Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – On the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much anticipated visit to the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, former senior adviser on the Near and Middle East to the Bush Administration and currently senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, outlined the challenges Clinton will face as the new top U.S. diplomat, and portrayed a gloom state of affairs in the region, at the core of which is the stand-still in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There’s very little belief, in the Middle East, that political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are possible,” Abrams, a leading neoconservative who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, said in a conference call with reporters. Currently, it is impossible to say who would even be a legitimate representative of either party at a negotiating table. In addition to a long-standing split within the Palestinian camp – where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) represents only a part of the population, the other having embraced Hamas — the general elections recently held in Israel, and which have yet to yield a national government, only contributed to complicating the picture.

According to Abrams, the hope for a broad base coalition that would include both Likud and Kadima parties, an option more conducive to dialogue with the Palestinians, has already been crashed. Despite widespread popular support for such a solution, and Likud leader and Prime Minister-Designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni is resistant to aligning her party with Israel’s more conservative factions. “The U.S. would prefer a broader base government,” Abrams said. Nevertheless, it unlikely that Washington will put any direct pressure on Livni. “It’s hard to know what the outcome of a direct intervention would be, and how Kadima would react to it,” Abrams explained.

Political negotiations over the future of Palestine have been languishing for a long time. Discussions have long reached a point where the minimum the Palestinian Authority is willing to accept is more than the maximum the Israeli Government is willing to concede. Increased Palestinian ambitions make things worse. In Abrams’ opinion, the idea that the creation of a Palestinian state is a matter of urgency and should be attended to immediately is relatively new and was not, for example, part of the road-map. The road-map contemplated incremental steps and an interim stage before a state could ever be created. “I think these issues shouldn’t be taboo. One can envision many different combinations beyond what the Palestinian Authority wants now,” Abrams claimed.

Because of the unlikelihood that a political agreement will be reached in the near-term, Abrams encouraged all parties involved to focus on a step-by-step approach aimed at improving material standards of living in the West Bank, leaving Gaza aside for the time being. “The economy in the West Bank has not collapsed yet. It is actually in a decent state. Even more could be achieved if the Israelis loosened road blocks and checkpoints. We should work to strengthen some of those Palestinian institutions, like the police force, that one day will be needed for a Palestinian state,” Abrams advised.

In this context, Abrams believes that the issue of Jewish settlements in the territories should be downgraded. In his opinion, population growth in the settlements doesn’t have, per se, a huge impact on the daily lives of Palestinians, nor does it hamper the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state. The real problem lies, instead, in potential land expansion. However, according to Abrams, there has been little evidence of this in recent years. “The U.S. should tell Israel to exercise pressure on its settlers to avoid outgrowth of the settlements. For the rest, we should keep our ammunitions for issues that affect Palestinians more deeply,” Abrams advised.

As for Gaza itself, the Israeli blockade still stands. As a consequence only humanitarian supplies (i.e. medicines and food) are being allowed in, while other kinds of products, for example materials needed for reconstruction efforts, are not. “I don’t think Netanyahu will mend this position,” Abrams predicted, indicating that one, although difficult, possibility would be to get these supplies into Gaza through Egypt. “The Egyptians will be resistant because they don’t want the Israelis to offload Gaza on them,” Abrams explained. Things are further complicated by the fact that Israel considers an even more porous border between Egypt and Gaza as a potential threat in terms of arms smuggling. The Israelis are convinced, and many Egyptians agree, that Iranian weapons come into Gaza via the tunnels under the Egyptian border. Reportedly, most arms shipments leave Iran by sea, circumnavigate the Gulf of Aden, and ultimately stop short of the Suez Canal and hit land in places such as Somalia and Eritrea, finally arriving in Gaza via land.

In the context of Iran, Abrams criticized the Obama Administration’s new approach. Irrespective of whether or not the U.S might eventually start direct diplomacy with Teheran, Abrams believes that Washington should have never taken the military option off the table. “We need to keep the Iranians off balance and we need to keep them worried,” Abrams said. “Instead, I think we left the Iranians with the feeling that the possibility of a U.S. strike is totally out of the question,” he regretted.

While it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. will attack Iran, it is hard to predict what Israel might do. “They do see Iran as an existential threat and they believe that a nuclear Iran could trigger a second holocaust,” Abrams explained. According to him, Israel will have to consider how effective a military strike could be and assess the political and social consequences it would have. Abrams disagreed that attacking Iran would trigger a backlash and increase support for the regime. While he conceded that this could happen in the short run, a military intervention could cause the Iranian people to doubt their choice of leadership in the long run.

Finally, Elliott Abrams touched on the nomination of Dennis Ross to be Secretary Clinton’s special adviser to South West Asia and the Persian Gulf. The choice of Ross, criticized in Iran for his pro-Israel stances, had long been expected and turned out to be for a less significant role than what had been anticipated.
“I’m not sure why he wasn’t officially nominated for Iran. There are many speculations as to why that happened,” Abrams said. Interestingly, Ross has not been given the role of an envoy, such as George Mitchell for the Middle East, and is not tasked with outreach. Rather, Ross might be assigned to a behind-the-scene role of private consultations with Secretary Clinton. Clearly, Ross’ final job will also depend on what approach the Obama Administration decides to take toward Iran and on when any form of direct engagement might actually start.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Thomas Frank is the author of best selling “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and recently became a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his newly published book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” Mr. Frank describes what he believes to be the principles of conservative politics as a philosophy of laissez-faire.

He lays out how Republican Presidents and Congresses in the last twenty-eight years have, little by little, undermined the foundations of the liberal state and dismembered the U.S. Government, making it the inefficient and corrupt machine voters think it is today.

“The Wrecking Crew” begins with a witty portray of Washington DC in the new millennium. In Frank’s account, the national capital has become a city solely dominated by glass high-rises sprawling up in Rosslyn, across the Potomac in Virginia, inhabited by lobbyists in designer suits, and subjugated to the encompassing presence of private consulting firms and government contractors.

Mr. Frank wonders how metropolitan DC became one of the wealthiest regions in the country and the destination of choice for young ivy-leaguers seeking high paying jobs in the private sector, when it was once the place for passionate young men and women wanting to dedicate their lives to public service.

The answer, according to Frank, lies in the takeover of Washington DC by conservatives that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and went into full force with the Newt Gingrich’s Congress in 1994.

Despising the liberal state while worshipping the Market, the conservative revolution, slowly but methodically, proceeded to disrupt the government from within: “Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence,” writes Frank. To achieve their goals, conservatives used a variety of means. They shrank the role of government agencies they deeply distrusted by appointing some of those agencies’ staunchest opponents to run them.

Instead of letting government attend to the tasks it had always been responsible for, conservatives preferred handing over many of those tasks to private companies. Conservatives also understood, before and better than anyone else, the business potential of politics and successfully turned it into a lucrative enterprise with the help of industries such as lobbying. They also pushed for unconstrained deregulation to favor big corporations, and reduced public oversight of the private sector. As a result, Frank believes that conservatives created a fertile ground for corruption, wasteful spending and inefficiencies, and that they weakened the state to the point it had to give in to the power of money.

Thomas Frank’s tale of the conservative self-fulfilling prophecy on the futility of government is carefully researched and offers a wealth of details. The line-up of interviews, the historical analysis and the data presented are impressive and provide depth to Mr.

Frank’s argument. The book is also audacious, sharply written and often amusing. Thomas Frank’s relentless attack on conservatives, however, appear at times too narrowly focused, merely depicting Washington DC as a city abandoned into the hands of a bunch of reckless cowboys.

It makes the reader wonder what liberal Americans in the national capital and across the country were doing while the GOP was taking the US Government apart. Do they bear any responsibility for the ballooning deficit and the uncontrolled growth of the budget? Have they also mistakenly relied on tools so damaging to transparency in politics, such as lobbying? And what can Americans do today to get their country back on track?

In this interview with Washington Prism, Thomas Frank talks about “The Wrecking Crew,” Conservatism, and what it all means for the ongoing Presidential campaign.

Washington Prism (WP): In your book you portray the take-over of Washington DC by conservatives and their distaste for the liberal state. How would you describe their mission with regard to reforming the role of government?

Thomas Frank (TF): Conservative tradition doesn’t have a problem with government per se; they just want to be able to control it. Think of John Jay, for example. He once said: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” What they really dislike is the liberal state. However, it’s hard even for conservatives to simply do away with all the agencies that that they dislike, such as the Department of Labor or the Environmental Protection Agency, because the public expects these agencies to exist. Conservatives can’t simply abolish them, and so they decided to capture them from the inside and then use them for goals different from those that they were originally set up with.

WP: Laying out the means that the Republicans used to fail the liberal state, you mention an excessive reliance on private contractors, deregulation, and the growth of lobbying. Where were the Democrats while all of this was taking place and why have they not been capable of preserving the liberal state?

TF: The reality is that there are plenty of Democrats that are conservatives. During the Reagan years Congress was in the hands of the Democrats but Ronald Reagan had his way because there were plenty of Democratic Congressmen that went along with him, supporting free-market ideals and a policy of laissez-fair.

The larger problem, however, is the ever-growing role of money in politics, which has pulled the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, to the right. When I was growing up, until the 1980s, I always had the feeling that Republicans would be able to win a Presidential Election here and there but would never be able to control Congress because the majority of the people were democrats because they were working-class. The Democrats used to appeal to these voters on the basis of economic issues, but the problem became that these issues are not popular with people who fund politics. The Democrats have been faced with this dilemma for years and they have not found a solution.

WP: As a response to the ongoing financial crisis, the Bush Administration is stepping in with government money to rescue private businesses gone badly. How would you explain this in the theoretical framework of small government, free market and laissez-faire that you describe as the conservative trademark?

TF: Nobody really believes in free market, it’s just an ideological slogan. What conservatives believe in is class power, and of course they’re going to rescue these big corporations. There is also another argument, that some of these institutions must be rescued or it’ll be the destruction of the financial system. This is definitely is the case of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage in the U.S. anymore, had the government not rescued them. In any case, the market has done this to itself and it’s a problem for conservatives. I think it’s embarrassing to them and that it will be embarrassing for McCain. This is a philosophy of government, based on deregulation, which was put on trial and is failing miserably. It has returned markets to what they were before the New Deal and it should not surprise anyone that the markets are behaving like they were behaving then, with these unexpected crashes.

WP: Watching the ongoing Presidential Campaign, one would think that all candidates read your book and are now running against broken Washington. Polls suggest that voters are accepting the claim on the part of both Obama and McCain. How do you explain a Republican running on a platform of change after eight years of GOP Administration? Is there something about John McCain and Sarah Palin that makes the claim legitimate?

TF: I don’t know, I don’t know. You people in the media seem to believe him. It’s ridiculous. This is the party that has ruled Washington on and off for twenty years. I agree that McCain has been on the off with his party on a few occasion, but he agrees with the philosophy of George W. Bush. Yes, he’s not personally corrupt, and in that sense he is o.k. And Sarah Palin is definitely not from DC.

They clearly went to find her as far as possible from DC. But they still believe in the same philosophy. I don’t honestly know why people believe him; it’s preposterous that he can talk about change. The truth is that these people live and breathe cynicism. They are cynic about government, about voters, about everything. That’s the nature of the beast.

WP: Do you have anything positive to say about conservatives and Republican politics?

TF: I was a Republican when I was young. Everyone in Kansas is a Republican, but we used to have very liberal Republicans. McCain talks a lot about Teddy Roosevelt. He was a great President. Unfortunately liberal Republicans are gone and they won’t come back. After the 1960s, the two parties sorted themselves out. Before, you would have very conservative Democrats from the South and very liberal Republicans, especially from the Northeast. But today, if you are going to be a liberal, you will become a Democrat.

WP: What should the Democrats do to appeal to voters in defense of the liberal state?

Democrats have to appeal to blue-collar workers by talking about economic issues. They must emphasize how the current government has not been able to respond to their needs. They need to fight hard for social security. It’s really important that they reach out to blue-collar voters. For example, and I don’t think they will do it, but if they said that they were going to renegotiate NAFTA, they would win the elections in a heartbeat.

WP: NAFTA is an international agreement. Don’t you think that the Democrats can only promise so much, because renegotiating it will depend on other countries and factors beyond the Democrats’ control?

TF: We can do whatever the heck we want; we are Americans (laughing). If we decided to renegotiate NAFTA, we could. Can you imagine if the Americans started pushing the whole world to the left? Instead of invading Iraq, renegotiated NAFTA? What would the rest of the world think (laughing)?

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – Only a day before early voting begins in Virginia, with a host of other states following next week, a group of Republican-leaning analysts gathered Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — a conservative think tank in Washington DC — to assess the state of the 2008 Presidential Campaign. AEI Fellows Michael Barone, Karlyn Bowman, Norman J. Ornstein and John Fortier discussed issues ranging from the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP candidate for Vice-President, to the ongoing financial crisis.

“Sarah Palin’s choice undoubtedly electrified the Republican base,” said Norman J. Ornstein, “I think she is the prettiest candidate for Vice-President since John Edwards,” he joked. Although everybody agreed that the selection of the Alaska Governor as his running mate helped McCain’s resurgence in the polls – the Republicans enjoyed a much more significant ‘convention bounce’ than the Democrats – the panelists acknowledged that the Palin effect is already fading. “Now the race looks very much like it did before the conventions,” Senior Fellow Karlyn Bowman commented. “Palin has been a great phenomenon but the polls have already shifted back,” echoed John Fortier, “we know in general that people don’t vote for the Vice-Presidential candidates and the receding of the polls indicate that the Palin effect might be dying down already.”

Undoubtedly the story of the week is the financial crisis, the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers and the government rescue of insurance giant A.I.G. and of mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “If the Campaign stays focused on the economy then Obama has a lot of traction,” Mr. Ornstein noted. Economic distress generally moves voters towards the Democratic Party, added Michael Barone. However, he also pointed out, a look at state polls seem to suggest a different reality: “Obama is doing well in economically vibrant places such as Colorado and Virginia, which were not on the Democratic map four years ago. And yet, in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, among the hardest hit by the crisis, the race looks like a dead-heat,” Mr. Barone said.

Despite the depth of the turmoil on Wall Street, the speakers at AEI agreed that it is too early in the campaign to state with certainty whether the financial crisis will remain the most pressing issue on the mind of the voters: “We will have many more surprises ahead that will suddenly shift what’s in front of the voters’ radar screen,” Mr. Ornstein said, “even if only temporarily.”

As far as the electoral map is concerned, panelists’ view on what should be expected diverged. While Mr. Barone predicted a surprising and unprecedented outcome, with states such as West Virginia potentially within reach of the Democrats, “This is a time of open field politics, when voters are moving around, candidates are moving around and many unexpected things happen,” he said. John Fortier argued that, in the end, the map won’t look too different from what it has been in the last few elections cycles. “I see history reasserting itself, especially if the results are close,” he said.

Norman J. Ornstein had a different explanation for the apparently tight race, one that other Conservative pundits have been making recently: “I see many similarities with the campaign of 1980 between President Carter and Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Ornstein said asserting that the desire for change is strong and it is in the direction of Obama, but that voters are still waiting to learn more about him. According to this perspective, support for Obama could be underrepresented in the polls conducted thus far. Mr. Ornstein believes that the reactions to the first of the three Presidential debates, hosted next Friday at the University of Mississippi, should give us a better grasp of what’s to follow.

Although there is still over a month before Election Day, early and absentee voting could impact the results in a way that is hard to predict. “Both campaigns are already targeting those voters whom they want to get to the polls early,” Mr. Fortier said recalling how he has been receiving e-mails from the McCain campaign inviting him to cast his early ballot in Virginia. In truth, most early voters wait until the last two weeks before Election Day. However, the AEI Fellows warned that it is important to remember, when making predictions, that there are Americans who will have voted even before any of the debates scheduled takes place.

J. Peter Scoblic is the executive editor of The New Republic and the former editor of Arms Control Today. While a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, Scoblic wrote U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism has Undermined America’s Security. Scoblic traces back to the 1950s and to the Cold War the sources of the conservative worldview embraced today by President George W. Bush. A philosophy rooted in a Manichean understanding of the world based on the opposition of good vs. evil and us vs. them that does not allow for any compromised solution, conservatism explains the driving forces behind Bush’s foreign policy and the many controversial decisions that have been made in the last seven years, from the war in Iraq to the approach towards Iran, North Korea and non-proliferation. In this interview with Valentina Pasquali, J. Peter Scoblic talks about his book, conservatism and America’s future.

Valentina Pasquali: A lot has been said and written about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, the war in Iraq and his two-term presidency. What inspired you to research and write U.S. vs. Them? What gaps did you set out to fill?

J. Peter Scoblic: I wrote U.S. vs. Them because I felt there had not been an adequate explanation of the phenomenon that we have seen in the last seven years. It seemed to me that there had not been any comprehensive analysis of the Bush administration that went beyond its policies in Iraq but that also tried to account for how we dealt with North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and India, the way we did. It was confusion on my part on the sources of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy in particular, but also of the choices made in other realms.

What had been written appeared more descriptive than explanatory. We can accuse the administration of being unilateralist, but my question was: “Why were they being unilateralist?” Conventional wisdom is that neo-conservatism is the ideology behind the administration. I believe that there is truth to it, but I was convinced that there had to be a deeper explanation going further back into the history of this country. This is why I decided to start digging into the 1950s, which is when the modern American conservative movement was created. Looking back to the writings of the time, and how they affected U.S. nuclear policy and approach to negotiations during the Cold War, I saw a remarkable set of similarities between then and now and I found it very enlightening.

VP: In your book you talk about the conservative movement as centered on a worldview characterized by concepts such as good vs. evil. You also describe it as having a moralist foundation, but not necessarily moral or religious. Do you see any specific role of religion in conservative foreign policy making?

J.P.S.: When foreign policy makers divide the world into good and evil, they choose to use terms that normally refer to moral and immoral actions. However in the course of U.S. foreign policy, and as it was practiced by conservatives, good and evil often simply stood for the United States and our enemies. It did not always mean that the U.S. was conscious of acting in a moral way, or that for example it would be defending human rights above all other things. We saw ourselves as a righteous force facing an enemy that was dedicated to our destruction, or that of our friends and allies. In general, not many countries wage a moral foreign policy in the sense that they seek to maximize global good. They tend to be out for their own self-interest.

Religion comes into the picture in an interesting way. I think it can make it easier to frame the foreign policy discourse in terms of good vs. evil. A very religious president like George Bush may have an easier time thinking of the world as divided into good vs. evil because his own religious belief system sees it in a similar way. For someone like him, it may be a more natural tendency to see things in black and white and to have such an approach to foreign policy as well. At the same time, there are very religious people who don’t see the world in terms of good vs. evil. So there may be a correlation but there’s certainly not a completely clear causal connection.

VP: In U.S. vs. Them you refer to the Great Depression of 1929 and explain that the economic crisis of those years became a catalyst for a switch in American domestic politics. It created a needed opening for the policies of the New Deal to emerge and allowed the Democrats to regain the predominant political position. What impact, if any, do you think the current economic crisis could have on the two parties and their alignment?

J.P.S.: I don’t think we are looking at any major realignment such as that of the 20s and 30s. I think we are probably going to see increasing regulation. The major question that was being dealt with back then was, “Should the government really be involved in the economy?” And I think we have the answer, the answer is “Yes, the government should be involved to some extent.” Then we argue about the degree, but we are not arguing about the base question. Today we’re having a new version of that argument in terms of the degree of oversight of these exotic financial instruments and institutions that haven’t yet necessarily fallen under the government purview.

VP: There is a second historical parallel that could be drawn from the book. In the 1940s, as you write, “without a coherent creed or a patron, conservatives were defined principally by their discontent.” Is there any similarity with the Democrats since 2000? Finally, it was the opposition to communism that worked as a unifying force bringing the conservatives together in one political movement. What do you think could serve a similar function for the Democratic Party of today’s divisive primaries?

J.P.S.: I think the Democrats have coalesced quite a bit in the last four, eight years, even though there’s a bitter primary going on right now. I think they’re more unified than the Republicans, who have seen a fragmentation of the conservative movement that has animated the party for the last 25-30 years, or since the beginning of the Reagan era. During the Bush presidency, the War on Terror substituted communism in bringing the party together and there is a possibility that John McCain will continue to hold that coalition together. The one conservative credential that he undoubtedly has is support for the Iraq War. I think he sees the world in terms of good vs. evil as well. But with the many other apostasies that he has demonstrated with regard to other tenets of conservatism, I think the Republican Party faces a far greater challenge than the Democrats today.

VP: It can be argued, as you do in your book, that the Cold War ended partially thanks to the policies of containment and deterrence as they were pursued by the U.S., These policies contributed to bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and were for the most part harshly opposed by American conservatives. Nevertheless, during his presidency, George W. Bush decided to ignore that lesson and when it came to the challenges of terrorism, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, he chose instead to cling to the much more aggressive approach that had been advocated by conservatives during the Cold War and that, during Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, brought the world on the brink of a nuclear war. What are the reasons behind such choices and how do conservatives view the end of the Cold War?

J.P.S.: I think the reason is that conservatives interpret the causes of success in the Cold War differently from what you just lay out. They think that containment and deterrence were not working and what worked instead was Ronald Reagan’s vision of rollback and of an aggressive nuclear posture. The extent to which Reagan really pursued rollback is arguable. If you look back historically, there were very few instances in which the Reagan administration actually pursued rollback. And moreover, while Reagan chose an aggressive nuclear policy during the first three years in office, the administration clearly switched course in the last five.

Nevertheless, when the Cold War ended, conservatives that said “We don’t want to co-exist with communists” realized the U.S. had indeed defeated communism, and came to believe that therefore what they had argued for must have worked. Retrospectively they came to the conclusion that it was right to see the Cold War in terms of good vs. evil, to support a nuclear war fighting strategy, to pursue rollback instead of containment.

The eventual goal of containment, if you go back to what George Kennan among others wrote, was that the Soviet Union was going to collapse under its own weight if we prevented it from expanding. And we did that, and if you look at the data the Soviet Union did collapse under its own weight. It was an economically unviable state and it became unviable long before the Reagan administration came into office. But when we won the Cold War, the conservatives tried to establish that they had won the Cold War and not containment.

VP: You describe the neo-conservative view of peace as equal to a flat-out American victory. How much do you think this belief resonates with the American public at large? What should foreign nations make of this?

J.P.S.: I would want to look at public opinion polls to be certain of this, but my memory of the polling that I’ve seen is that if you ask Americans if they want to be more involved in the UN they say yes. Americans also think that we spend more on foreign aid than we do, and they support a negotiated settlement with Iran versus war with Iran. I think that the view of absolute American dominance is not one that is shared by the public at large. But it does depend on how you ask the question. Would it be nice if we could take care of our own security and not worry about what anybody else thought? It would be nice not to have to depend on anybody else. But Americans recognize that we’re a part of the world and we cannot completely divorce ourselves from it. They know that our security is in a sense intertwined with that of others and with the way others perceive their own security. I don’t think you should look at Americans and see a nation of imperialists. I think it is a minority view It’s been advanced by a group of hard-line policy-makers who received much of their support from the American public because the American public was very frightened in the wake of 9/11 and, frankly, it was not given correct information on the contours of the post-9/11 world and where the dangers lay.

VP: Throughout your book, as well as in most conservative writing, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona is described as the father of modern American conservatism. How has he managed to become so influential when, in 1964, his political career was marked by one of the most embarrassing defeats in the history of Presidential campaigns? How do you evaluate his legacy today?

J.P.S.: Barry Goldwater was the first and one of the purest embodiments of conservatism as it took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was a guy that was talking about conservatism at a time when people didn’t think there really was anything such as conservatism. The liberal worldview both in terms of domestic and foreign policy was dominant. He became a kind of noble rebel figure. And a number of today’s conservatives got their start working under Barry Goldwater. (Interestingly, Hillary Clinton was also a Goldwater girl). We can say that he failed politically but he succeeded ideologically. Conservatives saw in him ideological bravery. He also embodied what they believed in, and before Goldwater there had not been a national figure that did.

The Goldwater’s legacy has become melted with a lot of other influences – it’s hard to say that there is a strict Goldwater school. John Bolton [former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations] very much sees himself as a Goldwater guy. But John Bolton is a rare figure in that he is very ideologically pure. Most conservatives still retain certain beliefs that don’t necessarily fall in the conservative worldview. In any case, if you talked to a serious conservative of any stripe at some point the names of Goldwater and Conscience of a Conservative will be brought up.

VP: What would Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan think of George W. Bush and his presidency?

J.P.S.: From a foreign policy standpoint, Goldwater would be very pleased. From an economic standpoint he would be a lot less pleased, since the Bush administration has done nothing to rein in government spending. Goldwater was also a social libertarian as well as an economic libertarian and he would probably have trouble seeing some of the blending of religion and politics that there has been under Bush.

I think Reagan would be horrified in many ways. If you think about the later Reagan years, he would probably be somewhat mystified by the refusal to talk to enemy states. Although it is true that there is nobody right now in North Korea that you could talk to that would be on the order of a Gorbachev, in Iran – and especially prior to Ahmadinejad – you had pragmatist/reformist politicians whom the Bush administration refused to engage with in 2002 and 2003. Reagan would also be horrified by the idea of more useable nuclear weapons. Reagan was horrified by nuclear weapons and I think the idea of developing more useable, low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons would bother him deeply.

VP: What kind of a foreign policy should the world expect from John McCain if he were to become the next president? Will it be more similar to Reagan and Bush’s more aggressive first terms or to their more accommodating second-terms?

J.P.S.: This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. It’s impossible to predict what any future president will do before he/she enters office and before he/she appoints various people to various staff positions – staff lends an administration a lot of its character. There are many reasons to believe that John McCain would continue Reagan and Bush’s first-term approach to foreign policy. He talks about the world very much in terms of good vs. evil. And it doesn’t appear to be simply a rhetorical device for him. McCain seems to genuinely view the United States in a transcendental way. And he seems to be taking that worldview to a similar conclusion to that of the conservatives during the Cold War, similar to Reagan and similar to Bush, in the sense that he doesn’t want to engage with Iran or North Korea for example. Instead he’s been an advocate of what he calls “rogue states rollback,” which is very much a conservative position. He advances an idea of a “concert of democracies” which could sound like he is going to work with our allies more. But I think you can also interpret that as being a new version of the “coalition of the willing,” meaning that we are going to surround ourselves with people that think the same as we do, and we are not going to have to worry about the rest of them. Unfortunately the rest of them happen to be all of the states in the United Nations; not only the really hard cases like Iran and North Korea, but all of those that are now called “non-aligned states” which are all going to be essential if we are really going to fight proliferation and a number of other transnational issues such as climate change. Russia and China are not going to be part of the “concert of democracies,” but the U.S. can’t really have a foreign policy that not only advances its own national interests, but also global interests such as the environment, non-proliferation and terrorism, if Washington is unwilling to involve Russia and China. I guess I’m not incredibly optimistic right now about a McCain Presidency.

VP: What do you think are the lessons from the Cold War that should be applied to the dealings with Iran? Is containment a good option? Do we need an even stronger form of engagement? Can the U.S. ignore Teheran all together?

J.P.S.: I certainly don’t think we can ignore them all together. I think that ignoring them led to the unchecked continuation of Iran’s nuclear program and I’m convinced that Iran’s nuclear program does present a security threat to the United States and to the West. Since it also presents a threat to the non-proliferation regime, I believe that in general it presents a global threat. Some form of engagement with Iran is going to be necessary and is going to have to involve the United States directly. It will probably have to take place without pre-conditions and go from there. What a successful negotiation will require is the willingness of the Iranians to seriously engage. If that doesn’t exist than this is not going to go anywhere. And it’s also going to require a willingness on the part of the United States, its allies and Russia and China to present Iran with a series of benefits that will make clear to Teheran the advantages of giving up the enrichment of uranium and that will motivate them to close the possibility of any sort of nuclear weapons program. If Iran is not willing to halt enrichment, if it wants to keep its options open for a weapons program, then we’re going to have a serious problem. And even then I don’t think that ignoring the problem is going to be the answer. There is a lot that hasn’t been tried yet. The U.S. hasn’t been directly involved with Iran on the negotiations about the nuclear program and until that has taken place I’m not going to foreclose that option. With any luck, we will soon have a different Iranian president that we can deal with as well as a new American president.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Mickey Edwards is a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the vice president of the Aspen Institute. Before Princeton he taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice. Prior to his teaching career, Mr. Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years as the Representative for Oklahoma’s 5^th District. He was a member of the House Republican Leadership, a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees, and the ranking member of the House subcommittee on foreign operations. A leading conservative, Mr. Edwards was also one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation and national chairman of the American Conservative Union. Mr. Edwards has been a weekly political commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers. Mr. Edwards’ primary interest is in the field of constitutional studies. In his most recent book, Reclaiming Conservatism, Mickey Edwards offers a frank and provocative critique of George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Troubled by the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive that has taken place under the current administration, Mr. Edwards launches an attack on today’s GOP for having abandoned its original mission of defending the Constitution and protecting the individual rights of the people. Finally, Mickey Edwards lays down the principles that are at the roots of American conservatism in an attempt to revive the movement from the ground up.

Mr. Edwards spoke with Washington Prism about the crisis of Conservatism, the Bush Administration, the future of the Republican Party and the 2008 presidential campaign.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): When and why did you originally start thinking about writing this book?

Mickey Edwards (ME): There were many triggers overtime. I decided to write the book when I reached the breaking point, when there were so many things that had got me so upset about the direction of the Republican Party that I couldn’t just privately grumble about it anymore, I needed to do something about it. In 2004 I didn’t even vote for George W. Bush, even though I had been a foreign policy advisor to his campaign in 2000. But I still wasn’t being very publicly outspoken, only my family knew that I had not voted for him. As things began to pile up, more and more things that really bothered me, I really felt like I had to say something about it.

VP: How much do you think the conservative message still resonate with the American public at large? Do you think the take-over of the Republican Party by movements different from Conservatism was the result of intra-party power struggles, or it also reflected changes of ideology occurring at the level of public opinion?

ME: I think the views that were predominant in the party, and that were primarily the views of Ronald Reagan, are still very popular. But that’s not what the current Republican Party is presenting, what it stands for. But I don’t think what the public wants has changed, so I don’t think that the Party has changed in response to a public demand. I think what happened was that various narrower interests began to take over the party. It wasn’t a matter of a change in the feelings of grass-root people, registered Republicans, but of the people in the political class, those who were running for office, for example the religious right, to some extent the Neo-conservatives. I don’t think the great bulk of the American people, or even the bulk of the Republicans agree with that. But in a political context, a small political group can have a lot of influence. Because they turn out to vote in the primaries, and, in America, it’s not who the most people are for, but who the most people who go vote are for. To some extent the rise of the religious right and the neo-con came about because America stopped participating in elections, especially in primary elections.

I just visited my home district in Oklahoma and I was worried about people’s reaction to what I wrote. But I found overwhelming support for those ideas. I think there’s an important fault line; on one side it’s the people who worked in the Reagan Administration and supported the Reagan Campaign, and of course, before then, those that were a part of the Goldwater and Nixon times. These people very strongly agree with me. Then there are the people who came after Reagan, which is when the religious right and the neo-con actually reached their greatest strength; they hate what I’m saying. They are the tail wagging the dog.

VP: How much of the base of the Republican Party is comprised by the so-called religious right?

ME: Most of the numbers I’ve seen are in the range of 20-30%. I remember one poll from the Florida primary, which is considered to be a pretty hard-core conservative state, where less than 30% of the Republicans said that they considered themselves very conservative. And in today’s language very conservative means either religious right, or strong supporter of the Bush’s foreign policy. It was certainly less than a third of the Republican voters and in terms of the whole electorate a very small proportion. However, if a group represents the 25%-30% but it is made of people who work in the elections and show up to campaign, if they make phone calls and distribute literature, then they have an influence way beyond their number.

I think the better question, but I don’t know the answer, would be what percentage of the Republicans who actively participate in somebody’s congressional campaign, for example, are a part of the religious right or are neo-con. I haven’t seen any number but it’s has to be way higher than 30%, probably over 50%.

VP: What do you think Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s opinion would be of present-day Conservatives and the current Administration?

ME: I’ve said several times that if Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton had done the things that this President is doing, real conservatives would have marched on Washington to protest and I think Barry Goldwater would be leading that march. And I think he’d be leading it against this President too. All of that Goldwater stood for was opposed to this concentration of federal power, to presidents acting like kings, who believe that a President is above the law. Our complaint about government was that it was intruding in the freedom of the people. Well, Lyndon Johnson never intruded on the freedom of the American people the way George Bush does. So I think Goldwater would be just sick. In fact, Barry Goldwater Jr., his son, has been extremely outspoken about this President and how bad he is.

VP: What approach do you think a truly conservative President would take toward Iran and how do you evaluate George W. Bush’s stance toward Teheran?

So far George Bush is not doing anything about Iran except insisting that Iranians pose a threat to us. He worries about their nuclear ambitions; he is concerned about whether they are helping the terrorists in Iraq fighting American soldiers. I think any American president would have exactly the same position. But I think Ronald Reagan, for example, would not have a problem sitting down with the Iranian President. There would be a lot of groundwork laid first; we would have to see whether there was something we could talk about. But he sat down with the Soviet leaders when they had missiles aimed at the United States, and they had not renounced Khrushchev’s statement that they were going to bury us, when they still had the Eastern part of Europe locked up. Reagan went to talk to them. I don’t think he would say never ever talk to them. But neither Reagan nor Goldwater would just let the Iranians off, to continue with nuclear weapons or to do harm to American soldiers in Iran. On Iran, I think Bush’s policies are not very different from what any American president would do.

VP: Considering what we have been saying thus fur, how did George W. Bush win a second term?

ME: For two reasons: First, most of what he did, and is now disliked for, became much more visible in his second term. Remember that the elections for his second term came only about a year after we had gone into Iraq. There still wasn’t full information available about the fact that maybe we had been misled. I remember, in 2004, there were people still insisting that the weapons of mass destruction had to be there, but that we just had not found them yet. Secondly, Republicans don’t win so much as Democrats lose. The Democrats continued to put forth candidates who just don’t resonate with the American people. To some extent George W. Bush won and to some extent John Kerry lost. Even in 2000, when Gore won more of the popular vote, most surveys showed that the people didn’t like him. Maybe they agreed with his policies, but they didn’t really like him and when you have this kind of a society that is so driven by the media, whether or not you like someone versus just reading about his/her policies makes a huge different.

VP: What is your opinion of John McCain? Where do you think he would stand in relation to Conservatism if he was to become the new President?

ME: There’s wishful thinking here, but I want to believe that the real John McCain is the one who ran in 2000, the one who is now publicly distancing himself from George Bush, on the way to handle foreign policy, on the attitude toward war, the environment. I hope that that is the real John McCain. From time to time, he starts worrying about the hard-core conservatives, 30% is enough that you don’t want to lose them, even though they are a minority, and so he says things that bother me, that are too much like Bush. But I think the real John McCain is more like what I’ve been talking about a not a lot like George W. Bush. I hope that, if he were President, and given his age there are pretty good chances that he would choose not to run for a second term, that that would free him up to be the maverick that a lot of us think he really is.

VP: Who are, in today’s GOP, the political personalities that you think still embody American Conservatism and that should lead the reclamation of the movement that you advocate for?

ME: I don’t know. At the national level, those who are in Congress already, it’s hard to know which one believes what because they have so automatically rallied behind the President and supported the President, with almost everything he wants to do, that you don’t know what they would really do on their own. Ron Paul has some of the things that we talked about, but he’s also off in other directions especially on monetary issues, and he’s too old to be leading any kind of reclaiming of the party. I don’t see one right now. I see some people but they are people who are in state legislatures or who are holding some state office. I don’t see any on the federal level. I see people at the federal level who receive a lot of attention, but I don’t know enough where they really stand on issues. So far they’ve been casting outrageous votes supporting the President. I’m guessing this kind of new movement will have to come from people from the states that we don’t know about yet.

VP: Do you think these individuals could be hiding among those names that are being thrown around as potential running mates for McCain?

There are people like Bobby Jindal in Luisiana, Charlie Crist in Florida, Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota. There are a number being considered, plus people like Romney, who is a former governor. None of them really fits the same model. I’ve always liked Bobby Jindal, but when he ran for Governor he ran on a pretty hard-core conservative program. Mike Huckabee (Governor of Arkansas) remains a possibility. I don’t know if I see any of them in that light. Maybe Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota and Charlie Crist in Florida; I’d say those are probably the two closest.

But way too much attention has been paid to this. There is always an assumption now that the vice-president will be like Dick Cheney, real powerful input. But Cheney is very unusual; the history of the United States has been very different from that, with the vice-president that has virtually no influence. When Harry Truman became President, he wasn’t even aware that we had an atomic bomb. That was much more typical, that the vice-president is not a decision-maker. Charlie Crist, who’s very popular in Florida, could cause a few additional people in Florida to vote Republican and that could help carry Florida. So the choice of the vice-president does that. Like Lyndon Johnson helped carry Texas. But they are not important because they have any real impact on policies.

VP: Does the “reclamation of Conservatism” necessarily need to take place within the ranks of the Republican Party?

ME: If a democrat adopted those policies I’d be for a democrat. We thought we had taken over the Republican Party, instead the Republican Party took us over, and party dominance became the greatest goal. Well that’s not my goal; my goal is protecting the Constitution, a government that follows our Constitution. I care about America more than I care about the Republican Party. Bill Clinton, when he was President, said that it would be the end of welfare as we knew it, that he wouldn’t be the old fashion left wing liberal democrat anymore. And I said then, “don’t attack him, just claim victory.”

VP: What do you think instead of this year’s Democratic candidates?

ME: First of all I don’t know if there still are candidates in the plural. In any case, I think Hillary Clinton would make a decent President. I think she’s has sound judgment in foreign policy. There were a lot of things wrong with her husband but his policies weren’t all that bad. Unfortunately she’s run a terrible campaign. In the early stages she let Obama get ahead because she did a really poor job with grass-root organizing. She thought that because she was who she was, she could just cruise through. And instead Obama had organizers who killed her in the caucuses.

As far as Barack Obama; in one way I’m worried about him, because he does seem very naïve and inexperienced, and that’s a dangerous thing in foreign policy. I really like his approach to politics, his talking about getting beyond party divisions. I don’t know how real this is, because in his policies, he seems a pretty traditional liberal democrat, they are not middle-ground policies. And I also hope that we are not just being taken in by somebody who’s simply a really good public speaker. I wish I knew if that was real or smoke and mirrors. If he’d been in office for 10 years and he was talking this way, you could look back on his record and see if that’s the real him. But now we have no way of knowing. You either take his word or you worry that is all air.

VP: In conclusion, do you feel optimistic about the possibility of reclaiming Conservatism?

No. And I don’t feel optimistic because so few Americans really understand what our system is like. If you walk down the street and ask someone; “who’s the head of Government?” they won’t know. They’ll say; “it’s the President.” But he is not. “Who’s in charge of foreign policy?” “The President,” well, he is not. “Who’s supposed to decide on whether you go to war, or what you do with prisoners of war?” “The President,” well, he is not. We have been so unchallenged for over two hundred years that people have gotten lazy in remembering why our system of government is what it is. It is decentralized, with the powers being all separated. The thing that makes America different is that we’ve left the power in the hands of people through their representatives. That’s different from almost any country in the world and that what scares me today. Until people can’t understand what the President should be and what the job of Congress should be I don’t see how things can change.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition