Counting electoral votes in April

Other things being equal, a decent Democratic nominee for president might have expected a reasonably comfortable walk to the White House in 2008. But then the Republican Party nominated the one Republican born for running nationally in the peculiar circumstances of 2008, and Democrats got stuck in a protracted "civil war" for their party's leadership, with a radicalized base making demands of its nominee which leave him or her little room for maneuver.

U.S. presidential campaigns are won and lost in the individual state battles, so it is the state-level polling that best tells the future, and we dreary political science-types have a game of calculating electoral votes based on those state polls.

In the "election-gaming" between de-facto Republican nominee John McCain and the leading Democrat candidate Barack Obama, McCain is bidding fair to collect 260 of the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency. And McCain polls very respectably against Obama in another ten states, any one or two of which would put him over the top.

That swath of the country which may be termed the "Rust Belt" is not exactly seized by Obama-mania. And the Rust Belt counts states which any Democrat for president must carry in a general election and which Republicans may expect to lose even in a good year, but polling there has found cause for hope for John McCain, versus Barack Obama.

And that is certainly the pitch that the Clinton campaign is making to the Democrat superdelegates even now. It is a compelling argument, but following it may be to exchange one set of problems for another. It may well amount to Democrat Party elites overturning Barack Obama's majorities in the popular vote and delegate allocation. Obama supporters would be fit to be tied if their votes were effectively vetoed by some party big-wigs in favour of Hillary Clinton, whom they don't much care for as it is.

The schizophrenic Democrat Party primary system, as much as anything else, has led to this state of affairs. Results are allocated by an ultra-democratic proportional representation scheme, then subjected to an anti-democratic veto by party elites. The effect is that an even match in the primaries and caucuses will yield no clear winner, and the superdelegate wildcard will give a close-running loser reason to carry on in hopes of a last-minute reprieve.

A solution has been proposed, of course: split the difference and put both Obama and Clinton on the Democrat ticket. But a shocking WNBC/Marist College poll of April 9 found that a ticket with Clinton and Obama -- in either combination -- would lose to a speculative John McCain-Condoleeza Rice ticket...in overwhelmingly Democratic New York state. If that poll is even remotely close to accurate, it would indicate that Obama and Clinton could be weaker together than individually.

And would either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama be prepared to carry the other's coat, and tie themselves to the other's fate? What if this Obama-Clinton ticket lost the election, or won but managed an unsuccessful single term? There would be little to be gained for either of the two by playing second fiddle, and quite a lot of risk. Still, plenty of primary opponents have wound up as general election running-mates, so it is a possibility, and the Clinton campaign has publicly raised the prospect of sharing a ticket, with Clinton at the top, naturally.

The superdelegates must surely be pondering these days whether Obama would bring debilitating liabilities to a general election, weaknesses that have not been probed much in the primary process. The Democrat Party of 2008 is to the left of its bearing in 1992, '96, or 2000, and consequently Hillary Clinton could hardly campaign by branding Barack Obama as "too liberal" or "too leftist". That would be a stick in the eye of the party base she needs in order to win.

But Obama was rated by the notoriously nonpartisan National Journal the "most liberal" of the 100 U.S. Senators in 2007, further left even than the self-described Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That is all well and good in the Democrat Party caucuses of 2008, but not so much for a presidential election in what is the Western world's most conservative nation.

Which is not to say that there is no trouble in paradise on the Republican side. The latest twist has been the prospective third-party candidacy of Bob Barr. Barr is a former Republican Congressman who would never be mistaken for charismatic, most famous for his role as a Congressional prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment trial of 1999. But Barr has now abandoned the Republicans for the Libertarian Party, and threatens a vanity campaign as its presidential candidate.

Without reliable polling on Barr, or an electorate that is even aware of him, it is impossible to know what if any effect on the election he might have, but Democrats must be hoping he plays the Kamikaze against McCain, siphoning just enough potential McCain voters to make the difference in a close state or two.

There are still almost seven long months 'til Election Day. In a fraction of that time, Hillary Clinton went from presumed presidential nominee to underdog in a Democrat race that has already lasted over two months longer than anticipated. So, in American national politics as in life generally, anything can happen and it usually does.

The Revenge of the Sith and the politics of George Lucas

I'm no authority on Star Wars, or much more than a casual watcher, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to declare Revenge of the Sith the best of the three Star Wars "prequels", by far. Revenge of the Sith premiered in 2005, about half-way through President Bush's two terms as a war-time president.

A single line from the film crossed into the politics of the time. The Anakin Skywalker character has by this point in the film gone over to the "Dark Side" and will be fully transformed into the evil force of nature, Darth Vader, a matter of hours later. He is about to face his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobe, in an epic duel to the death, or close enough to death. And then Anakin/Darth Vader declares to Obi Wan, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Now, George Lucas was the writer, director, and executive producer of the film. There is no possibility that Lucas was not responsible for that line. And there is no possibility that he was unaware that the line was effectively identical to a remark made famous thoughout the world by President Bush in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Lucas could only have intended the line as a political statement, and seeing as how Darth Vader is an icon of evil in Star Wars and in the popular culture, a not very complimentary one to President Bush.

Fine. George Lucas is free in America to imply that his war-time president is evil, in the course of a science-fiction fantasy that adds several more tiers to the towering Lucas fortune. But the way President Bush is regarded in history will be unrecognizable from how he is often viewed today, and from how he was seen by George Lucas in 2005. And some years from now, when viewers recoil from hearing one of the most famous quotations of a past war president -- who was moving heaven and earth to keep the nation safe in the wake of the worst attack in its history -- put into the mouth of an evil movie villain, that gratuitous line will be a blemish on an otherwise fine film, and on Lucas himself.

There are undoubtedly those who think that the President's remark really was evil or more probably overly-simplistic, deserving of condemnation and scorn, but why exactly was it wrong to warn that failing to help thwart an attack would be effectively to enable it? This isn't a disagreement over the rate of increase in the HUD budget.

The Wikipedia entry on "You're either with us, or against us" includes a helpful list of comparable quotations by some other famous figures including Jesus, George Orwell, writing in defense of the Allied war effort in 1942, and even Hillary Clinton, in exactly the same context and on exactly the same date as the Bush quote.

George Lucas is notorious for re-editing and re-releasing the Star Wars films -- like Handel revised The Messiah for new performances -- and it is not inconceivable that he might someday reconsider equating President Bush with one of the most iconic villains in movie history, and find a way to amend that line in a future edition of Revenge of the Sith.

Then the only problem with the movie will be the bland dialogue.

Don't count Chinese chickens before they're hatched

I once heard a U.S. Postal Service worker, while waiting on some unlucky customer, preach for all the world to hear that it was "a matter of when, not if" America was overtaken by China .

But before we start learning Mandarin and hanging portraits of Chairman Mao in every public place, it might be worth considering a second opinion.

The same sort of prophesies were made in the 1980s and into the '90s, when the coming colossus was supposed to be Japan. Or Germany. Or in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was supposed to have been winning the Cold War.

Today’s visions of a Chinese future got some clarification late last year, when the World Bank reported what may qualify as the world’s biggest accounting error. It found that “the size of China’s economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures....” That overestimation was a ballyhooed factoid in more than a few forecasts of Chinese ascendancy and American decline.

It must be said that China is a great power already, and has been for some time. China began its double-digit annual growth in the 1980s; it was a foreign policy obsession in Washington in the 1970s; it has been a nuclear power since 1964; it has had a space program since 1956; it held American-led forces to the 38th Parallel in Korea in the early 1950s; and it has been one of only five permanent members of the Security Council since the UN's founding in 1945.

So China has been a leading power in the world for 60 years. But it is a long way from there to global hegemony. And China is a big country with problems to match.

The numbers show much more than an unstoppable sprint to global domination. China ’s economy is now second only to America ’s, but U.S. GDP is still twice China ’s, and equal to the second, third, and fourth largest economies combined. China is awash in cash -- enough to help finance U.S. debt -- yet mainland China’s market capitalization is not very much higher than tiny Hong Kong’s, and only about a quarter of America’s.

Many Chinese cities – Beijing , Shanghai , Guangzhou -- are truly impressive, even evocative of some futuristic science fiction film. But outside the favored urban centres, China remains profoundly impoverished. 800 to 900 million of China 's 1,300 million souls are peasants, and nearly half the Chinese people live on less than $2 a day.

China ’s success has been largely propped atop its exports to the West, and China produces those exports to Western designs, in Western factories, for Western consumers. The Chinese export economy is an enormous branch plant. And branch plants are derivative and dependent. Taiwan was once the West’s preferred branch plant location. India could easily be our next, or even Vietnam. What happens to Chinese growth then?

And the fear of dependence on China should be mutual. China has precious little natural resources for its size. Even the Chinese staple of soy beans has to be imported, largely from the United States.

China is also getting old. As a predictable consequence of the Communists' forced one-child-per-couple policy, every generation is twice the size of its children’s generation. China 's ratio of retirees to workers hit 1:3 in 2003. So it's not for nothing that China-watchers often say " China will get old before it gets rich."

America, meanwhile, has increased its fertility rate to the highest in 35 years, reaching the "replacement rate" in 2006 for the first time since 1972.

And the one-child policy has had another consequence. The male-to-female ratio in China has already become imbalanced, at 6:5, and it is difficult to see how that trend can be anything but problematic.

The fantasies of a Chinese-dominated world are in some part a product of resentment and contempt for America. And though it may be appealing to certain people to imagine a world in which Washington takes orders from Beijing, such a world would be appreciably less free, less democratic, less humanitarian, even less environmentally-friendly.

The recent satellite shoot-downs may put things into some perspective. When China decided to shoot down a satellite in 2007, it did so unannounced and at an altitude that put the thousands of shards into the paths of other satellites and spacecraft. When the United States decided to shoot down a satellite in February, it informed the affected governments directly, then the international press, and it smashed the satellite at just the altitude to cause the debris to be incinerated in re-entering the atmosphere.

A crass assessment would call both powers bulls in china shops, so to speak, but clearly there is a bad way and a better way of going about being a superpower.

China has been a top-tier global power for some time already, and it has room to grow. But to conjure the future and see China in anything like the role America now plays is wildly speculative and takes far too little account of China’s gargantuan problems.

The kind of nation that denies its citizens the right to have children as they wish, or to worship as they wish, let alone to vote, is not the sort of nation that can hope to compete over the long term with the boundless creativity and energy, the self-correction and dynamism, of the great free societies.

Andrew W. Smith

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Presidential predictions

My amateur prognostication last October -- when John McCain was polling third among Republicans and his campaign was in debt -- was that McCain was the Republicans' strongest candidate, and that winning the Republican nomination would be the harder part for him: If John McCain won the Republican nomination, he would be most likely to win the presidency.

That seems about right today, now that John McCain has in fact become the Republican nominee and Democrats have managed the impossible and turned a broadly favorable political situation with no real policy disagreements into a civil war and the longest primary fight since 1968.

The latest poll averages at Real Clear Politics show John McCain edging out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, by 0.5 percent and 1.2 percent respectively.

I would expect McCain to "close hard" in the last days before the election. McCain is the safe vote. He has no real liabilities in experience, credibility, partisanship, corruption, plausibility, or likeability.

I would also expect the economic/financial picture to be brighter by Election Day. The numbers may worsen in the current quarter and possibly into the next, but unemployment is still very healthy, at 4.8 percent, and the economy was still growing in the last quarters for which we have statistics -- 0.6 percent in Q4 and 4.9 percent in Q3. The problems so far have been related to the mortgage crisis and the high cost of a barrel of oil. But the stimulus package should help offset the oil inflation, and federal mechanisms are right now being brought to bear on the financial dislocation. Even some of the analysts preaching recession are looking for better numbers by the third quarter.

Iraq is a won war, though it could still be lost, and today the Iraq issue is not the vote-loser for Republicans that it was just a year and a half ago. What is more, Iraq became America's showdown with international jihadism and al Qaeda, and America won. John McCain can be expected to make that point forcefully and repeatedly.

Democrats have become the anti-war party, which historically has shut them out of the White House. Democrats became the anti-war party in 1968 and lost seven of the next ten presidential elections; they became the anti-war party in 1864 and didn't elect a two-term president until 1916. Americans do not elect pacifists, or those who can't take their own country's side in a war, as president.

McCain's age may be an issue, but 71 isn't as old as it used to be, and a solid, young vice presidential pick should mitigate any age concens, plus McCain should be able to make a virtue of necessity with his age, like Reagan did in 1984 especially.

And McCain will be the only candidate in November who fits the presidential "profile". John McCain is an old male WASP (not "Anglo-Saxon" per se in McCain's case, but Protestant British Isles), Episcopalian, which happens to be the most common denomination among presidents, and even named "John", which happens to be the second-most common name among presidents. McCain matches the profile of 42 of the 43 presidents of the United States (the Irish Catholic John Kennedy being the one real exception to the "profile" rule).

I do think a black man or a white woman could become president of the United States, incidentally, but that it would more likely be a conservative woman or conservative black man, not the Clinton and Obama types.

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the President's low approval ratings, but the lesser-told other side to that story is that the Democrat-controlled Congress has consistently had approval ratings of about ten points lower than the President's for nearly a year now. And all the talk about Democrats out-fundraising Republicans in the presidential race has neglected the fact that Republicans have been winning the fundraising battle of the National Committees.

Plus which, Democrats have no strategists and organizers -- to my knowledge, at least -- to equal Ken Melhman or Karl Rove, both of whom have started advising the McCain campaign. Rove is a towering intellectual of American politics and government, and understands every heartbeat.

And at this point there are no apparent spoilers -- third party vanity candidates who siphon enough votes from one of the big two to throw the election result. The only third party character with a hat in the ring thus far is Ralph Nader, who could only possibly take votes from Democrats, but who is of course unlikely to manage much more than half a percent or so of the national vote.

So there is one man's forecast. I do think the race will be close, that the campaign against Hillary Clinton would differ from the campaign against Barack Obama, and that there are any number of unforeseeable events that could alter the landscape radically, including even attacks in America or overseas. But based on everything I know now, and everything I can foresee, John McCain is the most likely next president of the United States.

The New York Times: Rooting against America's economy since November 2000

"Sharp Drop in Jobs Adds to Grim Picture of Economy" read the March 7 headline in The New York Times.

That "sharp drop" to which The Times refers was 63,000 for the month of February, which is undeniably unwelcome news, at least for those of us who want to see America moving from strength to strength.

But what was The New York Times reporting for the record 52 consecutive months of job growth that ended just this January? The four years and four months in which the U.S. economy created a net 8.3 million jobs?

The Times can take pride in having predicted this downturn. Indeed, The New York Times has anticipated hard economic times nearly every month since sometime around November, 2000.

When the Labor Department reported last November 3 that the U.S. economy had gained 166,000 jobs in October, The New York Times demurred. "Despite Gain in Jobs Data, Wall Street Is Skeptical". At The Times, "despite" is always a good sort of way to start a headline reporting good news.

128,000 jobs were added in August of 2006, but The Times had the cold water ready for that. The September 2 story was headlined "Jobs and Wages Increased Modestly Last Month", and began, "Job growth seems to be reaching its peak," just in case the poor reader was getting carried away with all the wet blanket-wrapped good news.

The Labor report for July of 2006 found an increase of 113,000 jobs. The August 5 New York Times headline? "Job Growth Slackened Last Month".

And what would The Times do if jobs grew at such a pace that it would be impossible to deny the improvement without losing all credibility? Like a quarter of a million jobs added in a single month?

The jobs report of March 10, 2006 was a blockbuster. In February, the U.S. economy had added 243,000 jobs. So, The New York Times avoided adjectives altogether. " U.S. Says Employers Added 243,000 Jobs in February". Note that "U.S. Says", as if the numbers might be in dispute, or are just one opinion on the subject.

It only got worse from there. The Times actually found a way to turn an explosion of 243,000 jobs in a month into a troubling development, within the first paragraph: "...igniting concerns among many Wall Street economists that higher wages could fuel inflation and increase expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates further."

In fact, only five of the article's 23 paragraphs were upbeat, and the piece was peppered with lines like, "But the increase in wages was greeted with some furrowed brows." Including at The New York Times, apparently.

The Times even managed to work in a little global warming-ism among the economic data. "January's average temperature of 39.5 degrees was the highest ever recorded." What that has to do with the price of tea in China is unclear, but The Times does have the world's temperature to worry about as well as the negative ramifications of a quarter million fewer jobless Americans.
Give credit where it's due. In 2005, when the United States was busy adding 2 million jobs and there were no national elections for The Times to worry about, the headline writers were good enough to toss the optimists a bone: "Creation of Jobs Surged in April, and Income Rose".

But on May 7, The Times editorial writers calmed their excitable scribes. "If April's numbers are the start of a new upward trend, great. But it's too soon to tell. Policy makers must be especially mindful that the economy has been at this juncture before, and then failed to deliver on its promise."

October 9, 2004: Labor Department reports 96,000 new jobs in September; New York Times reports "Growth of Jobs for Last Month Seen as Sluggish". You'll have to forgive The Times for that one -- you can't have good news getting through at election time.

And as the 52-month job expansion was beginning in August of 2003, The Times headlined "Not Much Job Growth, but Mediocre May Look Good in 2004".

So, at The New York Times, a loss of 63,000 is "sharp" and a gain of 128,000 is "modest"; 96,000 is "sluggish", 113,000 is "slack", and the less said about 243,000, the better.

Play down the good news, play up the bad. That's how The Times makes the news fit to print. Unless of course The Times supports the president of the day, in which case, reverse those rules exactly.

Now The New York Times has that slowdown they've been dreaming of since the last boom began in President Bush's first term, and just in time for a presidential election, too. Better hope the stimulus package doesn't work. But even if it does work, The Times can always say it's only made things worse. An election season would be no time to start acknowledging good news.

It's not for nothing that The Times' circulation and advertising taken the same direction as its writers and editors have been wishing on America 's economy. The bad news is that among those stragglers who still worship at The Times' Gothic nameplate are almost the entirety of the English-speaking world's journalist class, amplifying the axe-grinding of The New York Times in newsrooms from Houston to Halifax .

Surge success and anti-war assumptions

The last-ditch American drive to win the war in Iraq -- the "surge" policy -- finally took full effect on June 15 of last year. By the end of the year, Iraqi civilian deaths were a quarter of the body count 12 months earlier. Between May and September, U.S. military deaths were halved; By year's end, the death toll had been cut by another two-thirds, to the lowest monthly losses in nearly four years and the second-lowest of the entire war.

American military and civilian leaders have thus far declined to declare even a limited victory, having learned the hard way how fragile victory in the Middle East can be. But the numbers speak for themselves.

No war supporter will deny that the war has taken too long and cost too much, that implanting democracy in the wreck of a Mideastern nightmare tyranny was not exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, or that the desire of all sides for an early draw-down of Western troops in fact enabled the insurgency. But if we war supporters had to re-think the war, some of the anti-war side's assumptions of the past several years are not above re-thinking, as well.

The leaders who are blamed for everything that ever went wrong in Iraq have gotten no credit for the quick and clean invasion or the eleventh-hour pacification, but what about the Congressmen and Senators who authorized and supported the war when it was popular, then opposed and undermined it once that became the popular thing? How should history remember the sort of politicians who do whatever is most convenient at any given time?

The Weapons of Mass Destruction rationale for the war was no "lie." If it was, then the Clinton Administration were liars, too; anti-war foreign leaders like former French President Jacques Chirac were liars, too; and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore were liars, too. They all said the same things about Saddam Hussein's WMD threat that the Bush Administration did. The Hussein government actually used WMDs on ten known occasions, after all.

And there were many other grounds for the war named in the joint resolution of the U.S. Congress that authorized the use of force in Iraq. The failure to find WMD stockpiles does nothing to diminish the numerous other justifications for the war. Saddam Hussein ensured that no-one would ever want for good reasons to dismantle his dictatorship.

The United States has not grabbed Iraq's oil. If former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote recently that the war was "largely about oil," he was referring to his own idiosyncratic view, as he explained: "I was not saying that that's the Administration's motive. ... I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential. ... I have never heard [Bush and Cheney] basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive."

Hysterical figures like 655,000 or 1.2 million civilian dead are impossibly high and based on spurious polling and methodology. The most widely-accepted tally has been by Iraq Body Count, which is an anti-war outfit with no interest in diminishing the numbers. That puts the total civilian deaths since March of 2003 at 80,000-88,000. Saddam Hussein's enforcers killed more Iraqi Kurds in a single "Anfal" campaign.

The worst killer of Iraqi civilians remains Saddam Hussein. By far. Human Rights Watch has concluded that Hussein had 100,000 Kurds killed in 1988 alone, and that 290,000 Iraqi civilians in all "disappeared" during Hussein's 23-year tyranny. Which does not include hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the pointless 8-year Iran-Iraq War, launched by Saddam Hussein.

So concern for Iraqi civilians can as easily argue in favour of the war to end the Saddam Hussein nightmare, and in favour of the continuing surge against the jihadists and death squads which target civilians.

The Iraqi-al Qaeda connection cited as cause for war in Congress' Iraq resolution has been branded another "lie," but again, even the Clinton Administration was convinced half a decade before the war that al Qaeda and the Hussein government were allied. The Clinton Justice Department's 1998 indictment against Osama bin Laden found that al Qaeda had agreed to "work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq...on particular projects, specifically including weapons development."

And if the pre-war relationship was not extensive enough, no less an al Qaeda authority than Osama bin Laden later called Baghdad the "epicentre of jihad" and "capital of the Caliphate." A more recent Iraq assessment by bin Laden, however, is that "the darkness has become pitch black." Al Qaeda is being routed on its self-described central front in the global war. Pounded and harassed militarily, and repudiated by practically every sect and tribe of the Iraqi people.

As for the surge's skeptics, the policy has largely separated the insurgency from the Iraqi people, decimated the insurgents, and secured the population. It has taken more American troops, more time and money, riskier tactics, and a final revulsion of the Iraqi people against the jihadists and militants. But a miracle was worked in a matter of months.

It has always been the case that ultimate failure in Iraq would color the entire enterprise as wrong and hopeless. But the other side of the coin is that a lasting fix would re-cast the war in a favourable light, as a worthy cause, and one for which the sacrifice was not in vain.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Saturday Night Live conservatives

By the time Dennis Miller had a show of his own in the 1990s, it was established that he was for the death penalty, at least. Miller's HBO show was even the soap-box for a memorably strident defense of American capitalism: "Coming to America and complaining about the capitalism is like walking onto a baseball field and complaining that nobody's playing soccer." But even there Miller defied labeling as a conservative, as by devoting an installment to "What's wrong with Republicans?" and appealing for answers to Arianna Huffington. Then came 2004, when Dennis Miller "came out" on The Tonight Show in the most unabashed apologia for President Bush. He explained later that he had found himself on the Right on some questions for some time, but that it wasn't 'til after the 9/11 attacks that he turned the corner to conservatism, with the accustomed qualifier that he wasn't so conservative on those bothersome "social issues". And Dennis Miller today is a defender of President Bush and booster of Rudy Giuliani and a no-foolin' conservative commentator, with jokes.

Norm Macdonald in the presidential election year of 1996 graduated to the leading Bob Dole impressionist, and when he signed off his final Weekend Update before Election Day with "Vote for Bob Dole," that might've been influenced by the prospect of Macdonald's elevation to leading impressionist of a president of the United States, or a joke. Macdonald appeared on a Comedy Central year-in-review special not long after the 2004 election with a stand-up act that came at John Kerry's campaign from the sort of angle a skeptic would see, but still, nothing declarative. Well, it turns out that Norm Macdonald is something of a conservative, and a John McCain man of long standing.

Sometime in the early-middle '90s, before nostalgia for President Reagan had spread beyond committed conservatives, Dana Carvey gave an interview on Later with Bob Costas which got around somehow to a recollection of Reagan's reaction to the attempt on his life. It was highly sentimental, with the sort of admiration unlikely in anyone who'd passed the 1980s shrieking "trickle-down economics" or other leftist indictments of the greatest presidency and greatest age in America since mid-century. Carvey's George H. W. Bush impression was something of a sensation in the early '90s and earned him a relationship with the actual George H. W. Bush, and there was no concealing Carvey's affection for the man. Then in California's gubernatorial recall election of 2003 Dana Carvey campaigned for Arnold Schwarzenegger -- this being before Schwarzenegger's unconservative governorship dispelled the notion of his being a conservative Republican -- and against the Democrat governor and lieutenant governor Carvey took no prisoners.

Adam Sandler signed an open letter in defense of Israel at the time of its summer war against Hezbollah in 2006. Not very Hollywood of him, but an otherwise-impeccable leftist may be excused a parochial, pet heresy. But it turns out that Adam Sandler also is a Rudy Giuliani man, a donor to Giuliani and in the fullness of time not impossibly also a public advocate.

And then there's Victoria Jackson, who's been known even to turn up on The 700 Club: a lifelong and devout evangelical Christian and a longtime conservative.

This probably is not a complete list, and SNL is of course an institution with by now so many seasons and so many casts, that an SNL alumnus or two might be expected to be political conservatives, as a matter of statistics. But to watch Comedy Central for any length of time is to appreciate that contemporary comedy and shrilly-partisan, stock leftism are twin worlds in America. If nothing else, the monopoly is broken.

Addendum: A couple more SNL alumni, lifelong Democrats both, driven off the plantation or all the way over to the other side in the Age of Obama. Jon Lovitz who by 2012 was a businessman laboring to keep up a couple California comedy clubs bearing his name, "went F-bomb" on Obama and his class warfare, on mic, and then admirably stood his ground when the little enforcers of the Left inevitably descended on him for his heresy and blasphemy. And in 2013 Rob Schneider whose vitamins business had been chased out of his Democrat one-party-state of California, converted to Republican and endorsed a Republican assemblyman for governor. 

The Iran NIE: Resetting the nuclear clock, not stopping it

December 6, 2007

The new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear development has itself hit like an atomic bomb of sorts.

The NIE's most immediate implication is that U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are not in the offing. Not because the NIE claims Iran will not go nuclear, but because it claims Iran is at least two years away from enriching uranium enough to build a bomb. The military option will only ever be a last resort, and a period of at least two years is outside the "red line" for last resorts.

The 2005 NIE found that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon "early-to-mid next decade," and "by the end of this decade" at the earliest; the new NIE foresees Iran crossing that weaponization threshold "during the 2010-2015 time frame," with an earliest possible date of "late 2009." So both forecasts agree on timelines, and the nearest point-of-no-return is now only two years out.

The good news is that, if the report is correct, we have a window of opportunity for non-military solutions to the Iran problem.

If the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about air strikes harming innocents or alienating the pro-Western people of Iran. We need not worry for now about an Iranian retaliation to air strikes, whether upsetting the newfound peace in Iraq, targeting Western soldiers in the region, driving the price of oil even higher, or unleashing terror attacks against Israeli or Western civilians.

And most importantly, if the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about Iran announcing the detonation of the world's first Islamist nuclear bomb.

The bad news is that National Intelligence Estimates are notoriously faulty. They don't call them "estimates" for nothing.

The catalogue of flawed U.S. intelligence in the past two decades includes the failure to envision the fall of the Soviet Union, the underestimation of Iraq's WMD capabilities before the 1991 Gulf War, the overestimation of those same capabilities before the 2003 Iraq War, and the failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and the current global war.

So there is no particular reason, without the benefit of hindsight, to believe that this NIE is some final word in accuracy and analysis. Especially as it neglects Iran's work on heavy water and longer-range ballistic missiles. But, as of now, the new NIE is the best we've got. It is the most current assessment of the U.S. intelligence agencies on the central intelligence question of the time.

The NIE finds that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003, and even Israeli officials skeptical of the report agree on that point. 2003 of course coincides with the war to end the Saddam Hussein regime, just across the border from Iran, and largely as a result of Iraq's WMD defiance. President Bush had recently declared Iran part of an "Axis of Evil," along with Iraq, so Iran may have feared that it was next up on the hit list. And Libya was persuaded by Saddam Hussein's example to abandon its WMD program; Iran may have drawn a similar lesson.

But that was 2003. A lot has happened since. Iraq is in hand today, but by the start of this year there was a real possibility of an American withdrawal and defeat there. If American victory in Iraq deterred WMD development, then the prospect of American defeat was presumably having the opposite effect, and by 2005, Iran had resumed its uranium enrichment.

Bizarrely, the NIE credits "international scrutiny and pressure" for Iran's nuclear freeze in fall, 2003, but there had been no such international efforts by the fall of '03. What there had been was the recent example of regime-change in Iraq.

The NIE also finds that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program since 2003, and it is on this point that the Israelis, the NIE's critics, and the 2005 NIE, disagree. The Iranians themselves boast that they are enriching uranium in thousands of centrifuges -- as would be necessary for building a bomb -- and the NIE does not disagree, except to claim that the enrichment is going slowly. So the finding that Iran's "nuclear weapons program" has been halted, but that its uranium enrichment continues, may be splitting hairs. The uranium enrichment would be the biggest part of a weapons program.

The report of slow progress on Iran's nuclear development has been readily received as a defeat for the United States or the Bush Administration. But U.S. and Administration policy is that Iran must not have nuclear weapons. In any less poisonous political environment, a finding that the policy is being realized might even be treated as a small victory, if not a new vindication of the Iraq intervention.

The danger of the NIE is that it will be abused by the Iran appeasers as proof the Islamic Republic is as pure as the driven snow, and give them an excuse for dropping the diplomatic pressure on Iran, let alone even the feeblest threat of military action. The NIE confirms that Iran continues enriching uranium, which is the stuff nuclear weapons are made of, and predicts Iran could have the bomb in as little as two years. But the NIE also allows that the West has time -- not to carry on as usual, but to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear Islamist theocracy, by non-military means. If we do not use this time to halt Iran's nuclear drive diplomatically, we will sooner or later be back to bracing for the military option.

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Andrew Smith / Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Metropolis, 80 years on

2007 makes 80 years since the premiere of Fritz Lang's epic of science fiction futurism, Metropolis.

Metropolis marks a sort of intersection: It came out of the cauldron of interwar Germany, launched an entire genre of film, and was one of the last great silent pictures, released on the cusp of the "talkie" age which began in earnest with The Jazz Singer later in the same year.

That futurism can contain so much medievalism may be a measure of the irresistible and sometimes fatal pull on the German imagination of the Dark Ages. In the same film, we see both a remarkably prescient projection of a videophone, and a Grim Reaper and skeletal chorus right out of a Black Death-era manuscript. The evocation of the Middle Ages in this brave new world is one of the features that makes Metropolis so compelling, though one wonders if it wasn’t so much a clever juxtaposition as the product of a mentality so fixated on the Gothic that even a film set in 2026 ends up playing out Medieval fantasies.

Metropolis itself is New York City circa 1924 -- when Lang first saw New York for himself -- only bigger and taller and with a few more architecturally audacious edifices here and there. That remains arguably the most striking and familiar image from the film: the Metropolis cityscape, with the skyscraping towers so fantastically high that the ground is almost forgotten, the ant-like traffic bustling in every direction and on multiple levels, and the planes buzzing not far above the higher tiers of traffic.

On the petty but pesky matter of Metropolis’ planes. The tiny biplanes and prop planes in the film were soon to be museum pieces even in 1927, and aircraft evolution had been so fast and furious in that time, it beggars belief that anyone of the time would envision planes a century hence as being exactly like whatever was current. A small point, admittedly, but these things do, as they say, take one out of the movie.

