Libya, Limited Government, and Imperfect Duties

Posted by Julian Sanchez

Glenn Greenwald observes that we’re hearing a familiar false dilemma from advocates of intervention in Libya—the same one that was trotted out so frequently in the run-up to the war in Iraq: Either you support American military action, or you must be indifferent to the suffering of civilians under Qadaffi. Bracket for a moment the obvious empirical questions about the general efficacy of bombs as reliable means of alleviating suffering. What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people’s suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn’t come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world.

A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can’t help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it’s much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

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This Month at Cato Unbound: Neoconservatism Unmasked

Posted by Jason Kuznicki

This month, Cato Unbound examines neoconservatism — perhaps the most puzzling of current ideologies. The lead essay is from Professor C. Bradley Thompson, author of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea.

So what is it? Some say there’s no there there — neoconservatism is a disposition or a mood, no more and no less, and it’s got little or no enduring philosophical content. Thompson, however, argues that neoconservatism is a coherent political philosophy, one blending Machiavellian pragmatism with Platonic idealism. Philosophers may apprehend eternal truths, but these truths aren’t fit for ordinary folk, and still less are they a good basis for politics. In these realms, we need national unity, national greatness, national strength — in a word, nationalism.

Is this an accurate portrayal? Some will certainly disagree, and we’ve invited three distinguished panelists to engage Thompson’s thesis — Patrick J. Deneen of Georgetown University, Damon Linker of The New Republic, and Douglas B. Rasmussen of St. John’s University. Be sure to come back throughout the month, or subscribe to our RSS feed to see the conversation as it develops.

How to Tell When ObamaCare Supporters Are Nervous

Posted by Michael F. Cannon

Supporters have gone to great lengths to make ObamaCare appear popular or to make repeal seem impossible.  But this op-ed by my friend Jonathan Cohn made my jaw drop.

First, Cohn notes that the Senate recently voted down two efforts to repeal one of ObamaCare’s more unpopular provisions: the “1099 reporting tax,” which will place an enormous burden on small businesses.  ”Neither provision,” Cohn obliquely reports, “got enough votes to pass.”  He concludes:

Critics of health care reform [sic] this week thought they would get their first win in the campaign to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Instead they got a lesson in just how politically challenging a wholesale repeal might be.

If opponents can’t even repeal the unpopular parts of ObamaCare, how can they repeal the whole thing?

Cohn neglects to mention a few important details.  The reason neither amendment received “enough votes” is because, due to procedural considerations, each would have needed a 2/3 majority to pass — i.e., 67 votes.  The Republican amendment actually received 61 votes.  (The Democratic amendment received only 44 votes.)  Reading Cohn’s account, though, you might think — and Cohn might think, or just want you to think — that both failed because they lacked majority support.  In fact, the Republican amendment received a filibuster-proof majority.  Even though it included $19 billion of spending cuts.  And in a chamber with only 41 Republicans.  (Another six arrive next month.)  And the mere fact that Democrats offered an amendment to repeal part of ObamaCare is notable in itself.  Cohn’s spin aside, the skirmish over the 1099 reporting tax shows that Democrats are divided and ObamaCare supporters are on the run.

Second, Cohn writes, “advocates of repeal have one extra liability that the law’s architects did not — a lack of majority support even before the wrangling begins.”  As evidence, he cites a single Gallup  poll from July 2009 that found 50 percent of the public supported “comprehensive health care reform.”  Oy, where to begin.  First, by Cohn’s own single-poll standard, he is just flat wrong.  Advocates of repeal can point to the latest Rasmussen poll, which shows that 58 percent of adults support wholesale repeal.  (Polls have clocked support for repeal as high as 61 percent.)  Second, support for “comprehensive health care reform” is not the same thing as support for ObamaCare.  If Gallup were to ask Cato employees whether they support comprehensive health care reform, my guess is that at least 50 percent would answer yes.  (Presumably, Cohn would then write an oped titled, “Even Libertarians Support ObamaCare!”)  Advocates of repeal have something else going for them, too: 17 months of consistent public opposition to ObamaCare.

No one is saying that getting repeal through the Senate is likely in the next two years.  But the fact that supporters have to shade the truth like this suggests they are nervous.

Problems with 911

Posted by Tim Lynch

Michael Crowley, senior editor at The New Republic, recounts some nightmare episodes with the 911 Emergency Response System in the current issue of Reader’s Digest.  Here’s an excerpt:

If there’s one thing we think we can count on, it’s that a frantic call to 911 will bring a swift and effective response.  Government’s first priority, after all, is protecting its citizens.  But a spate of recent cases reveal shocking flaws in our national emergency response system–at a cost measured in lives.

One of those cases involved a young college student at the University of Wisconsin.  She dialed 911 and then hung up without saying anything.  Before the line was disconnected, however, there were screams and sounds of a struggle caught on tape.  The operator claims she could hear no noise–so she did not dispatch the police or try to call back.  Later that day, the college student, Brittany Zimmerman, was found beaten to death in her apartment.  An audio recording of some of the 911 nightmares can be found here.

Michael Crowley stresses the need for better trained operators and perhaps penalties for the people who tie up the lines with frivolous calls.  That’s all well and good, but more importantly, we must all acknowledge the limits of the 911 system and take responsibility for our own safety.  As the libertarian sheriff, Bill Masters, points out “If you rely on the government for protection, you are going to be at least disappointed and at worst injured or killed.”

For related Cato work, go here.

Update: New Jersey State Police are reviewing how a recent 911 call was handled. A Catholic priest called 911 as he came under criminal attack in his church.

The New Republic and Guilt by Association

Posted by Justin Logan

I watched with interest the J Street debate between Matt Yglesias and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait over the question “what it means to be pro-Israel.”  Matt’s a very efficient thinker, and Chait’s a particularly sharp debater.  I witnessed him slug it out at length in a debate with David Boaz a while back, not something I’d like to do.

Chait made a straightforward argument: to be pro-Israel, someone has to accept two premises.  First, one has to believe that historically, Israel is the more sympathetic party in the Middle East.  Second, one has to believe that the U.S. should not be even-handed in the Middle East, but rather should be on Israel’s side.

But what was most interesting about his argument was his accusation of guilt by association against J Street.  It was a problem, Chait argued, that J Street had been embraced by people who did not meet his definition of pro-Israel.  Chait rang the alarum that “The American Conservative magazine, which was founded by Pat Buchanan, …has been saying nice things about J Street.”  In addition, “the famous Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying extremely nice things about J Street — embracing J Street.”

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Another Day, Another Tranche of Afghanistan Reading Material

Posted by Justin Logan

Item: The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of concerned scholars and authors who work on international security and U.S. foreign policy, have issued an open letter to President Obama warning him not to expand U.S. involvement in that country.  (Full disclosure: I was a signatory.)  The list of signatories includes many of the scholars who urged President Bush not to invade Iraq.  Politico was the first to run the story: see here.

Item: Via Michael Cohen, former CIA counterterrorism honcho Paul Pillar takes to the pages of the Washington Post to think through the concept of “safe havens” in Afghanistan.  His conclusion?

Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them. But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key — and flawed — assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.

The Obama administration and other participants in the debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that horror. It would instead mean presenting a convincing case about how such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the United States. That case has not yet been made.

Item: Michael Crowley offers a piece in the New Republic that strongly implies but doesn’t quite come out and say that President Obama should ignore the skeptics and the political risks and wade deeper into Afghanistan.  The piece swallows whole the conventional wisdom narrative on Iraq–that the Surge amounted not to a combination of defining down “victory” and appeasement of Sunni tribes but rather a borderline miracle whereby Gen. Petraeus loosed his wonder-working COIN doctrine on the maelstrom of violence in that country and produced a strategic victory.  Crowley then uses this narrative to frame the decision before President Obama.  Still, he writes

[I]f the definition of success isn’t clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become “the central front in the war on terror” and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don’t publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. “The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” Riedel said. “[T]he stakes are enormous.”

Obama may have one last thing in common with Bush: personal pride. Bush was determined to prevail in Iraq because he had invaded it. And, while Obama, of course, had nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan, he has long supported the campaign there–including during the presidential campaign as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq war. Speaking before a group of veterans last month, Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity”–a phrase which politically invests him deeper in the fight. “The president has boxed himself in,” says one person who has advised the administration on military strategy. “The worst possible place to be is that our justification for being in a war is that we’re in a war.”

Lots to chew on.

Who’s Blogging about Cato

Posted by Chris Moody

Here’s a round-up of bloggers who are writing about Cato research and commentary:

  • QandO‘s Michael Wade offered his own thoughts on the New York Times blogger who said Cato’s voice against bailouts has not met her “expectations of adequate noise.”
  • The Atlantic‘s Clive Crook reviewed the new Cato book, The Beautiful Tree, which explains how private education efforts are empowering children in Third World nations.
  • Blogging on Tax Day, Jacob Grier cited Charlotte Twight’s essay in Cato Journal on the history of income tax withholding in the United States.