Pinkerton & Kaus: Revolution From Within

What's up with James Pinkerton lately? I was surfing through his columns and it was astonishing to read the former Reagan and Bush 41 official has, since December 2002, written approximately 0 pro-Republican columns. Did I miss something?

Now, to be sure, Pinkerton has always been a moderate Republican and that's one of the reasons that I've always liked him. People like Pinkerton and James Q. Wilson who've advocating using the market to bolster welfare without the reverse incentives and bloating that government welfare requires is actually one of the things that got me out of the libertarian/independent camp and into the libertarian-minded-Republican one. It's somewhat disheartening to see Pinkerton so far off the reservation.

Pinkerton is against the war in Iraq (nearly every other week, in fact). Fair enough.

He's also pro-Israeli-appeasement-with-Palestinians. That's a little harder for me to stomach, but this is assuredly a position that he's held for some time that I've just been unaware of.

He takes a number of swipes at Bush's budget which, frankly, is not a hard thing to have problems with.

With the exception of one column on Columbia and another on Matt Drudge, every one of them comes down against Republicans. Here's the count:
Total: 28
War+Iraq=bad: 15
Bush's economic policy stinks: 3
Israel should focus on peace: 2
GOP racists: 2
Columbia: 1
Matt Drudge: 1
Bush in trouble in 2004: 1
EU=noble enterprise: 1
Maureen Dowd impression: 1
Homeland Security: 1

I suspect that, at the end of the day, Pinkerton's views haven't changed much. So the question is why he's writing all these liberal columns in succession. The answer is likely a frustration with Bush's Iraq and fiscal policies and a feeling that the party is headed in the wrong direction. Part of me wants to say "C'mon, James, go-along-get-along" but then I know if the GOP were to go on a homophobic tear, I'd likely be its harshest critic. That wouldn't make me a Democrat anymore than the pending Iraq invasion makes Pinkerton one. It does alienate us from our party and there is nothing wrong with that as Pinkerton's criticism is the only way for anti-Iraq Republicanism to be heard. When people ask me how I can reconcile my pro-gay marriage views with pulling the lever for a party adamently opposed to it, part of my answer is that I want to change the party from within. I also see it as a less daunting task to oppose the GOP stance from within on gay marriage and the death penalty to being a pro-market, anti-regulation, anti-abortion, anti-tax, pro-gun, anti-welfare Democrat.

The biggest counterexample that comes to mind is Mickey Kaus, whom many liberals have accused of turning conservative or of being fundamentally unserious. Anyone who has read Kaus's End of Equality book would know that Kaus is by no means conservative. He's just a different kind of liberal and finds himself at odds with with the current liberal dogma. He comes off as a Republican because in many ways he holds them to a much lower standard. After all, he rarely agrees with them and views them as suspect, so it's not a difficult bar for them to rise above. Liberals, on the other hand, are much more frustrating because even if they do win, Kaus still won't get the sort of changes he's after. Pinkerton's frustration with the direction of the all-GOP government is similar. His team won, but is going in the opposite direction. He may still agree with the Republicans more often than the Democrats, but it wouldn't be as frustrating if it was the other team taking us in the wrong direction.

Kaus could write column after column explaining why he's liberal. He's written a novel on it, but his faith really should be reaffirmed somehow. It'd be nice if Pinkerton took a time out to remind himself why he's conservative. It'd probably do them both a world of good and give them quite a bit of perspective.

IRAQ REBUTTLE

Daniel,

Where I disagree with you (and the writer of the letter to Sullivan) is the failure to answer the question of what he plans to use the nukes for. Will he give/sell them to al-Qaeda? Maybe, maybe not. I am skeptical of the claims that they are that closely linked (though, it's worth mentioning, those that say because Hussein is secular and bin Laden a fundamentalist they hate each other are forgetting what strange bedfellows a common enemy makes). If Hussein needed money, though, I don't think he'd have a problem doing it. And risk nuclear annihilation? Only if he's directly implicated. But really, then what? As some have pointed out, can you imagine discovering a link three months after the fact and Colin Powell going to the UN to get a resolution to nuke Baghdad? I can't imagine they'd approve because, honestly, I'm not sure how much I would if I were in their shoes either.

So what does he want the nukes for? Defense purposes? Defense against whom? Iran? Militarily, he has the upper hand in that ongoing conflict anyway against a very disunited Iran. Why risk what's about to happen? Is he trying to stock up in order to pre-empt a US attack? That's really circular logic since sans a threat, it's unlikely we'd invade anyway. To use against his own people? In some cases possibly, but his current arsenal seems to do a good job of that. If, as the writer of the letter to Sullivan suggests, they have no use for them, why is Hussein risking so much to build them?

I can think of two possible reasons, both justify invasion:

1) Immortality. We're all going to die and I am utterly convinced that he's not that concerned about what happens to Iraq post-him. If he were, he wouldn't be playing his kids off against one another to the point of leading to a probable civil war when he dies anyway. So what if his plan is to leave his mark and achieve immortality? A Middle East expert commented shortly after 9/11 that bin Laden is what Hussein wanted to be: An immortal ghost, untouchable yet powerful. Because of his station as a national leader, his hands are somewhat tied (we know what country he's in, at least). Even if Iraq does get leveled and he (especially if) he starts World War III, his deeds will live after him. People dirisively say that Bush wants Hussein becuase he tried to kill Bush Sr. Seriously, though, think about that. He tried to kill a president. Is that something a rational national leader acting in a defensive posture (as critics of invasion say he must be as he doesn't intend to use these weapons) would do? How, strategically speaking, would that help him? Had he succeeded, he could have set off a war that would have knocked him out of power.

2) Empire. Hussein's imperial ambitions are well known and we've seen it before. Let's say that he has a nuke or some vials carefully placed in a major US city. Having these, he invades Kuwaitt. If you were president, wouldn't you think twice before trying to push him back? What if he invades Qatar and Yemen. What can the president do? What we've been doing in North Korea, which is precisely nothing. Our hands suddenly become tied. Threats and tough talk become empty. As we fall all over ourselves to give North Korea whatever the hell they want to go ballistic, we'd have to do with Iraq... except Hussein has always been the more obviously ambitious of the two. Unlike the five permanent security council member nations and unlike India and even Pakistan, Iraq and North Korea has nothing to lose. By geography, Hussein has much more to gain.

There are two arguments against war that weigh against these. Namely, that war with Iraq would be protracted and casualty-ridden and that by attacking him, we'd be setting off whatever arsenal he presently has. In both cases, I feel it's risk it now or risk it later. In the first, that might well be what happens, but we've been ahead of the curve thus far and it's fear of the Middle East that has caused many of our recent trouble with the region. We're scared of losing Saudi oil and we've been too scared of casualties to take Hussein out. This has not gone unnoticed. It's a gambit, but one I think that favors us in the long run. In the case of Hussein setting off what he already has, I am worried about that myself. However, this one will get exponentially worse as he successfully develops more and more.

I was upposed to trying to topple Saddam prior to 9/11. When Bush talked of it during the 2000 election, I was hoping it was just big talk. I thought if we just don't make any waves, they will just beat their chest and at the end of the day we'd be okay. I thought the same about going all-out against bin Laden.

I was wrong in both cases.

Well, This Is News

A celebrity actually refuses to state her opinion on a political issue!

Never saw that one coming.