Real Patriotism
by George Liebmann

One who used to be a contributor to The American Enterprise, then a moderate and sensible exponent of the case for market institutions and respect for family structures and the "little platoons" of society, now feels called upon to explain why he contributes no longer. Put simply, in its attitude toward foreign relations and to many aspects of our domestic society, TAE has simply "gone over the top". The Editor’s "It Will Come Down to Fortitude" supplies as good an illustration as any.

We are told that our post 9/11 adventures have transformed the world. Afghanistan is a "democracy". Iraq is on its way to becoming a democracy. Palestine will be transformed through the cutting off of subsidies. In spite of these "triumphs" we must make the Patriot Act permanent and more stringent, close our "porous borders", license our leaders to resort to the "preemptive assassination" that has brought Israel so much security, ask fewer questions about Guantanamo and Abu Gharab and replicate in our society the institutions of a nation engaged in total war. 9/11, we are incessantly told, changed everything.

At the risk of being thought to be a combination of "newscaster, computer yuppie, professor, and high income soccer mom", let me declare that each and all of these propositions are unmitigated rubbish. Afghanistan is not, has never been, and will not become, a democracy. We entered it to root out terrorist training camps, and in the elimination of it as a sanctuary our interest in it begins and ends. It is now, outside Kabul, in the hands of its traditional warlords. The only potentially secular and modernizing government it ever had was the communist one we overthrew.

Iraq is not going to be a democracy. The three or four successor states that emerge from the current confusion are likewise unlikely to be secular states. Saddam was sustained by Sunni nationalism. The reduction of Sunni dominance to its proper geographic sphere is not the cause we went to war for, but is likely to be the only beneficial result of the war. There will be no multi-ethnic democracy in a country that has never known limited government. People who take dictatorship for granted prefer to be dictated to by their own kind, believing that, as Learned Hand once said, "an alien master is the worst of all." The longer we stay, the more fanatical Sunni nationalists we will recruit, whether they are religious or irreligious.

Any "transformation" in Palestine is due to the action of the grim reaper, not to our foreign policy. Our lectures to the Palestinians about free elections have not been balanced by lectures to the Israelis about the evils of proportional representation, which has given the crazies and the half-crazies veto power over the actions of its government.

While the alleged evils of the Patriot Act have been overblown, the in-your-face quality of the Bush administration’s behavior is hard to exaggerate. Why was it deemed appropriate for its lawyers to go to court to defend the detention of Americans without trial, when only two or three such were being detained? How could it be deemed legitimate to pretend that the Iraq war resolution operated as a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, when neither its sponsors or its opponents in Congress suggested that that was its effect? What sense was there in detaining a few hundred foreigners at Guantanamo for four years without an administrative hearing system or publicly designated decision-maker of any kind?

When Britain in 1940, in its time of mortal peril, rounded up tens of thousands of enemy aliens, the Home Secretary immediately created a system of tribunals to review the appropriateness of each detention. He was a Cockney with a grade school education, but better judgment than some of our Ivy League lawyers.

The institutions of mass detention and martial law are temporary expedients in any democracy, designed to deal with mass insurrections and wars where the sheer number of cases overbears the ability to use an orderly system. To resort to them for four years, without declared rules, and even against a handful of citizens is not a response to felt need, but authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake.