I agree. I think Brooks is getting better. Not up to what I had hoped when he started at the NYT, but getting there.
David Brooks: Not Native Yet
By NewSisyphus
We probably don't have to tell you what our first thought was back in late 2003 when the Weekly Standard's David Brooks joined the New York Times op-ed page. The Times has a well-deserved reputation for cynically choosing which "conservatives" get to grace its pages, and somehow they always seem to be the kind of conservatives that, gosh darn it, just don't happen to agree with President Reagan/Bush I/Bush II on this or that central and critical issue. The term of art for this phenomena is "going native," and we must admit we saw some signs of it in Brooks early on. Many a Republican has made a career being the go-to guy for the liberal media for an easy anti-conservative swipe. Heck, Chuck Hagel has raised this to an art form.
So you can see why we were concerned. Brooks was then and is now a different sort of conservative, one whose hallmark is the study and analysis of current American popular culture, not typically the type of intellectual endeavor associated with Burkean types. He was a rising star in conservative circles, producing the kind of prose only guys like him, Steyn and Hitchens (both of them) are capable of producing. We felt we were losing one of our own, one of the team.
Yesterday, however, much of our on-going concern was assuaged. Brooks wrote an op-ed piece for the Times that was so insightful, so meaningful and so uncompromisingly conservative that all we could do was toss him a mental salute (and write this column, of course). The piece was entitled "Back From Battle" and it involved a most unlikely chance encounter in, of all places, Shannon Airport in the west of the Irish Republic. Brooks explains:
This was going to be a column exclusively about a trans-Atlantic security conference that took place in Munich last weekend. But on the way back, the U.S. delegation stopped for refueling at Shannon Airport in Ireland.
A bunch of us were milling about in the airport bar, holding little Irish coffees, when hundreds of marines started flooding into the terminal. This was their first chance at a beer after eight months of mayhem in the Sunni Triangle. They streamed in looking thick-necked and strong, but they also had wide-eyed, tentative expressions on their faces, like people trying to reacclimate to the manners of normal life.
This unit had lost 22 men, including several in the last weeks. I talked to one kid who had a craggy scar running across the side of his skull. He was proud of how Election Day went and said Iraqis were working harder to take care of their own streets.
I told a bunch of them some senators were on the other side of the bar if they wanted to shake hands. One of them was blasé, but the rest were pleased to go over - especially when they saw John McCain and Joe Lieberman. These were not guys grown cynical about their political leaders.
It means something--a lot, actually--that Marines just back from battle in a war the Left has uniformly dubbed a new Vietnam were demonstrably not cynical about their political leaders. Listening to the Left speak on Iraq, one would expect the Marines, just back from a hopeless exercjse in which they lost friends and comrades, to express disgust for the leaders who got them in the mess. Instead, they met their leaders in an airport bar with delight and told any who would listen that they were proud of what they had done, what their blood had accomplished. More proof, in case any was needed, that through the eyes of those paying the cost, we see hope, progress, hard-won victories. Brooks continued:
I tried to think of the Munich conference from their perspective. If those marines had had the stomach to sit through all those panel discussions, would they have thought that the political class was playing games at luxury hotels, or that the politicians were doing something useful to make the most of those 22 Marine deaths?
The first thing I'd tell these marines is that when these politicians went abroad to represent the U.S., they didn't take their squabbles with them. There were Democrats and Republicans in this delegation, but you couldn't tell who was who by listening to their speeches.
Instead, what you heard were pretty specific, productive suggestions on winning the war against Islamist extremism. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham lobbied for ways to use NATO troops to protect a larger U.N. presence in Iraq. Democratic Representative Jane Harman was pushing the Europeans to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Hillary Clinton suggested ways to strengthen the U.N., while also blasting its absurdities. Clinton affirmed that the U.S. preferred to work within the U.N., but she toughened her speech with ad-libs, warning, "Sometimes we have to act with few or no allies."
We in the Foreign Service are well aware of this fascinating fact; differences that appear so key, so fundamental at home--differences like race, religion, party affiliation, regional origin--all of them seem to disappear in the foreign context. One very quickly realizes that we are a people, with a hell of a lot more in common than you would think were you just to listen to the partisan bickering in Washington. At times, like after Pearl Harbor and September 11, this commoness, this shared ideology, this Americanism bursts through even in the domestic context. We are a people with a shared history and a shared culture just as much as the French, Germans or Japanese.
We are almost unable to overstate our satisfaction in hearing that both the R's and the D's were singing from the same hymnal when it comes to the subject of explaining to European leaders our perspective on the War on Terror and how to secure a better future. So long as Europeans hear only the bickering, as they did during the Kerry campaign, they will continue to believe that Americans can be won over to their point of view. Only by presenting a common front do we stand a chance of convincing people that we are committed to this war, to seeing it through to the end.
There are differences of course. We don't mean to overstate our case. But the fact that there is a common American point of view and that both sides of the aisle are communicating it makes it that much more likely that our voice will be both heard and heeded.
The second thing I'd tell them is that the politicians were willing to talk bluntly to the tyrants. McCain sat on a panel with officials from Russia, Egypt and Iran. He began his talk with suggestions on how to use NATO troops in the Middle East. Then it was time for a little straight talk. He ripped the Egyptians for arresting opposition leaders. (The Egyptian foreign minister held his brow, as if in grief.) He condemned the Iranians for supporting terror. (The Iranian hunched over like someone in a hailstorm.) He criticized Russia for embracing electoral fraud in Ukraine. In the land of the summiteers, this was in-your-face behavior.
Let us just add that the thought of a President McCain makes us happy indeed. We're going to need someone to continue to talk straight and take the hard decisions in this war after 2007, and the Senator from Arizona fits the bill. We have some issues with the guy, as do all conservatives, but overall we think he is a good man whose time may be coming. Brooks concluded:
But I'd tell the marines that I didn't hear too many Europeans giving specific ideas on how to make Iraq a success. Instead, I heard too many speakers evading this current pivot point in history by giving airy-fairy speeches about their grand visions of the future architecture of distant multilateral arrangements.
I heard the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in his soaring, stratospheric mode, declaring that we need the "creation of a grand design, a strategic consensus across the Atlantic." We need a "social Magna Carta" to bind the globe. His chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, proposed a vague commission to rebuild or replace NATO. His president, Horst Köhler, insisted, "Unless we tackle global poverty, long-term security will remain elusive."
Fine, let's tackle global poverty and have new arrangements. But maybe democracies should be contributing to Iraq now. That's called passing the credibility test.
It occurred to me as we left Shannon that it's always been true that American and European politicians have different historical experiences and come from divergent strands of the liberal intellectual tradition. But now there's something else different. American politicians meet combat veterans all the time. They make the calls to bereaved families.
That concentrates the mind.
Regular readers will know that here Brooks is speaking our language. The reason European politics have run so far off the rails is precisely due to their lack of real-world responsibility, a fact Brooks nails dead on.
Until Europe is made to understand that the United States will not fight all the battles, we are doomed to perpetual responsibility with only limited authority. The bubble our "superpower" status creates allows zones of ever-increasing irresponsibility to grow to the point where the political discourse in Europe is almost completely without a reality check. Left to float without real power or real responsibility, the discourse comes to resemble that of a university English department.
Ironically, and counter-intuitively, we need to disengage a bit in order to re-engage the rest of the world. Some no doubt would call this isolationism (or at least neo-isolationism), but that could not be further from the truth. We must cede responsibility to gain real long-term allies.
Only that, as Brooks noted, will concentrate the mind. |