The film does avoid some of the usual pitfalls of futuristic science fiction, especially the unfortunate tendency to outfit the characters in tinfoil jumpsuits and metallic beehive wigs. The costuming, as the aircraft and automobiles, is mainly typical of the time the film was made: slacks and shirts, neckties, suit jackets, hair short and parted on the sides, etc. In fact, only two decades away from the 2026 setting for the film, it seems there was either shrewdness or at least dumb luck in those costuming and props decisions, as the difference between 1927 and 2026 is liable to be less than the difference between 2026 and a 1920s filmmaker's vision of 2026.

It is duly noted that Metropolis is a specimen of German cinematic expressionism, and perhaps that should dull one’s criticisms, but "expressionism" shouldn’t become an excuse for every flaw in the work.

The "plight of the workers" gimmicks particularly are cartoonish, as in the opening scene of the subterranean workers changing shifts, trudging unnaturally slowly and in mechanical lock step, as a signal to us benighted viewers that these are some decidedly non-unionized working conditions. Some silly stunts are tolerable in the name of expressionism. But even the miserable slaves who built Egypt’s pyramids were presumably permitted to trudge in their own gaits. And at that, if the laborers must walk unnaturally to make a point of their enslavement, why not have them walk faster rather than at a snail’s pace which no self-respecting slave-overseer would abide? It’s ridiculous and unnecessary direction and diminishes the film.

And that points to a bigger problem with the film. Why, in this advanced, mechanized future world, are human beings necessary for such menial tasks as mechanically turning dials? In a world in which so much else has been automated – even programmable androids invented -- one might imagine that the task of turning dials would have been sorted out as well. But that of course would have undermined the point of the film, which was to comment on the plight of labor and some class apartheid.

Being a silent film, Metropolis tends toward the hammier school of acting -- overwrought expressions and gestures, etc. -- but that’s a forgivable and indeed charming feature of the era, when such visual embellishments compensated for the silence.

As Maria, Brigette Helm is frankly a little boring. But as "Machine-Maria" -- the android given Maria’s characteristics by its mad scientist inventor, Rotwang -- she’s positively possessed, at times wild and at other times coldly manipulative, with a sinister smirk and an exuberant nihilism. Her Machine-Maria performance ranks with the very best in silent film. Incidentally, Helm’s look is one that seems to have appealed quite specifically to Germans of the era.

Alfred Abel plays Metropolis’ master, Joh Fredersen, and can be something of a show-stealer. More subtle for the most part than typical silent-era actors, and conveys the sort of control and cynicism that one might imagine in a master of this future city of 60 million.

Among Metropolis’ anachronisms is its quite sincere invocation of Christianity. The film is filled with Christian allusions and symbolism, and not for purposes of irony, scorn, or villanization, as would tend to be the case in any nonreligious film of the past several decades. When the hero Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, finds himself in the laboring bowels of the city and witnesses a worker die in service to one of the machines, his point of reference is the human sacrifice culture of Molechism condemned in the Old Testament, and he envisions the factory scene as a stylized Biblical one of ancient Ammonites throwing themselves to the furnace as sacrifices to Molech. It takes some considerable familiarity with the Bible, not to mention an assumption of audience acquaintance with Scripture, to instinctively allude to such a thing as Molechism.

The heroine is named Maria, and is a rapturous John the Baptist-figure/Social Gospel preacher/labor organizer who calls subversive meetings in the catacombs below the city, festooned with crosses. Maria recounts the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, but appropriates it as a class struggle "legend". In the passed-over Biblical account, the man-as-god thinking behind the tower was a blasphemous affront to God, whereas in Maria’s legend, the problem with the tower is the conscription of dumb labor to build it and the lack of understanding between that labor and the designers.

Maria points the people to their messiah, or to use the film’s preferred term, "mediator", who happens to be the son of Metropolis’ lord. Only son, at that. And in case we missed anything, this mediator’s head is illuminated as in a medieval icon. He is supposed to be the "heart" that allows the "head" and the "hands" to communicate, which is evidently very important and which, we are given to know from the first frames of the picture, is the moral of the story.

There’s also a cathedral, Scripture passages, the fulfillment of Revelation prophesies, even a burning at the stake, etc., with characteristically Teutonic Medieval embellishments. Christianity comes in many forms, and Metropolis’ Christianity is more along the lines of what was called "Social Gospel", quite Biblically literate, and more accommodative than radical. A Continental Social Democrat’s Christianity, which itself is becoming a bit anachronistic today even in Europe.

The unionist economics of the film is blessedly outmoded today, dated and almost other-worldly, like a debate on women’s suffrage. Speaking of the womenfolk, the workforce of 2026 Metropolis is uniformly male, which, like that ancient biplane and prop plane, was not long for this world even when the film was made. We learn that there are women in Metropolis’ laboring class, and children, but they apparently keep to their housing.

The time of the film’s making must be of some significance. 1927 precedes by a couple years our dating for the Great Depression, when this kind of Marx-inspired art would become even more typical. But Germany is another case. It’s sometimes said that Germany was the first country into the depression and the first out of it, and by 1927, while to the west of Germany were boom-times and happy days, Germany was already an economic basket case, thanks especially to the war, the post-war carving-up of valuable German territory, and Germany’s ruinous Reparations burden. So no doubt all that gave the film some currency and import, as a generation drowning in economic depression is liable to go for a movie that shows economics as some cruel machine, complete with a villain and scapegoat at the controls.

Like so much leftish advocacy art, Metropolis manages to miss the pending cataclysm that was gathering all around it in interwar Germany, and imagines instead some dystopia that would never materialize, in this case a caste system slavery. Not only did the coming slide toward fascism and war elude the filmmakers, but Lang’s then-wife and his Metropolis co-writer would later become quite an enthusiastic Nazi herself, which probably wasn’t much of a stretch. Maybe 1927 was still too early for the specter of fascism and the next global conflagration to have appeared to anyone, although Mussolini had established his Fascist government in Italy some five years earlier.

As politics and as science fiction futurism, Metropolis was no prophet. And as storytelling, it’s less compelling than some of Lang’s other work, like the Dr. Mabuse films. It is as art that Metropolis is magic. So many scenes, like the one in which the diabolical scientist Rotwang merges Maria with his android "Machine-Man" in his fantastical laboratory, with music at least as inspired as the concept itself, are as close to perfection as can be found in any silent film. So many touches, like setting Rotwang’s space-age lab in an ancient hovel in the shadows of Metropolis’ towers, are the stuff of truly great stories.

Metropolis is a tour de force, and legitimately the landmark cinematic achievement which its advocates claim it to be. Just don’t mind the quirks.

(The Murnau Foundation has done an exquisite job of making Metropolis presentable in its old age, being as faithful to the partly-lost original as possible, and adding a brilliant rendering of the original orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz. The Murnau restoration is distributed in North America by Kino.)

Iran and the power of the presidency

(Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia)

Although France's new leadership has been more hawkish in its Iran pronouncements than the Bush Administration, which has yet to go further than the perfunctory "all options are on the table" statements, speculation has grown that a U.S. attack on Iran may be only a matter of months away.

And not for nothing. Iraq has gone from a boil to a simmer for the first time since the explosion in civil strife after February of 2006, allowing attention to turn elsewhere. Four years of European diplomacy have done absolutely nothing to dissuade Iran from going nuclear. And Iran is increasingly, if indirectly, killing Western troops and sabotaging the new democracies of the Middle East. All potentially pointing to an armed confrontation with Iran. But with an anti-war Congress that has already signaled opposition to action against Iran, is there even a possibility of such a thing?

It was not so many years ago that another "lame duck" president, facing a hostile Congress and a United Nations Security Council veto, launched an air war. In March of 1999, President Bill Clinton had 22 months remaining in his final term. Both houses of Congress were vehemently opposed to the Administration, so much so that the House of Representatives had recently made Clinton only the second president to be impeached. Russia, on the Security Council, was certain to veto any resolution for action against Russia's "little brothers," the Serbs.

Nonetheless, invoking the support of NATO, Clinton waged a 78-day air war on Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, and by the time the bombs stopped dropping, Congress had done as it usually does and capitulated to the Commander-in-Chief, funding the operations with money to spare.

This was the trend through the 1990s. It is mistaken for a placid period, but the military missions came one after another: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, plus many strikes on Iraq, attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan, and a major show of force off Taiwan. All while the United States Armed Forces was being hacked to half its 1992 size, leaving a rump of the Cold War army that would have to improvise and take up the new war against Islamic fascism as of 2001. Congress might as well have stayed home. The Clinton Administration ordered half a dozen military actions citing UN resolutions or NATO support, but without the advance approval of Congress, and often over Congressional opposition.

The Bush Administration, for all the Iraq resolution rejections at the UN Security Council, did seek and receive prior Congressional consent for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in the 2001 and 2002 "Authorization for Use of Military Force" resolutions, on top of the standing Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

Of course, the aerial campaigns of the 1990s are an order of magnitude or two down from the full-scale, "boots-on-the-ground," regime-changing wars of today, but it is mainly '90s-style air strikes that are being considered for Iran.

The most pertinent U.S. law in the Iran case may be the 1973 War Powers Act. It was passed by a radicalized post-Vietnam Congress, overriding a veto by President Richard Nixon, and was intended to restrict the role of Commander-in-Chief. But it actually codified the principle that a president can order military action without Congressional authorization, requiring only that the president seek approval within 60 days -- assuming the operation has lasted that long -- and report to Congress within 48 hours.

Presidents since Nixon have tended to take a dim view of the War Powers Act -- Clinton called it "constitutionally defective" -- but it remains the most explicit expression in law of the Congressional view on war powers.

If all this is a sullying of the U.S. Constitution, it is one with a long and respectable pedigree. The United States has used military force a couple hundred times in its couple of centuries; the majority of those deployments have lacked Congressional consent, and only five times has Congress actually declared war as per the Constitution. The subordination of Congress, in its current form, started with President Harry Truman in 1950, and subsequent administrations have entrenched the practice of committing U.S. forces first and asking for permission later, if at all.

Part of the rationale for this is legitimate enough: The necessity of immediate action or an element of surprise. Conducting public hearings, debates, and votes on a military mission for weeks or months beforehand does let the cat out of the bag. But the motivations are also less noble. Congresses are often hostile to the executive branch and likely to automatically refuse approval for "the president's war," administrations tend to view Congress as a second-rate institution on matters of war and peace, and Congresses can be divided, not to mention loath to claim responsibility for risky missions. So presidents often invoke the fullest interpretation of the Commander-in-Chief mantle, and order an operation unilaterally, Congress notwithstanding.

We would be getting ahead of ourselves to assume there will necessarily be an Iran attack. The sabres have yet to be rattled by the Bush Administration, after all. But the question is effectively the President's to decide. He will order strikes on Iran or not, and his lame duck status, the disposition of Congress, and the vetoes on the UN Security Council will have much less to do with it than his judgement of the costs of action and inaction.

Andrew W. Smith/Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

The John McCain longshot

Republicans have won seven of the past ten presidential elections. Two of the three lost elections came when the Republican base found the Republican nominee to be insufficiently conservative on domestic policy, and a substantial third party candidacy was mounted. In both elections the Democrat won on the strength of less than half the popular vote. The years were 1992 and 1996, and the Democrat was Bill Clinton, who won in '92 with only 43 percent of the popular vote, and in '96 with 49 percent.

That history is rehearsed here on the occasion of a new poll out of Rasmussen Reports -- which forecast the 2004 presidential vote with uncanny precision -- and of declarations from the more conservative quarters in American politics, including especially James Dobson.

The Rasmussen poll sets Hillary Clinton against Rudy Giuliani, Clinton as Democrat nominee for president and Giuliani as the Republican, then inserts a third-party challenger who satisfies the conservative base of the Republican Party on domestic policy, with the result that Clinton wins, but on the strength of 46 percent of the popular vote. I.e., the candidate who unites the outstanding 54 percent bids fair to become next president of the United States.


And so we come to the conservative base of the Republican Party. James Dobson doesn't presume to act as some official spokesman for the base, but I presume to know him particularly and the base generally to where I can say with some authority that Dobson makes a reasonable representation of the values and votes of devout Christian and traditionally-minded core conservatives. Threats of a third party conservative kamikaze in the event that Rudy Giuliani is Republican nominee are not novel, but on October 8 Dobson appeared on Hannity and Colmes and uttered the starkest pronouncement I have yet heard, that under no circumstances will he vote Giuliani.

In light of the Rasmussen poll and the Dobson declaration, the picture is clearing, that Hillary Clinton cannot command half of the popular vote, and that the Republican Party cannot seize on that with a nominee who doesn't first satisfy its base on domestic policy. Defense and foreign policy don't figure in this, incidentally, the principal Republican candidates being agreed on "beyond the water's edge" questions.

The lessons of '92 and '96 were that Republicans lose nationally when their base is unenthused, that motivating the conservative base goes most of the way to winning national election. Most Americans are not Republican, but most Americans are conservative, and to the extent the Republican Party is the conservative party, it stands to win the most votes in most elections. Those lessons were taken to heart by Karl Rove and his class of strategists particularly, and presumably the thought has occurred to Rove et al. that if the Republican nomination goes again to a less-reliably conservative candidate, the lessons will have been unlearned.

John McCain as of this writing may not qualify for the top tier of the Republican presidential field. But it was one presidential cycle ago that John Kerry ascended from sub-McCainian primary polling to Democrat presidential nominee, and McCain has compared better against Hillary Clinton than some of those Republicans who rank ahead of him in the primary polls.


The Powerline blog on October 7 posted what is to me the shrewdist observation on John McCain and the Rebublican base: McCain is disliked by many Republicans for many reasons, but he is a conservative, and to pull the lever for John McCain would be a good deal less disagreeable than a vote for Giuliani or Romney, to the conservative base. McCain has managed to be a bad Republican but a better conservative than Giuliani and Romney, who are good Republicans but spottier in their conservatism.

And there is another, probably sillier point. 43 of the 43 presidents of the United States have been male, and 42 of those 43 have been what is called in America "WASP". That is a very resilient tendency of history. Of the candidates with national appeal in both parties, there are precious few who satisfy that "historical tendency" test. One is John McCain.


John McCain is a longshot for the presidency, certainly, and the Republican nomination may be the longer part of that longshot, but it may be that McCain makes a more likely "next president of the United States" than the leaders and first runners-up of both parties as of this writing. The core conservative activists now demurring on the prospective Republican nominees are sounding an alarm that may yet be heeded. And they are allowing an opening for John McCain. It would take a comeback on the order of John Kerry's comeback following the Iowa caucuses in 2004, but that's recent demonstration that it can be done.

The Iran conundrum - "Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well"

There has been a real reluctance in the West's confrontation with Iran, and the reasons go beyond the most superficial ones -- the burden of existing commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq or the usual dissent within the West on how best to proceed.

Making matters murkier is that Iran is such a formidable nation. Territorially vast, more populous than Aghanistan and Iraq combined, with the world's second-largest crude oil reserves at a time when oil is an especially good thing to have. Iran has a sophisticated and dedicated military, and sustained a brutal war with Iraq lasting eight years and costing 300,000 Iranian lives, a scant two decades ago. It has a unique language and Persian core population, and an ancient culture with imperial traditions of regional domination. Not to mention, the more permanent parts of the Iranian government are at the same time fanatically anti-Western and constitutionally unconstrained.

The hesitation in dealing with Iran more forcefully also comes from an understanding that the Iranian people are some of the most Western-oriented and savvy in the region, perfectly capable of managing their own affairs in a decent, democratic fashion. It is tragic that a nation which might as easily be a great friend and ally, has ended up one of our most challenging threats. That Iran would become the first modern Islamic theocracy is itself a sad irony: Islamic government ought to be a poor fit for Iran, with its tradition of secular government reaching back some two-and-a-half thousand years.

So there is a sober respect and indeed fear of what Iran would be capable of in retaliation for military strikes on its nuclear production, and a worry that even limited Western air strikes could stir some nationalist reaction and make enemies of the otherwise pro-Western Iranian people. Those have made good arguments against the military option.

What has changed in the past months is the addition to the old equation of a new realization, that Iran is on the attack already: increasingly, without provocation, and with near-impunity.

As of August, about half the attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq have been Iranian-supported. Iran is shelling Iraqi Kurdish territory and threatening invasion. It is arming, training, and funding Iraqi insurgents as well as arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its weaponry is the most advanced in the insurgents' arsenals. Iran has even flooded southern Iraq with bogus voters to boost support for its client parties. Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist arm, threatens Israel and subverts Lebanon's democracy. Iran props up Hamas in Gaza and sponsors Islamic Jihad. Even the forces of the genocidal, rogue government of Sudan are considered worthy of training and support by the Iranian theocracy. Iran could probably do worse, but it is wreaking havoc enough already.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, the United States started diplomatic discussions with Iran, reportedly limited to the subject of Iraqi stability. But since those talks began, Iran has actually increased its efforts to sabotage Iraqi peace and democracy, doing little to vindicate the faith in diplomacy for dealing with Iran.

A widely-circulated September 2 report in The Times of London claimed that U.S. plans for a possible Iran attack were to strike not only Iran's nuclear facilities but also its military. Such reports appear with some frequency and are impossible to verify, but this particular story does have the advantage of squaring with some of what can be known. The Iranian military has made itself an active enemy in Iraq especially, it would be very capable of retaliation after any attack, and it is the theocrats' defenders against a popular uprising. All arguments for targeting Iran's military as well as its nuclear capacity in any Iran hit.

Then there is U.S. Executive Order 13224. The Washington Post broke a story last month of the Bush administration’s intention to name Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a "specially designated global terrorist entity." It would be an extraordinary move. Classifying an official force of a nation state as a terrorist organization is without precedent. But the suit certainly fits. The Revolutionary Guard and its elite, expeditionary Quds Force are the outfits responsible for aiding Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

The Executive Order would squeeze the Revolutionary Guard's substantial international financing. Section 6 of the Order could conceivably also lay a legal foundation for military action against the Guard, but at the very least, the terrorist designation would be a signal of seriousness from Washington.

Another possible indication of new seriousness was noted by the veteran commentator Arnaud de Borchgrave. When the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy made his remarkable and blunt foreign policy speech recently, warning that the consequences of diplomacy without results would be "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran," it was shortly after Sarkozy had met with President Bush.

It is a reasonable guess that the Administration has been focused on Iraq, and informed that Iran is not yet at the point of no return in its nuclear project, so it has been enough for now to encourage the domestic opposition to Iran's theocracy, experiment with the diplomatic and economic measures, and hope for some development to intervene before military strikes become necessary, all the while planning and preparing for the military contingencies.

The Iran case is a conundrum. A dangerous enemy with a friendly population that defies clear prescriptions. Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well. But the Iranian assault is making things very slightly clearer as the days pass. Action against Iran can only become more likely as Iran continues in its genocidal rhetoric, doomsday-minded drive for the bomb, and now the region-wide offensive against the West it has launched despite our best efforts to decline the fight.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia