political words

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the administration’s epistemologist, worrying over the question of knowability; Bernard Lewis was its historian, Paul Wolfowitz its moralist in arms.

As for Paul’s remark about our congenital narcissism as intellectuals, ‘twas ever thus, but I would say that it pays to be a little circumspect about other people’s battles for liberty.

My fear is that it’s precisely the American public’s unwillingness to do so that leads to policy-by-drone.

BURUMA: The problem with helping liberals and dissidents in authoritarian countries is that they often end up as pawns in diplomatic games.

Huge numbers of people have killed and been killed because of our decision to stay in Afghanistan after we had toppled the Taliban and our invasion of Iraq.

It is an archipelago beneath democratic scrutiny, and it has done liberal democracies real damage: rendition, torture, detention without trial, Guantánamo, military tribunals.

I do think this is the great question going forward, and I do think we’re all very much chastened, and I do think the American public is sick to death of the whole enterprise.

It may well be that the Muslim Brotherhood is the principal beneficiary of Tahrir Square, not the democrats.

As for Paul’s remark about our congenital narcissism as intellectuals, ‘twas ever thus, but I would say that it pays to be a little circumspect about other people’s battles for liberty.

BURUMA: Perhaps this fear is part of the ethos of the United States.

Military intervention, to topple regimes, the Napoleonic enterprise of revolutionary war, is almost always a mistake.

I believe that Obama’s relative passivity vis a vis the Green Revolution in Iran, for example, actually helped.

The new technologies of surveillance — those vast computers that sit there somewhere in Washington and elsewhere, mining telecommunications — the thousands of people in Washington and elsewhere with top-secret security clearance — I’m not sure these are passing phenomena, and I’m not sure they are easily dismantled or easily invigilated.

When the U.S. cannot do anything much, it is often better for all concerned to acknowledge that and not either indulge in huffing and puffing, to no effect, or flail about like a well-meaning, but sometimes lethal, giant.

– SCOTT MALCOMSON

SCOTT MALCOMSON: I was looking over George Packer’s 2002 New York Times Magazine piece on war and liberalism and it occurred to me that the liberal-engagement debate really didn’t start until some months after 9/11.

Paul Berman’s March 2003 cover story on Sayyid Qutb, ‘‘The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,’’ was a seminal attempt to frame the conflict in terms of competing ideologies.

RIEFF: I don’t know — I would like to know — who this all-encompassing “we” Paul speaks of is.

But I don’t think the salient aspect of our reaction to 9/11 was a modern equivalent to the Alien and Sedition Acts, or the suspension of habeas corpus, or the Red Scare after WWI.

It is an archipelago beneath democratic scrutiny, and it has done liberal democracies real damage: rendition, torture, detention without trial, Guantánamo, military tribunals.

Yes, it could be argued we were successful in Germany and Japan, but that was because there was a different context (total victory on our side, parliamentary history on theirs).

MALCOMSON: I hate to demur but really want to hear Michael, Ian and Jim.

As for Paul’s remark about our congenital narcissism as intellectuals, ‘twas ever thus, but I would say that it pays to be a little circumspect about other people’s battles for liberty.

There was widespread anxiety that the Muslim minority in the US was infiltrated by terrorists or their sympathizers, and a commensurate anxiety that these minorities would be subject to revenge attacks.

That America’s actions (as opposed to precautions) after 9/11 almost all took place far from home, with a professional army, strengthened this sense of abstraction.

Low level anxiety, in every airport, in every large public space, is now the norm, and since the perpetrators that have been caught don’t fit any obvious demographic profile, it’s not clear who were are supposed to watch with a beady eye and report to police.

JAMES TRAUB: I think Paul’s point raises the question of what a “modern” or at least substantive response to terrorism would be.

But the Bush administration has perhaps sped up the decline of U.S. clout in the world, by doing great damage to the country’s good reputation.

If we dismiss them as part of an evil totalitarian block that we must “argue” (how?) against, we could well impede the democratic progress we hope will come from the Arab Spring

TRAUB: I agree altogether with Ian.

But we have acquiesced in a series of serious transformations of our policy, or rather of the face we turn to the world.

It is a compilation of modern and ancient ideas, admixed with a great many horrendous European ideas.

Or are we too self-absorbed, and too unwilling to pay taxes, and unwilling to take risks, to do anything for the people who are right now embodying a love of liberty?

The modernity of the response eludes me a little.

But I don’t think the salient aspect of our reaction to 9/11 was a modern equivalent to the Alien and Sedition Acts, or the suspension of habeas corpus, or the Red Scare after WWI.

How can we do some good without being so blithe, and so self-righteous about it?

The American reaction to being attacked on Sept.

What enhanced oversight becomes necessary if we are not to perpetuate a permanent emergency?

The apocalypse has been deferred indefinitely.

The concern I have about the whole world opened up after 9/11 is this archipelago, not just of drones, but of communication intercepts, Internet monitoring, which preserves our security at the price of . . . what?

There is a big difference between humility and despair.

I actually don’t think that our worst fears over the throttling of domestic dissent have been realized — far from it, in fact.

I have no experience whatever from a state perspective, and for what it’s worth, I’d say the move toward risk-averse military action has been going on for some time.

The essay laid out an argument for interpreting al Qaeda as a kind of totalitarianism, that is, as a modern phenomenon, which ought to be opposed in a modern way and with modern hopes.

I’m not a declinist, and I do think America and Americans will always have a special vocation for liberty, but the century ahead is not American.

I think this would have happened — the rise of China, India, etc. — with or without 9/11 or Bush’s blunders.

But more importantly, these are anecdotes.

I called Kosovo a “virtual war” precisely because we tried to protect civilians from the air, to eliminate risk to ground troops, and more importantly, to maintain domestic political support for an operation in a faraway place that was always shallow.

One obvious reason has been the ferocious counter-attack by US special forces, CIA, and other secret agencies.

We should let them know they are not alone, and we should do what we can to make sure they are not massacred, but I come away from all of this thinking it is a kind of respect to acknowledge how different their fight is, how specific it is to their situation, how little we are likely to understand their language of freedom, and how circumspect we should be about jumping in, especially with troops.

We met virtually, on two separate occasions, with Ignatieff entering the fray late and Rieff exiting early.

This means the Chinese government wins on two fronts: they get concessions from the US, and they are rid of a nuisance.

Military intervention, to topple regimes, the Napoleonic enterprise of revolutionary war, is almost always a mistake.

But we have acquiesced in a series of serious transformations of our policy, or rather of the face we turn to the world.

It is a terrible indictment of the Bush years that when people outside the US hear the word “democracy” in US foreign policy rhetoric, they won’t believe a word of it.

We believed that the anthrax attacks belonged to a wider conspiracy.

We met virtually, on two separate occasions, with Ignatieff entering the fray late and Rieff exiting early.

But 10 years of U.S. and NATO and some non-NATO involvement, at the usual costs we all know, seem to have affected this battle of ideas very little indeed, in the region itself.

I called Kosovo a “virtual war” precisely because we tried to protect civilians from the air, to eliminate risk to ground troops, and more importantly, to maintain domestic political support for an operation in a faraway place that was always shallow.

Even empires, with all the means at their disposal (think of the British, or for that matter, the Soviets in Central Asia), failed at this.

But I don’t think the salient aspect of our reaction to 9/11 was a modern equivalent to the Alien and Sedition Acts, or the suspension of habeas corpus, or the Red Scare after WWI.

Ian Buruma’s magazine articles focused more on contemporary Muslims, most notably Tariq Ramadan (in February 2007).

Do we need to retain the same restraints on visas issued for the Islamic world?

That they have clearly not, as this conversation makes clear, seems to me ample cause for despair.

James Traub anchored our foreign-policy reporting across this period while producing two books on the subject, "The Best Intentions” and "The Freedom Agenda.”

The Islamists do not come out of primitive caves; they come out of modern intellectual settings, out of universities and libraries.

That is why this remains the most hopeful event of at least the last 20 years, notwithstanding all the concerns.