Re: cruising the right
On Jul 13, 2007, at 10:57 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
Well, it would be hard to beat the National Review’s cruise for
hilarity, what with Norman Podhoretz serving as shipboard tummler.
For sure, but what’s going on with WFB?
[…]
The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork,
Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from
beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable.
Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying.
Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing
them.”
Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry,
the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says,
“The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any
irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The
Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was
true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”
No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that
people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then
they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people
like their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis – who was
deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney’s spine in the run-up to the war –
declares, “The election in the US is being seen by [the bin
Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” This is why
the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give
him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.
A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism
is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman
Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand
Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – “I have
lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some
ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants –and Buckley says to the
chair, ” Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a
smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11
American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs.
Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled
through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in
America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is
a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq
war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims:
“There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria … This picture of a
country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a
triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast.
He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and ” thank God” for that.
Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the
National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite
society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of
appeals to ” the people,” preferring the eternal top-down certainties
of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless
Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world
view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the
Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first,
appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged,
and he is fighting.
“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley
snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war
reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD
primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were
shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was
hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this “
rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There
was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only
contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re
winning.” The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill
Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media?
Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward”.
His wife nods and says, ” Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head
with her finger to suggest dementia.
I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them
for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling
in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review’s
50th birthday, President Bush described today’s American
conservatives as “Bill’s children”. I ask him if he feels like a
parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly,
and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, “The answer is
no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the
Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty
well gone.”
This does not feel like an optimistic defence of his brood, but it’s
a theme he returns to repeatedly: the great battles of his life are
already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald
Reagan would have made of Iraq. “I think the prudent Reagan would
have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a
commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in… I think he would
have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by
the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of
which we could predict.” Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the
Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan’s
approach would have been to “find a local strongman” to rule Iraq.
A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, “which
will make some people very happy”. Then he croaks out the standard-
issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States
had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the
political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who
declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the
fact that 80 per cent of Iraqis want US troops to leave their
country, according to the latest polls. “I don’t much care,” he says,
batting the question away. He goes on to insist that “nobody was
tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo” and that Bush is “a hero”. He
is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will
attack Iran.
Podhoretz excitedly talks himself into a beautiful web of words,
vindicating his every position. He fumes at Buckley, George Will and
the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He
announces victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it
is as though a thousand miles away Baghdad is not bleeding. He starts
hacking and coughing painfully. I offer to go to the ship infirmary
and get him some throat sweets, and – locked in eternal fighter-mode
– he looks thrown, as though this is an especially cunning punch. Is
this random act of kindness designed to imbalance him? ” I’m fine,”
he says, glancing contemptuously at the Bill Buckley book I am
carrying. “I’ll keep on shouting through the soreness.”
[…]