BAGHDAD’S BOHEMIANS BETRAYED

Anyone who doubts the intensity of support felt by many Baghdad residents for the liberation of their country should come to the Hewar Gallery just north of the city’s center. Here, in this combination exhibition space, teahouse, and gossip nexus you’ll find what passes for Baghdad’s bohemians--young, smart painters, poets, and sculptors comfortable with English and familiar with foreign reporters. What they say about recent events would make Paul Wolfowitz blush. “We feared America wouldn’t invade,” painter Mohammad Rassim told me. “We knew there would be death, but we chose war to finish Saddam.” For sculptor Haider Wady, “Saddam’s fall was like a dream, I still can’t believe it. We used to pray for five minutes without his regime,now we have the rest ofour lives.” Remarks poet Nasser Hasan, “April 9 [the date Saddam’s statue fell in central Baghdad] was a second birthday for me. I’m now rediscovering parts of my soul I once buried and thought were dead.” Other Iraqis, some not as fluent in English, indicated to me that they agree with these sentiments.

These young Iraqi artists--moderate, pro-Western, eager to join the international community--are the kind of people who are crucial to Iraq’s move toward democracy. So why don’t the world media focus more on such figures instead of just the disgruntled ex-Baathists and religious firebrands? One explanation may lie in an observation that these artists repeatedly stressed to me: Foreigners--especially Europeans--are so anti-American that they refuse to hear positive comments about the war. “Many reporters don’t listen to us,” Wady remarks. “Especially the French, who just want us to support their attacks on America.” Or, as painter Esam Pasha told me, “Many journalists act as if they know all the answers. They just need us to make negative comments about the U.S.” Sometimes this bias becomes manipulation off acts. One painter recounted how a German TV journalist reported that an ash-strewn field was once “farmland destroyed by coalition bombing”--even though the painter protested that the field was the trash heap for a nearby village. Wady recalled how a Spanish photographer he was accompanying as a translator posed an Iraqi woman amidst a dilapidated building and asked her to raise her hands in sorrowful supplication.“ The photographer first asked the woman to remove her expensive wristwatch,” Wady said. “When I pointed out that she had a car and was in fact pretty wealthy, the photographer ignored me. She just wanted to make the U.S. look bad.” Don’t expect Western liberals to promote the views of Baghdad’s bohemians. Whether it’s aid workers claiming that those working for the Iraqi governing council are “traitors,” or left-wing filmmakers who suggest that Iraqis move beyond their memories of Saddam in order to criticize the coalition, these “humanitarians” do not want to hear good things about America. “One Dutch woman predicted that Bush would soon equal Saddam’s brutality,” says Hasan.

“When I mentioned that it seemed unlikely that America would destroy millions of Iraqi lives, she said, ‘We in Europe can see the situation better because we’re outside the situation.’” This might be amusing if it didn’t affect the very lives of Hasan and his friends. So weary have they become with ideologues, that they now shy away from people who evince strong anti-American sentiments. “It’s easier that way,” a painter told me.

It’s ironic: Six months after the fall of Saddam, liberty-minded Iraqis are again guarding their thoughts--only this time, not from the Mukhabarat and Baathists thugs, but from the outside world’s so-called “progressives.”

--New York writer Steven Vincent reports from Baghdad.

CALIFORNIA EARTHQUAKE

The resounding victory of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the equally breathtaking defeat of Governor Davis and the Democratic Party, mark a potential turning point, not only for California but also for urbanized, coastal America. In one evening, a seemingly unalterable trend toward ever-greater regulation, higher taxes, and social engineering within the Gore zone of “blue states” has not only been challenged but rejected.

The election also holds a great lesson on political trends along America’s highly urbanized coastal regions. In California, what Howard Dean would call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” got its rear-end kicked. Nearly two thirds of Californians, including a large contingent of Democrats (and the bulk of independents) voted for either Schwarzenegger or state Senator Thomas McClintock, his more conservative competitor.

Of course, not all Democrats deserted their party. In the parallel universe also known as San Francisco, the recall was defeated by four to one, and Lieutenant Governor Bustamante won a resounding victory. The Bay Area counties remain the last holdouts for left-wing orthodoxy.

But everywhere else, the tide was with the Republicans. In Los Angeles County, the largest urban jurisdiction in the nation, the recall vote was split down the middle, and Schwarzenegger beat Bustamante 45 percent to 37 percent. With McClintock’s vote added, Republicans got 56 percent, a remarkable number in what was considered a bedrock “blue” county.

Democrats have not suffered so complete a defeat in the Golden State since the days of Ronald Reagan. Much of the supposed base of the party, like trade unionists and Latinos, voted against the party’s choices. The issues that killed the Democrats were varied: ultra-liberal social legislation, particularly drivers licenses for illegal aliens, the tripling of the car tax, and a regulatory environment that threatened to chase away the state’s entrepreneurial class.

A former Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Robert Hertzberg, believes that the gerrymandered, increasingly leftist majority in the legislature simply had no idea that what they were doing was unpopular. “These people are not listening,” Hertzberg suggested. “They are paying all their attention to the people who are writing them checks and giving them awards. The problem is they are not in touch with reality, but are surrounded by artificially small constituencies.” This resulted in a legislature that passed bills such as the illegal alien drivers license that two thirds of the population was dead-set against. It allowed them to listen only to trial lawyers, union officials, and medical mills when thousands of small businesses were being bankrupted or forced to downsize due to escalating workers’ compensation costs.

Ultimately, many Californians saw in Schwarzenegger someone who seemed to care about their economic opportunity, an immigrant himself, but someone who had taken the legal route of naturalizing.

So what does this mean to the GOP? “Arnold Schwarzenegger just saved the Republican Party of California,” suggests David Fleming, a prominent Los Angeles attorney and a member of the actor’s finance committee. Yet Fleming says that Republicans also need to understand the limits of their victory. “We are only borrowing these voters,” Fleming warned. “They are not committed to either party.” Whether Gore-blue California can be tinted Bush-red will ultimately depend on how successfully Schwarzenegger handles the state’s fiscal policy. The overwhelmingly left-wing Democratic legislature will certainly try to stand in his way. The state’s dominant media, which also tilt heavily to the left, will certainly not be sympathetic.

So Schwarzenegger will have to craft his message outside Sacramento. He will have to meld two constituencies that are now kindly disposed to him: the business community and the state’s large middle class. Most likely, he will need to tap business money to put key reforms directly onto the ballot, and hope that the middle-class electorate will stay the course despite being bombarded by union-,Indian gaming-,and trial-lawyer-funded campaigns against reform.

In doing this, Schwarzenegger will have to take lessons from another actor who was governor when Arnold was first making his way in California. He might need to sing a slightly different tune, but in many of the essentials, Schwarzenegger can only be successful if he follows the script of Ronald Reagan.

--Joel Kotkin is a Los Angeles-based TAE contributing writer. An earlier version of this ran in the New York Sun.

ON DUTY

Few people know that the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery has been patrolled continuously by its honor guard since 1930--and we mean 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. Recently, when Washington emptied out to avoid the flying projectiles and flooding rains of Hurricane Isabel, the Tomb Guard Sentinels of the 3rd Infantry Regiment from Fort Myer chose to stay at their outdoor posts, to honor the combat dead who served even during the worst weather and most dangerous conditions. A contingency plan was made in case winds reached 120 m.p.h. In the end, the men never broke the measured steps of their constant vigil.

LEGAL DOCS FOR ILLEGALS

In a desperate attempt to curry favor with special interests and avoid paying his piper, Gray Davis signed a bill on September 6 that made it easy for illegal aliens to obtain California drivers licenses. The bill allows illegal aliens to use nothing more than a Mexican consulate-issued identification card known as the matricula consular to obtain a valid California license. There are an estimated 2 million illegal aliens in California who will thus be eligible for a license (which in turn opens the door to many other legal documents).

Beside the obvious concern over providing legal documents to people who broke this country’s laws in order to enter it, there is the additional problem that the cards are open to fraud. The cards are not authenticated by any computerized database, and the INS has encountered illegal aliens with multiple matriculas consulares, all bearing different names and addresses.

Ousted Governor Davis went even further, signing a bill giving illegal aliens free tuition at state-funded community colleges, provided they attend at least three years of California high school.

Davis had already signed a bill two years ago letting illegal aliens pay reduced instate tuition at California University campuses. Meanwhile tuition for American citizens is rising.

Why are serious national security issues being ignored? Why are foreigners who have entered the country illegally being offered privileged status? All Americans should hope that Governor-elect Schwarzenegger will reverse these decisions.

--Jennifer Brooks is a TAE intern.

PROGRESS IGNORED

A host of political and media critics claims that U.S. troops and administrators are “bogged down” in Iraq. Our own observations from Iraq during the war, plus recent polling there by TAE and other organizations (see this issue’s feature section), along with our continuing exchanges with the military men and women who are temporarily the princes running the Fertile Crescent, convince us that this gloomy view is incomplete and inaccurate. Contrary to the overwhelming negativity of most reporting, real progress is being made.

Remember the traumas that never befell us in Iraq. Not only was the war itself vastly less bloody and difficult than claimed, but its aftermath has also been quieter. We were told to expect a refugee flood, a food crisis, destruction of the oil fields, and public health disasters. We were warned that Iraq’s multifarious ethnic and religious groups would be at each other’s throats. Environmental catastrophes, chemical poisonings, and dam breaks were predicted. Turkey might occupy the north, Israel could strike from the south, the Arab “street” would likely roar in resistance. None of these things happened.

That is not to whitewash the fact that painful low-intensity conflict is still flaring. Your editor recently talked about his new book on the war at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division. They have lost 23 soldiers in Iraq. The man I photographed in combat for the cover of my book recently had his humvee bombed twice in a month. But he is not discouraged: He believes he is doing historic work to stabilize one of the most dangerous spots on our planet. He and other soldiers we hear from say they are making great progress in setting Iraq on a more normal and decent path.

Here are some signs they are right:

• Stores and traffic are bustling, and most services now exceed pre-war levels. A new currency has just gone into circulation.
• Large cities home to millions--like Basra, Mosul, and Kirkuk--plus vast swathes of countryside in the north and south, are stable, mostly peaceful, beginning to bubble economically, and grateful to the coalition forces who set them on a new course.
• More than 170 newspapers are published in Iraq, and broadcast media are proliferating.
• The Iraqi Governing Council has been well received by the country’s many factions and ethno-religious groups. Sixty-one percent of everyday Iraqis view the council favorably, and by 50 to 14 percent they say it is doing a better job than it was two months ago (Gallup).
• For the first time ever, localities have their own town councils. A working court system has been set up. A constitution is beginning to be hashed out.
• In addition to the 140,000 U.S. troops providing security, there are now about 25,000 soldiers from other countries, and 60,000 Iraqi police and guards on the job--with many thousands more in the pipeline.
• Nearly all schools and universities are open; hundreds have been rehabbed by soldiers into their best shape in years.
• Iraq’s interim economic leaders recently committed the country to a wide-open, investment-friendly, competitive market economy. The prosperity and global connectivity this should bring will become the ultimate guarantors of Iraq’s modernity and moderation (see pages 14-16).
• Oil production is heading toward two million barrels per day.
• Iraqi public opinion is much more moderate than the anecdotal press reports suggest. Four different polls have now been conducted in Iraq, including the four-city survey by The American Enterprise analyzed on pages 26-36. Their remarkably congruent results show that the vast majority of Iraqis are optimistic about their future, and believe ousting Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships that have resulted. Contrary to media reports of boiling public resentment, these polls show that seven out of ten Iraqis want American troops to stay for at least another year.
• Meanwhile, the pouncing raids initiated by U.S. forces two months ago have hurt the guerillas. More than 1,000 fighters have been arrested and many others killed. The bounty paid by guerillas to induce attacks on American soldiers has needed to be increased from $1,000 to $5,000 to find takers.
• Most critically, the U.S. is now on offense, rather than defense, in the war on terror. With a shock being applied to the seedbeds of Middle Eastern violence, the U.S. homeland has been blessedly quiet for two years.

Our friend Christopher Hitchens (who like numerous other recent visitors to Iraq witnessed what he calls “ecstatic displays” by grateful locals toward Americans) characterizes what is taking place in Iraq today as “a social and political revolution.” Major Pete Wilhelm, who is serving in Baghdad with the 82nd Airborne, recently described to us the way American forces are nurturing the first shoots of democracy along the Tigris and Euphrates:

We set up a Neighborhood Advisory Council representative of each neighborhood, and they voted on a leader who attends the city advisory council. Early on, the meetings would last four hours, and it would seem as though no progress was being made. The whole concept of a “vote” came hard and slow. We have gradually transitioned the burden of the agenda into the hands of the representatives, renovated the meeting hall with AC, and pushed the autopilot button. The meetings are down to an hour and a half, and we just keep the ball in play and act as referees. We are making great strides at grassroots democracy.

After his recent trip to Iraq, Hitchens agrees, saying “I saw persuasive evidence of the unleashing of real politics in Iraq, and of the highly positive effect of same.” All of this has been accomplished within just six months after the fall of Baghdad. Keep in mind that Germany--a much more advanced nation that already had a democratic tradition--did not hold elections until four years after the end of World War II. General MacArthur progressed even less rapidly in Japan.

Certainly there remains an enormous amount to fix. But there is something unseemly about the impatience of today’s pundits, their insistence on instant recovery, and what fellow journalist Michael Barone calls the media’s “zero defect standard.” Our soldiers and administrators are turning a tide of history and culture in the Middle East. If Americans will show some patience with them, we will gaze upon many heartening transformations in Iraq a few months and years from now.

WE CAN AFFORD IT

“This may not be Vietnam, but boy it sure smells like it. And every time I see these bills coming down for the money, it’s costing like Vietnam too.” So said Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin on the Senate floor recently.

To pay and supply U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then set those countries more firmly on their feet by rebuilding physical facilities, training security forces, and launching economic initiatives, President Bush requested $87 billion in 2004 spending.

That’s a lot of money. But contrary to what Senator Harkin says, it’s nothing like Vietnam-era costs. During an average year of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military effort consumed around 10 percent of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product. And we spent around 14 percent of GDP annually to defend our country during the Korean War. Amidst World War II, defense spending ate up fully 38 percent of our national output (see page 13).

Compare those figures to today’s effort for the war on terror. In 2004,total defense spending will amount to just 4 percent of GDP. That doesn’t even vaguely resemble Vietnam.

And the truth is, a good chunk of the $87 billion the President requested would be spent even if all our troops were back at their home bases. The 140,000 soldiers in Iraq and the several thousand more in Afghanistan are not going to be demobilized after their work is done overseas. They are going to head back to North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, New York, Georgia, and elsewhere, where they will draw salaries, fire off rounds at training ranges, and put mileage on their vehicles. Sure, they’re pulling extra combat pay now, and operating at a higher intensity. But they are also honing themselves into a better fighting force as they bring the war on terror to our enemies in their own backyards.

A further truth is that some of today’s military spending is catch-up for the 1990s,when the administration and Congress slashed the defense budget to its lowest level in three generations, took a holiday on procurement of new equipment, and chopped training hours and supply purchases. In the Balkans, we nearly ran out of cruise missiles and bombs. In Iraq this year--where your editor was an embedded reporter--many of the trucks, helicopters, and airplanes transporting American forces were much older than the men guiding them.

Your editor watched an artillery crew of the 82nd Airborne pull 105mm artillery shells out of crates stamped with the date of manufacture: “May 1970.”In about one shell out of every three, the 33-year-old powder bags had dry-rotted, spilling the propellant onto the sand and making the rounds useless.

Three quarters of the President’s spending request will go to our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it will buy new humvees, better body armor, and other equipment and supplies our soldiers need to hunt down terrorists.

The other $20 billion will go to help rebuild Iraq:$5 billion to set up an Iraqi army and larger police force,$15 billion to rebuild facilities providing electricity, water and sewers, communication, and transport.

Those are no mean sums. But they need to be kept in perspective. Consider that we Americans will spend about $37 billion in 2004 on salty snacks. We’ll collectively spend $31 billion on candy.

The American patriot Thomas Paine once said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” Today, more than a hundred thousand American soldiers are doing the dirty work of stabilizing and reforming the most dangerous portions of the globe, so that our children may have peace.

Can we afford $20 billion to help them set Iraq on its feet in 2004? We might better ask whether we can afford not to.

THE VALUE OF FREE TRADE

As Americans grow frustrated with trade manipulations by parties ranging from Chinese manufacturers to European farmers, the perennial temptation to erect protectionist walls is on the rise once again.

The Washington-based Consumers for World Trade (cwt.org) reminds us that when government trade bureaus fight, everyday Americans usually lose. The CWT has translated an array of often confounding tariffs and quotas into simple, understandable language. They estimate, for instance, that the average American bride endures a hidden tax of9 percent on her wedding budget due to import duties like the 18 percent tariff on luggage,26 percent on porcelain dishes, and 29 percent on glassware. Similarly, CWT found that “thanks to tariffs on a wide range of imported products, we Americans cannot remodel or improve our homes without paying a hidden tax equal to over 5 percent of the retail price.” If the 12 percent tariff on slip-joint pliers doesn’t anger do-it-yourselfers, the 27 percent import tax on Canadian softwood lumber should.

Consumer pocket change quickly adds up to gigabucks. The U.S. International Trade Commission reckons that trade restrictions hike overall consumer costs by $12.4 billion annually. They also limit choice, and create negative unintended consequences. Consider the campaign-donation-driven sugar program. Absent federal price supports, U.S. sugar production would disappear. While Florida’s politically connected Fanjul family and a few other growers would moan, the Everglades and its many flora and fauna would actually cheer, as consumer prices fall.

Because of the drawbacks of trade barriers, unilateral liberalization can boost an economy even if other countries refuse to follow. Indian consumers benefited from this approach. “On manufactured goods, India has been reducing tariffs unilaterally,” says Barun Mitra, director of New Delhi’s Liberty Institute. “For instance,on watches, computers, and CDs, India used to have tariffs of over 300 percent.” Massive smuggling ensued. After barriers plunged, consumers bought goods legitimately.

New Zealand also has benefited from freer trade. “In 1984,we went broke as a country, and we liberalized,” reports Tom Lambie, a milk producer and president of Federated Farmers. New Zealand’s government got out of agriculture and stopped funding growers. The result: “As farmers, we are better off today than we were 20 years ago, and we still are growing. When we had controls and protection, our industry was growing at 1 percent per annum. For the last 20 years, we’ve grown on average 4 percent per annum. As an agricultural industry, we have increased our percentage of GDP from 15 percent to 17 percent of the total New Zealand economy.”

--TAE contributing writer Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.