, I just don’t get it.

Yes, homosexuality presents society with challenges that point to deep questions. What raises human beings above animals is self-denial in its multifarious forms: generosity, responsibility, modesty, and in many ways, love. Animals, in contrast, rarely transcend brutal selfishness, except in the maternal (and in some species, paternal) instinct.

Like other species, humans are possessed of strong sexual impulses, and civilization requires that they be tamed. A key means to this end is to tether sexuality as much as possible to reproduction by favoring marriage as the framework for sexuality. Of course even in marriage most sex acts do not result, and are not intended to result, in conception, but traditional marriage nonetheless forms a context in which sex and child-rearing are linked. Since homosexual acts (as distinct from homosexual individuals) can never be procreative, homosexuality excites conservative suspicions.

But the argument cannot end there. In recent times, something has come to be understood that I suppose gay people always knew. Whether the source is nature or nurture, for most, homosexuality is not a choice. And is there any among us who has not experienced desires that we wished we did not feel? At the dawn of political philosophy, Plato’s Socrates rejoices that old age has freed him from the burden of libido.

A substantial fraction of people feel carnal affinity exclusively or primarily with individuals of the same sex. Insofar as their sexuality is to be channeled it cannot be toward the goal of procreation. If society has a general interest in the constraint of the sexual instinct, then it has an interest in encouraging long-term monogamous relations regardless of whether one ostensible purpose is to bear offspring.

Indeed, one other thing that feeds suspicion toward homosexuality is the promiscuity that contributed to the AIDS plague. This, too, is obviously an argument for public policies that encourage monogamy. Of course, promiscuity is not a characteristic of female homosexuals. Rather, it is an impulse of males of all sexual orientations. Among heterosexuals, females civilize males, sexually and in other ways. Since females can’t play that role with male homosexuals, what better way have we to tame their behavior than the institution of marriage? Were we to consider only the benefit of society, disregarding individual needs, homosexual marriage should be not merely permitted but encouraged.

The objection is raised that legitimating gay marriage will further weaken the institution of marriage. What has weakened marriage is prosperity, decline of religion, and liberalized divorce laws. No one wants to undo the first or knows how to reverse the second. Those who desire legal buttresses of marriage would do better to advocate raising the bar for divorce. The claim that we defend marriage by disallowing it to homosexuals is a non sequitur. Could it not equally be argued that we reaffirm the importance of marriage by making it available even to couples who have not traditionally had this opportunity?

In short, legalizing gay marriage is more likely to ameliorate aspects of homosexuality that trouble conservatives than it is to damage further the institution of marriage, which has been shaken by trends that scarcely can be blamed on gays.

The provocation of Israel staged by the Lebanese army earlier this week is an augury of a large Middle Eastern war that President Obama’s strategy of appeasement has made all but inevitable.

That it was a deliberate incident is evidenced by the presence of news and even camera crews that had been brought along on the Lebanese side while Lebanese military snipers killed an Israeli officer standing hundreds of yards inside Israeli territory and wounded another.

For generations, the Lebanese army has been among the world’s most timid. It went through the motions of fighting Israel briefly in 1948 and took no part in subsequent Arab-Israel wars. It has consistently been a non-factor, or rather non-actor, in Lebanon’s civil wars these past 35 years, bringing to mind the old quip about the Soviet satellite states: that they were so neutral they did not even intervene in their own internal affairs.

Why the sudden daring?

Because Hezbollah now largely controls Lebanon, and Iran owns Hezbollah, and both are feeling their oats. Initiating the skirmish with Israel was of a piece with the boast by Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff just three days earlier that Iran could build a nuclear bomb. According to a semiofficial Iranian news agency, the chief of staff elaborated: “Today . . . we are presented with an opportunity to alter world management.” In this usage, “world management” means the same thing that the Soviets used to call the “correlation of forces.”  In the face of such an opportunity, he continued, “confining ourselves to small steps, while less costly, is not right.”  And as Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the estimable Iran expert who brought these comments to light, explains, the chief of staff’s “reported remarks were full of comments about how this moment is a turning point in world history — one in which international arrogance can be replaced by a new global management, if only Iran makes the necessary effort.”

Some reports say Iran wants to avoid a new war between Hezbollah and Israel for now, preferring to keep the vast arsenal it has placed on Israel’s borders at the ready for retaliation against any strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This makes sense, and if it is true, it makes this week’s events all the more ominous.

