A Word from London

Herbert London

Herbert London is John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at N.Y.U., President of the Hudson Institute, author of Decade of Denial, published by Lexington Books, and publisher of American Outlook. He can be reached at: www.herblondon.org.

What Do Americans Think about Foreign Policy?

According to a survey conducted by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations, the percentage of those polled who have a sense of the terrorist threat and national vulnerability has declined precipitously since 9/11/01.

Several years after this attack against the United States, after substantial international action against terror groups--most obviously against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq--Americans are taking a more restrained stance internationally than was the case immediately after 9/11.

Fewer Americans show high levels of concern about critical threats. Fewer see various foreign policy goals as extremely important. It would be an exaggeration to argue this survey suggests complacency has set in, but it is fair to contend there is a declining readiness to spend for stationing troops abroad.

Most significantly, there is an overwhelming majority that believes the United States does not have the responsibility to play “the role of world policeman” and believes it is playing that role more than it should. This majority prefers diplomatic efforts to military ones and shows strong support for working together with other nations.

Of course it is difficult to assess the veracity of these findings without an assessment of the instrument used and a qualitative understanding of the sample. But if one relies on the findings for the sake of argument, there are several concerns. First and perhaps most noteworthy, Americans appear to discount the gravity of terrorist threats. It may well be that President Bush’s comments during the campaign about the administration’s success in fighting the war on terror has led to this emerging American view.

Second, there are Americans who have grown skeptical about the threat. Some would contend that since weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, there may be reasons for questioning the administration’s contentions about terrorism generally.

And third, some Americans feel that U.S. policies and actions, particularly steps taken by the Justice Department, CIA and FBI have lessened the danger, or people may simply have adjusted to living with threats.

Whatever the factor, the most striking finding in the survey is the overall decline among all foreign policy goals. It is instructive that the one goal most often cited in the survey is “protecting the jobs of American workers.” “Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons” is in a distant second place.

It might well be argued that what is in play is the natural return to basic American skepticism about foreign affairs and the assertion of national interests. The highest proportion of the public favors the expansion of purely domestic programs.

Nonetheless, the survey does point out that Americans are willing to use force when threatened, but also show strong support for diplomatic and nonmilitary actions to solve many international conflicts.

The problem with surveys of this kind is that they do not offer policy guidelines. If, for example, a threat exists that might cause enormous damage, is preemption an appropriate response?

It might also be asked whether discounting the threat that exists globally is in the national interest. After all, there was an interregnum of eight years between the first and second attack on the World Trade Center, a period in which we let our guard down. Could complacency emerge as the enemy of preparedness?

If the survey does tell policy makers anything, it is that the threat has receded in the public imagination. That is a matter that must be addressed. As Churchill among others has noted, the road to peace is dependent on the preparation for war.

This Chicago Foreign Relations survey suggests we may be losing our edge. That is a finding that deserves the widest possible airing.

My Experience with American Law Schools and Attitudes to the War on Terror

On October 15, 2004 I gave an address at Temple University Law School on the theme “Balancing Security and Civil Liberties in the New Century.” On my panel were three “distinguished” scholars, one from the ACLU and two with university appointments.

To my astonishment these panelists represented a unanimous opinion that the United States was violating the civil liberties of collaborators in the war against radical Islam. They spoke passionately about civil liberties violations from the Red Scare in the twenties to the Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In fact, they seemed confident that the government had overreached in its security concerns. One fellow discussed the many flaws in the Patriot Act and another the degree to which the U.S. violated the Geneva Accord with the Abu Ghraib atrocities. The names Padilla, Hamdi and Lindh were employed as a broken record. If one hadn’t any knowledge of recent history and walked into the auditorium, they might have assumed these men are national heroes.

Overlooked in the discussion were other names: bin Laden, Zarqawi, Sheik Omar. With the exception of the points I made, one might well conclude the U.S. is not fighting a war abroad but rather fighting against its citizens at home.

That future lawyers might be engaged in the web spun by these civil libertarian purists is enough to offer chilling prospects for the nation.

Are American law schools only concerned with pettifogging legal issues? Is there concern about the threat we now face? Is there a realistic appreciation of what the terrorists have in mind for us? As I see it, the answer to the first question is yes and the answers to the last two, no. Something has gone awry in American legal education.

It appears that courses on Constitutionalism start with the assumption that government is always wrong and is intent on compromising or eliminating basic liberties. Clearly people should be vigilant about the loss of rights, but they should also appreciate the nature of the present menace and face it with a realism rights obsessions do not permit.

Moreover, the threat at the moment is different from any in our past. Deterrence is predicated on basic rationality, a belief that bloodshed can be avoided if both sides in a conflict would prefer to survive rather than die.

If, however, many people want to die in order to serve Allah, deterrence isn’t possible. All one can do is eliminate the enemy before he eliminates us. That is the situation we now confront, notwithstanding the unwillingness of many law students to deal with the new reality.

This horrible scenario is complicated by the existence of weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical and nuclear) that the terrorists are eagerly seeking. Does any one doubt that al Qaeda would be willing to use this deadly force against the United States?

As I see it these law students and faculty members reside in a bubble, a kind of academic womb that protects them from the ugly dimensions of reality. They fight the legal battles of the past: Indian rights, McCarthyism, Chicago Six. They don’t realize our world has changed. The threat doesn’t come from Washington; it festers in dysfunctional regimes around the globe and in a culture of nihilism.

At the end of the conference an elegant speaker rose to say the U.S. is a “rogue state” because it refuses to adhere to the dictates of the International Criminal Court. I was inclined to laugh at the comment, but resisted doing so because the speaker was quite earnest. It hadn’t occurred to him that the U.S. might be hesitant to accept the legal opinion of judges from the Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe, among others. For this naive student, America is “the tyranny” we must oppose.

This position was reinforced at a debate organized by Indiana University Law School and Butler University several weeks later. The debate entitled “Civil Liberties and National Security” pitted Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU, against yours truly.

Ms. Strossen delivered a passionate defense of civil liberties and equally passionate condemnation of the Patriot Act. The focus of her fevered critique was John Ashcroft, erstwhile Attorney General, whom she mentioned at least half a dozen times during her remarks. Omitted from her critique was Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, Sheik Omar, or any of the other terrorists whose actions inspired the Patriot Act in the first place.

As I listened to Ms. Strossen and the dozens of students who made comments and asked questions--as you might guess most of the students were inclined to support her contentions--I had a strange sense of deja vu.

During the Cold War the United States had Communists, anti-Communists and anti anti-Communists. The latter group--while generally unsympathetic to the Communists, concentrated their criticism on the anti-Communists who they accused of overreaching or of undermining civil liberties. Lost in their calculus was the threat of Communism, a threat the anti anti-Communists considered greatly exaggerated.

For those like the editors at the Nation, Communists were merely union supporters, benign critics of income disparity and idealists caught in the web of great power competition. As a consequence, they concerned themselves solely with the actions of the anti-Communists condemning at every turn judicial or legislative action designed to thwart Communist espionage.

Curiously--as I see it--history has repeated itself. Now we have terrorists, anti-terrorists and anti anti-terrorists. Those in the latter group either resemble the leftists of yesteryear or, in fact, are many of the same people.

Their enmity is not directed at those who would kill and maim Christians and Jews, Americans and Westerners; their anger is directed at anti-terrorists who believe modification in judicial procedure and covert action may be necessary to track down a shadowy and deadly band of global fanatics. Hence Ashcroft is regarded as a more sinister figure than bin Laden. It is not coincidental that anti anti-Communists regard Joseph McCarthy as a more sinister historical figure than Joseph Stalin.

The only conclusion that I can reasonably reach from these discussions and debates is that there is an ideological plague at American law schools that overlooks or underestimates the threat to national security and overestimates the damage to our liberty through legislative action like the Patriot Act, however imperfect it may be.

Clearly, law is the foundation stone of the American political system and neither I nor John Ashcroft has advocated wholesale violation of Constitutional provisions. Yet it is useful to recall what Justice Jackson wrote in the majority opinion of the Kuramatsu Case: “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not constitute a suicide pact.” If only the anti anti-terrorists would remember that statement! Then again, if law professors would consider the balance necessary for national security and civil liberties, they might not have any way to arouse their students.

Campus Orthodoxy

My daughter Jaclyn is a first year student at Northwestern University. In one of her politics courses, discussion is encouraged in recitation sessions of fifteen or fewer students. Graduate students monitor these discussions that account for ten percent of the final grade.

In her discussion group the graduate instructor shamelessly offers opinion on all political subjects. “Bush is a liar,” “the Republicans are fools . . .” she declares without any evidence to substantiate her claims. On one occasion my daughter and another young man challenged her contention that the United States is a hopelessly racist society and that the entrenched class system militates against getting ahead.

Rather than ask the students to expand on their critique and justify their claims, she simply said, “You must be Republicans.” The young man said “that has nothing to do with the argument, but I am a Republican.” At this point, the instructor said, “I stopped listening when you said you were a Republican.”

This level of intolerance is far more evident than the lay public appreciates. The massive imbalance in university political views is clearly becoming an orthodoxy.

Writing in the New York Times, John Tierney points to several empirical studies that affirm faculty bias. He writes,

. . . a national survey of more than 1000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social science. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement.

A study of voter registration records at two major universities

. . . which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans.

The rationalization for this bias among liberal professors Tierney interviewed was most revealing. Many simply regard Republicans as ignorant or driven by religious impulses or doctrine. It rarely occurs to these leftist professors that they are probably more dogmatic than the Republicans they indict.

Yet it is not the bias that I deplore; it is rather the transmogrification of bias into an orthodoxy that cannot countenance another point of view. An academy that once put a premium on the free exchange of ideas has been converted into a hothouse of intolerance. The modern university is organized as a church in which dogma must be imbibed; it need not be subject to rational exegesis. What counts is expressing the catechism of radical cant.

Should a student, like my daughter, have the temerity to challenge the orthodoxy, silence or rebuke will be forthcoming. This academy is a totalistic subculture unresponsive to reasoned argument that is the presumptive foundation stone on which it rests.

The more that alternative views are silenced or purged through a tenure system that only rewards like-minded souls, the more a university will be a center for leftist conversion. Sidney Hook, the distinguished philosopher, once noted “I am in a classroom to teach, not to preach.” Now the tables have turned; the university has more preachers than teachers.

David Horowitz, author of Radical Son, has lobbied for legislative reform via an “Academic Bill of Rights” that encourages different points of view on campus. Presumably if “diversity” is the administrators’ calling card, it should include diverse opinion as well as diverse races and ethnic groups.

Imposing balance on campus is not likely to have the response Mr. Horowitz expects. Nonetheless, it is also unlikely the academy will reform itself, unless, of course, parents at private universities come to understand they are spending $40,000 a year so that Johnny can be propagandized with radical formulations. We are still a long way from having parents aroused. But the next time my daughter’s graduate instructor says “I stopped listening when you said you were a Republican,” I will urge my daughter to say “I stopped listening when you revealed your intolerance.” After all, the discussion group is only ten percent of her grade.     *

“Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.” –Groucho Marx