Reportedly, the commander of the unit that attacked the Israelis is a Shiite — sympathetic to Hezbollah. Conceivably, the Lebanese deliberately staged the incident to heat up the border in order to deflect the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which reportedly is leading directly to the doorsteps of the Syrian government and Hezbollah. Or possibly, it was an act of pure bravado.

But either way, this aggression and the Iranian aide’s speech both indicate that the region’s radical, anti-American forces are growing bolder. This is an inevitable result of America’s projection of weakness and uncertainty, the essence of Obama’s foreign policy, expecially toward our Middle Eastern enemies.

Democracies don’t ever go to war with one another, but they often have gotten into wars with dictatorial regimes, and often those wars have been provoked by the democracies’ natural tendency toward pacificism, which leads ambitious authoritarians to overreach. Thus, Germany counted on England’s aversion to war in 1914; Hitler dismissed the democracies as soft in the 1930s; Dean Acheson declared South Korea outside of America’s “defense perimeter”; and April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that America does not intervene in intra-Arab conflicts. In the end, democracies do fight, as they did in those instances, but often they might not have needed to had they not tempted the aggressors by a display of weakness.

Obama’s softness toward Iran has emboldened Ahmadinejad; and his similar stance toward Syria had led to the collapse of Lebanese independence that had nearly been restored in 2005. In the end, the US is likely to fight, and Israel certainly will. The steady growth of the radicals’ self-assuredness, stoked by Obama’s appeasement, will end in a big blow-up.

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The UN is sick beyond remedy.

Its Human Rights Council last week concluded its most recent session, and as Anne Bayefsky of Eye on the UN aptly summarized it, the council “abandon[ed] human rights victims the world over and contribut[ed] to the spread of anti-Semitism.”

This, you may say, is nothing new, and you would be right. But the story of how we got here and where we are headed next helps to bring into focus the full vileness of this institution.

The council was created in 2006 as one cornerstone of an overhaul of the United Nations in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal, which had spread a dark stain on it like the one the BP gusher has unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico. The council was designed to supplant the Commission on Human Rights, which had been created sixty years earlier at the instigation of the United States. That body was formed under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and a panel of distinguished international scholars and jurists who also composed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Over the decades, the vaunting idealism with which the commission was conceived had given way to the tawdry politics that came to characterize the UN. It all came to be symbolized by the 2003 elevation of Libya to chair the commission, notwithstanding that Libya had been ruled as a personal fiefdom by Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi since 1969 and had made the Freedom House list of the “worst of the worst” of the world’s repressive countries every year since this category was conceived.

If Libya’s election was outrageous, that still does not fully explain why it received special attention. Previously elected chairs of this august body had included the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, as well as Poland and Bulgaria when they were Communist colonies of the former USSR. Whatever the reason, Qaddafi’s triumph seemed to have brought matters to a head, and when the oil-for-food program opened the trickle-gates of UN reform, the commission became a ready target. Secretary General Kofi Annan said its performance “casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

Thus, throughout 2005, Annan worked hand in glove with the Bush administration to design a reform plan that would abolish the commission and replaceit with a Human Rights Council. The manner of its composition, the shape of its agenda, the frequency of its meetings were to be different from those of the old commission, and were designed to prevent the hypocrisies for which that body had become infamous. The question this raised was whether the abominable record of the commission had been due to structural defects or to a deeper flaw, namely the political atmosphere of the UN itself. 

Now we know the answer. After four years, the record of the council is, if anything, worse than that of its predecessor. Kofi Annan’s perception that the old commission had “cast a shadow” on the UN was an optical illusion: he was seeing the UN’s own darkness.

The essence of the problem was illustrated by last month’s election of new members. (Members serve a three-year term, with one-third elected each year.) As usual, the “election” was like those of authoritarian regimes: the number of nominees exactly equaled the number of seats to be filled, so that members were left only to vote aye or nay. And as usual, dictatorial states had little difficulty cutting deals to get themselves nominated, notwithstanding the mandate instructing the members to “take into account the candidates’ contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights.”

Only Iran was kept off the list, and this had nothing to do with its practice of torturing and murdering citizens who ask for honest elections, but rather was due to the fact that Tehran has alienated not only the Western states but also the Arabs. Just to make clear that Iran’s exclusion should not be interpreted as a sign of disapproval of its treatment of its own citizens, the mullahs’ regime was put in charge of a separate UN body on women’s rights. Who better?

Freedom House teamed up with UN Watch to pressure the UN member states to keep in mind human rights when choosing council members. Of the 14 nominees, they judged only five “qualified” for seats, four others as “questionable,” and five as “not qualified.” Needless to say, all of the latter five were elected nonetheless. They were Angola, Mauritania, Malaysia, Qatar, and — you guessed it — Libya. The opposition scored its best showing against Qaddafi’s regime, rallying a grand total of 37 nay votes to 155 ayes.

Apologies to Jimmy Carter. I have said that he was our worst president at least since the beginningof the 20th century. (I just don’t know enough nineteenth century history to compare him to Buchanan, Pierce, Fillmore, and the other names one hears in the “worst-ever” sweepstakes.)

To be sure, my judgment is based on foreign policy, both because that is what I know about and because I believe that our commander in chief’s foremost responsibility is to steer the ship of state through the ever-perilous tides of global politics. The voters may place pocketbook issues first, but a clever economist once likened the economic tools at a president’s disposal to the switches and levers on a control panel that doesn’t happen to be hooked up to anything.

Jimmy Carter came to office in the aftermath of the globally unpopular war in Vietnam, and he set out to make our country loved again by, as he liked to put it, giving us a foreign policy “as good as the American people.” He pursued this goal by appeasing and apologizing, by coddling foes and denigrating allies, and by emasculating U.S. military and intelligence forces. (Late in his term, a bipartisan coalition of congressional hawks forced through some defense restorations, and although Carter fought these increases tooth and nail, latter-day apologists have claimed that he initiated the defense buildup.)

All of the self-abasement that Carter forced upon America failed to restore out popularity, and instead undermined our security. The number of governments hostile to the United States, as compared to those friendly, grew at a faster pace during Carter’s term than at any other time. One performance was more than enough, and the Americans sent Carter packing in 1980, for which he has clearly never forgiven them.

The core idea of Obama’s approach to the world is identical to Carter’s. Our problem, as the president sees it, is that we are unpopular thanks to our own misdeeds. To Carter, the source was the “arrogance of power” epitomized by our involvement in Vietnam. To Obama, it is the arrogance of George W. Bush and our invasion of Iraq.

The goal of Obama’s policy, like Carter’s, is to atone as demonstratively as possible, so that the rest will see that we have mended our ways. Seventeen months in, this is already a whopping failure, leading me to dwell on the obvious comparison.

And then it hit me. This is unfair to Carter. Obama is clearly worse.

I say this for two serious reasons. First, for all his foolishness, Carter made one major positive contribution. He elevated the issue of human rights to a higher priority than ever before. True, he made a hash of it. Since America is the main engine of human rights around the world, there is no way to reconcile the advancement of human rights with the retreat of America that Carter favored. But subsequent administrations fine-tuned the policy, and it has done much good, retaining a place high on the list of US policy goals until the accession of Barack Obama, who has pushed it to the bottom of the agenda.

Second, the global situation facing the US when Carter took office was extremely disadvantageous. In the Cold War, what the Communists called the “correlation of forces” had tipped a considerable distance in their favor. America had lost 50,000 soldiers in Vietnam (as compared to 4,000 in Iraq). The Watergate scandal, punctuated by the resignation in disgrace of first the vice president, then the president, had strained the political fabric of the nation to its limit. Yes, Carter’s policies made things worse, but he was dealt a piss-poor hand.

In contrast, at the time of Obama’s swearing-in, although America’s popularity ratings were again swooning, almost everything else on the world scene was favorable. America continued to stand as the only superpower. Democracy had spread to nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries (compared to about one-third when Carter came in). In contrast to our spirit-crushing defeat in Vietnam, the “surge” apparently snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq. Seven years after 9/11, terrorists had not been able to pull off another attack on US soil. True, the Iranian nuclear program posed a gathering menace, Afghanistan was deteriorating, and Pakistan was shaky, but compared to what Carter faced, the world Obama inherited was a bed of roses.

Thanks to Obama’s foolhardy approach to the world, this is unlikely to be true for his successor. So, again, apologies to Carter.  And here’s hoping there is a staunch leader out there ready to rescue us from Obama’s legacy just as Ronald Reagan saved us from Carter’s.