7:37 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Robert Kagan's smear. Last Tuesday, the Washington Post carried an op-ed by Robert Kagan, a profoundly influential figure in American foreign policy. (His essay "Power and Weakness" is one of the most intriguing approaches to U.S.-European relations I've read in a long time.) Entitled "War and the Fickle Left" (link courtesy of Oxblog), the op-ed castigates noted liberal and Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer for flip-flopping on Iraq. In 1998, Walzer had defended the concept of preventative war to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; today, however, he is counted among the doves, writing in The New Republic that "The administration's war is neither just nor necessary."

Kagan finds this "illogical about-face" to be unfortunately common among liberals, as those who once supported intervention in the former Yugoslavia now call Bush a warmonger. "What changed?" he asks. "Just the man in the White House." Liberal thinkers have sacrificed their "intellectual consistency" for "partisan passions," opposing war simply because their political enemies support it.

Kagan is right to point out that many of the arguments now marshaled against the use of force in Iraq have been used selectively. (Who knew that U.N. approval was so important during the campaign in Kosovo?) But Walzer is largely innocent of this charge. Rather than engaging the arguments directly, Kagan instead embarks on a gross misrepresentation of Walzer's recent views, presenting a handful of out-of-context quotes and ignoring the rest. As it turns out, Walzer's position isn't inconsistent: it's just more nuanced than Kagan would like to admit.

The argument of Walzer's 1998 piece is relatively clear, and Kagan's summary of it largely accurate. At the domestic level, where the state protects individuals' safety and monopolizes the use of force, "political conflicts can be fought to their conclusion with the guarantee that losing won't mean massacre or imprisonment." No similar guarantee holds at the international level, and individual states might sometimes need to defend themselves without waiting for a collective political decision in their favor. And when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, necessary self-defense might even include a preventive war.

Walzer draws an important distinction (to which Kagan is seemingly blind) between preemption and prevention. A preemptive war, in the terminology that he applies consistently throughout both articles, is a war to stop an imminent attack; preventative wars are designed to address more distant threats. Walzer admits that "in international law and morality, preventive wars have generally been ruled out." This is because the standard purpose of such a war was to prevent a shift in the balance of power, and many other options were available to the parties to avoid conflict. Late-nineteenth-century Britain may have viewed the rise of Germany with alarm, but a preventive attack would not have been justified so long as negotiations, security alliances, or rearmament were still reasonable deterrents.

Walzer's key point, made in both articles, is that weapons of mass destruction have the potential to collapse this distinction. The days of massing troops on the border are over; a chemical or nuclear arsenal would be built in secret and launched without warning, and any response would already be too late. While a war against Iraq may not be strictly preemptive--i.e., designed to prevent an attack next Tuesday--it may be the only way to stop the catastrophic use of deadly weapons. And although one "might well hope" for an international order that removes the danger of such weapons, no such order yet exists. "The refusal of a U.N. majority to act forcefully," Walzer concluded in 1998, "isn't a good reason for ruling out the use of force by any member state that can use it effectively."

Why, then, is the Walzer of 2002 uneasy about the march to war? Contra Kagan, it's not because he can't stand to endorse the policies of a Bush White House. Rather, it's because he sees the United States as having alternative options to conflict.

Let's start with some chronology. Walzer's recent article was published on Sept. 23. The U.N. resolution calling for a new round of inspections was passed on Nov. 8, roughly a month and a half later. At the time the article was published, the policy decision seemed to be between a unilateral adventure by the U.S., with the bombs to start falling at any moment, or an effort to work through the U.N. and create an effective inspections regime. Some say that a U.N. resolution was always Bush's goal, with the regular Cabinet-level outbursts all part of a carefully calibrated good-cop-bad-cop strategy. But in September, this was by no means clear--many thought that the U.S. would push ahead regardless of U.N. backing, and some, like Charles Krauthammer, seemed to look forward to the possibility.

Walzer did not. The article he wrote in September argues unambiguously for a strong inspections regime, which he alleges could succeed in disarming Iraq without the massive costs of a full-scale invasion. To Walzer, the restoration of inspections represents a realistic alternative to an immediate military campaign. When Israel preventively bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981, it had few other tools for keeping nuclear weapons out of Hussein's hands; had it gone before the U.N. and called for an inspections regime, no one would have listened. But the U.S. of 2002 can make inspections work, Walzer says, and therefore it must. After all, Iraq is not so close to deploying a nuclear arsenal that we can't start bombing later should the inspections be frustrated.

All of this is perfectly compatible with the position Walzer took in 1998, when he endorsed unilateral action to bring the inspectors back. To Walzer, a war intended to stop Iraq from making deadly weapons is not justified so long as effective inspections are a real possibility. In order to make those inspections effective, however, the threat of war has to be on the table, and the U.S. would be justified in fighting that war unilaterally. Walzer makes no bones about the fact that inspections must be backed by "visible and overwhelming force." The right thing to do now, he says, "is to re-create the conditions that existed in the mid-'90s for fighting a just war"--hoping that Hussein will choose disarmament over suicide, but readying for war if he does not.

What Walzer is advocating is very much like the "coercive inspections" proposed by the Carnegie Endowment (PDF report) back in August--an idea that many people regarded as superior to an immediate military campaign. The Carnegie Endowment explained clearly the rationale behind a new inspections regime:

This paper proposes a third approach, a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo that allows Iraqi WMD programs to continue and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion. It proposes a new regime of coercive international inspections. A powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council, would enable UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams to carry out "comply or else" inspections. The "or else" is overthrow of the regime. The burden of choosing war is placed squarely on Saddam Hussein.

Although one central aspect of the report--the enforcement of the UN resolutions by a new international military force rather than by member states--has not been adopted, many of the Carnegie recommendations have since been incorporated directly into Bush administration rhetoric. How many times, for example, have we been told that the decision to go to war is Hussein's to make?

It's true that Walzer would rather avoid war if he could; so would we all. But in keeping with his 1998 argument, he also recognizes that sometimes fighting can only be prevented by the readiness to fight--something which too many European critics have forgotten:

I think it is fair to say that many influential Europeans, from both the political class and the intelligentsia, would prefer a unilateral American war to a European readiness to fight--even if, to misquote Shakespeare, "the readiness is all," and war itself could be avoided.

Such an attitude, Walzer writes, "suggests that they have lost all sense of themselves as independent and responsible actors in international society."

Though only three months have elapsed since its publication, Walzer's more recent TNR piece appears hopelessly dated. The inspections have already begun, and everyone recognizes a refusal to comply with their terms as the most likely trigger for military action. The war that Walzer describes as "neither just nor necessary" is a war fought in place of inspection requirements, rather than to enforce them. According to what appears to be the policy of the U.S. government, it is not the war we are now envisioning, nor is it the war that Kagan seeks to defend.

Honest people can disagree over whether even the toughest inspections regime can succeed in disarming Iraq; Walzer obviously believes it can. But he also believes that a weakened inspections regime will fail, and that the use of force, even unilateral force, may then become necessary. Walzer is crystal clear on this point, and Kagan presumably knows how to read. Describing Walzer's position as an "about-face"--and dismissing legitimate disagreement as mere partisan spin--is dangerously irresponsible, and unworthy of someone of Kagan's talents.

UPDATE: David Tannenbaum makes a similar argument in a letter to the Washington Post.

 

7:37 PM :: Stephen (contact)

What's happened to Jude Wanniski? For a long time, I knew of Jude Wanniski only as a famous supporter of supply-side economics, a supporter of unpopular ideas like a gold standard, and as the whipping boy of Paul Krugman (as well as others who actually have higher degrees in economics, unlike Wanniski). A friend in my introductory economics class was a fan of the supply-siders and of Wanniski in particular; as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, Wanniski had helped popularize ideas that have now become standard Republican dogma. Economics training or no, he seemed to have been taken seriously by powerful figures in government. It was under his tutelage, says CNN, that onetime vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp learned to be a supply-sider, an influence which still continues. President Bush is an adherent of supply-side doctrine, and Wanniski still gets quoted in the Washington Post whenever the subject arises. While at the American Enterprise Institute in the 1970s, Wanniski was the office neighbor of John Snow, now Bush's appointee for treasury secretary. As a result, my impression of Wanniski until recently was as a figure of some influence, if only historical, in American economic policy. A quack, maybe, but a quack with plenty of loyal readers.

That was before I read his views on foreign policy. In searching for information on the Kurds in Iraq, I came across an "open memo" Wanniski wrote to Karl Rove this March. In the memo, Wanniski makes a number of remarkable claims, not least of which is the following:

"President Bush cited last week's New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, which gives an account of the 1988 gassings based on 14-year-old hearsay. On three different Sunday talk shows, Cheney repeated the charge that Saddam killed as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds, in this manner. What I am telling you publicly, Karl, is that this DID NOT HAPPEN.... There is no possibility that Saddam gassed his own people and no evidence that he did. None."

Throughout the memo, Wanniski is emphatic on the subject of Iraq's innocence. Goldberg's article, for instance, "offers no evidence, only quotes from various Kurds who seem to remember gas being used." This is an odd way to describe testimony like the following, from a survivor of the Halabja massacre:

"On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to die," Nouri told me. "The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could see them." People were dying all around, he said. When a child could not go on, the parents, becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. "Many children were left on the ground, by the side of the road. Old people as well. They were running, then they would stop breathing and die."

Or this, from a former resident of the village of Goktapa:

[Ahmed Raza Sharif] saw the shells explode and smelled the sweet-apple odor as poison filled the air. His son, Osman Ahmed, who was sixteen at the time, was near the village mosque when he was felled by the gas. He crawled down a hill and died among the reeds on the banks of the Lesser Zab, the river that flows by the village. His father knew that he was dead, but he couldn't reach the body. As many as a hundred and fifty people died in the attack; the survivors fled before the advancing Iraqi Army, which levelled the village.

Goldberg's article is actually one of the most powerful discussions of the Kurdish experience in Iraq that I've ever read. Of course, for all I know, the piece might be chock full of falsehoods--but then the right way for Wanniski to criticize it would be to cite countervailing evidence in similar detail, which he fails to provide. (Wanniski never even mentions Goktapa in his rebuttal. And according to the New York Times, Tariq Aziz has now officially admitted Iraq's role in the Halabja massacre.) In fact, Wanniski holds Iraq largely innocent of the well-documented Anfal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, in which chemical weapons were used on a number of occasions. True, he notes, "There were hundreds of villages cleared by Baghdad on the Iraqi border, but the residents were moved to new villages built for them in the interior." It is impossible to read such words without thinking of the trains to the concentration camps, trains which were also ostensibly bound for new villages and "resettlement."

In discussing Iraq's record, Wanniski has a rather eccentric sense of whose story to trust. Although he dismisses the conclusions reached by Human Rights Watch and its fellows--although he sees through every biased news report and is never fooled by State Department propaganda--Wanniski also repeats as literal fact a press release from the Iraqi representatives to the U.N. Who does he think writes these press releases? Maybe in normal times, trusting wholeheartedly a government that imprisons dissenters and that controls information with an iron fist would only be foolish. But when it leads him to deny murder of thousands, such negligence becomes criminal.

Wanniski's is joined in his efforts to defend Baghdad by his "friend" and "the most important Muslim in the world," Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. Wanniski gives a glowing reception to what he presents as a pair of letters from Farrakhan to Presidents Clinton and Hussein. The letters were written in 1998, in the course of Farrakhan's attempt to mediate a crisis between the U.S. and Iraq that ultimately resulted in the expulsion of inspectors and a renewed bombing campaign. (I should note, by the way, that I'm forced to rely on Wanniski's account of these letters rather than a source originating from Farrakhan himself. As far as I'm aware, these letters have not been published elsewhere. But Wanniski seems to hold Farrakhan in very high esteem, often referring to him as a friend and portraying him as America's last best hope for improved relations with the Muslim world. At the very least, Wanniski can be trusted not to portray Farrakhan in a more negative light than the latter deserves.)

Farrakhan's letter to Clinton is generally unremarkable, but the letter to Saddam Hussein is simply breathtaking. Consider these two paragraphs:

But, Your Excellency, we who have grown up in Islam inside of America understand that the West wants to destroy you sir, in order to make an example out of your destruction to all strong Muslim leaders.

You are a visionary, and they want to destroy your vision! If they are able to bring you down, that will serve as a warning to Brother Qadhafi in Libya; to Brothers Hassan Turabi and Omar Bashir in the Sudan; it will mean a setback for the goal of unity of the Muslim ummah.

A visionary? This for the leader of a regime that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, that has gouged out the eyes of detainees, that tortures women to make their husbands confess?

To be charitable, perhaps Farrakhan was merely being a sycophant rather than an advocate of torture and murder--perhaps he just wanted to get on Hussein's good side, and thought he had a better chance of achieving peace by buttering up the dictator. But this stretches rather thin the notion of an "honest broker" for peace, who at the very least should be expected not to lie to the parties in order to get a better deal. Can you imagine Nelson Mandela, had he chosen to intervene in similar circumstances, calling Hussein a visionary? Can you imagine Jimmy Carter writing to Kim Jong Il, in an attempt to forestall a nuclear crisis, that "the West wants to destroy you sir"? And could he really find no better examples of Muslim leadership than in Libya and the Sudan? By publicly expressing such sentiments, Farrakhan has given up any claim to moral authority that he hadn't already thrown away. And by quoting them approvingly, Wanniski achieves the distinction of a scoundrel as well as a quack.

When one leaves the subject of Iraq, Wanniski's opinions get stranger still. He wrote on March 4, 2002 that there is no slavery in Sudan, a fact which he knows to be true because the New York Times was once forced to retract an article on the subject. This pronouncement will come as a great surprise to Human Rights Watch, as well as to the slaves themselves. It's even stranger in light of a 1999 article in which he wrote that the slaves are more like indentured servants, really--and in any case it's all the fault of the IMF and World Bank, just like the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. (You can't make this stuff up.)

I'm not sure if there's any unifying force in Wanniski's foreign policy views. But if there is, it's not a good one. Consider what he identifies as the real issue behind Jeffrey Goldberg's essay on the Kurds:

My big problem with Goldberg is that he told me three years ago that he had served in the Israeli army, which made him a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. I read his long article and can tell you it is worthless as 'evidence.' Even at the time, Turkey said it could not tell whether Kurds showing up on its side of the border had been gassed or were victims of malnutrition. Not that Goldberg is malicious, only that he had a serious bias going into the assignment and there is no evidence he made any attempt to test his own initial hypothesis. Having a dual citizenship with the U.S. and Israel might be okay in ordinary times, but when push comes to shove, you cannot serve two masters.

"Serve two masters"? This is dangerous language, echoing the old canard of Jewish control of the media, only updated to replace "Jews" with "Israelis." But Wanniski is not always so careful to update his prejudices. In another article, Wanniski asks the rhetorical question, "Do Jews control the media?" "You bet they do," he answers, at least as far as reporting on Israel is concerned.

Wanniski argues that such a claim isn't really anti-Semitic: "In my mind, anti-Semitism requires one to want to do harm to Jews in some way--at a low level barring Jews from country club membership, for example, a practice that still exists in some clubs at least 'unofficially.'" But one can harbor prejudices against a group without meeting Wanniski's extraordinarily high standard of wanting to do harm to members of that group. For instance, someone who claimed that Jews were intellectually and morally inferior people might mean no harm to anyone; in fact, he might want to help Jews by enabling them to overcome their innate deficiencies. And one can even harbor prejudices against a group without believing in that group's inherent inferiority: the virulent WWI-era prejudice against Germans, which certainly had its share of wild accusations and conspiracy theories, had no alleged basis in biological differences. In writing that the Jews control the media, Wanniski wasn't merely trying to praise the resourcefulness of a highly accomplished ethnic group by noting its over-representation in positions of influence. "Control" has clear connotations of influence used in a nefarious manner--and in any case, he represents the alleged Jewish control of the media as a very bad thing, which it wouldn't be if he didn't think Jewish influence was being used for undesirable ends.

And although Wanniski says his claims about Jewish media control are limited to the subject of Israel, that's clearly not the case. There's no better evidence of this than his story of Minister Farrakhan meeting with some Chicago-area rabbis:

Min. Farrakhan tells of a dinner meeting with a group of influential rabbis in Chicago a few years back, a dinner arranged by Irv Kupcinet, the columnist. He says the dinner went beautifully and the rabbis suggested they adjourn to another room for coffee, to come down to business. He said one rabbi took out a sheet of paper with a list of demands, telling him that if he complied with them, they would assure him his problems with the news media would go away. One of the demands was that he apologize for everything he had said in the past that distressed them, another that he say nothing in the future that would distress them. Farrakhan told me he said he would apologize for anything he said that was not true, if they would wish to discuss it with him man-to-man, but that he could not grant blanket apologies as if he were a child and thus could not comply. He said he told the rabbis that he could also take a list of demands from his pocket, if they were willing to sit and listen. He said he acknowledged the Jewish community had done more for the black man over the past century than any other ethnic or religious group. It was always in a parent/child relationship, and it was time for equal footing at an adult level. No deal.

Now, a reasonable person might interpret these events a different way. Perhaps the rabbis' case to Farrakhan was that if he signed the statement and apologized for the statements they found objectionable, his problems with the media would disappear as writers and editors, whether Jewish or not, stopped considering him an anti-Semite. You don't have to believe in a vast media conspiracy to think that a frank apology by Farrakhan, taking place at a joint news-conference/lovefest at which the Anti-Defamation League makes him its honorary president, might have positive effects for his image.

But that's not how Wanniski tells it. The rabbis weren't trying to achieve a rapprochement; they were offering to make Farrakhan's media problems "disappear," like Don Corleone taking care of union trouble. The image Wanniski presents is one of every newspaper editor in America placing a call to the Elders of Zion before signing off on another Farrakhan story. And if that's how the system works, how is Jewish control of the media limited to the subject of Israel--and how is such an account of it different from anything that might have been printed in Der Sturmer?

In short, it seems that Wanniski, whose ideas were always in dispute, has finally gone off the deep end. Of course, maybe this occurred a long time ago; maybe he was just as wacky when he was talking about the Laffer curve or the suffering of the American rich. I don't know enough economics to be sure. But it's still a little scary to hear a figure of some influence in American politics denying slavery in the Sudan, defending Iraq's programs of ethnic cleansing, and decrying Jewish influence in the media. Why have so few people picked up on this, and why is Wanniski still treated as a legitimate commentator rather than a dangerous crank?

 

7:08 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Clear thinking at Oxford. The Oxford University Student Union, the campus student government (not to be confused with the Oxford Union, a private debating society), recently passed a terribly confused resolution (scroll to bottom) on the war in Iraq. In general, opinion on campus has been almost uniformly anti-war, with positions running the gamut from complete pacifists to those who would support a war if fought under the aegis of the United Nations. There are a number of good arguments that could be marshaled for these positions individually--some of which I find quite persuasive, which is why I'm actually quite hesitant in my feelings about the war--but the resolution manages to avoid all of them. OUSU's claims (and my criticisms) may not be terribly original, but it's rare to have so many of the worst arguments all in one place. In particular, the student union resolved:

1. That the United States and United Kingdom's threat to ignore the United Nations if it does not agree with their viewpoints, and their efforts to put pressure on UN countries in order to ensure that it votes 'correctly', poses a real threat to the authority of the organisation.
2. That peace and common security will not be achieved by bombing already miserable peoples and imposing arbitrary regime change, but by a long-term process of strengthening the UN and examining our own role in reinforcing the root causes of war (for example, the continuing aid given to dictatorships across the globe).
3. That until the US and UK examine the contradictions at the heart of their own foreign policies, including their selective enforcement of UN resolutions and persistent failure to deal with their own weapons of mass destruction, they will have little right to lecture other nations about the rules of moral conduct.
4. That while Saddam Hussein is a brutal tyrant, a regime change within Iraq is a matter for the Iraqi people. Bombing Iraq is unlikely to kill Saddam Hussein, but is certain to kill thousands of Iraqis.

There's an awful lot of absurdity in this, which gives some perspective to the oft-described sophistication of political debate in Britain as compared to the U.S. But for the moment I'll only offer four quick points:

First, although propping up dictators is a terrible thing, who would have guessed that the "root causes of war" are best addressed by a reduction in the foreign aid budget? Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) would be proud.

Second, in what sense is regime change within Iraq "a matter for the Iraqi people"? This might be the case if, for example, the Iraqi people could choose their new leaders in free and open elections. But when those who try to change the regime have their tongues torn out, isn't this resolution just a call to abandon the powerless to their fate?

Third, does Oxford's student union really want the U.S. and U.K. to refrain from "lectur[ing] other nations about the rules of moral conduct" until their own houses are in order? That could take quite a while, and there's an awful lot of work to be done in the meantime. (Do Oxford student representatives really want an end to diplomatic or trade sanctions for Myanmar? No more criticism of China over Tibet? Not even any retrospective criticism of South Africa's apartheid government?) No responsible politics would ever discourage agents from acting morally. If the U.S. and U.K. have dirty hands, then they should clean them off, not sit on them.

Fourth and finally, there's a great deal that OUSU leaves unsaid, such as the fact that the "brutal tyrant" possesses a powerful and deadly arsenal which will only become more powerful and more deadly as time goes on. Well-reasoned opponents of the war argue either that (1) Hussein's weapons are not a real concern (at least when compared to the dangers posed by invasion), or (2) the dangers posed by Hussein and his weapons can be neutralized or contained without resorting to force. Statements from student governments on matters of foreign policy, no matter how strongly worded or effectively argued, are rarely taken seriously; given its failure to make either argument, one wonders whether OUSU even takes seriously its own resolutions.

 

9:10 PM :: Stephen (contact)

A few nights ago, I watched Bowling For Columbine, the new gun-culture documentary by Michael Moore. It's a thought-provoking film, if nothing else, and brings much-needed attention to an underpublicized issue. Gun violence has been purposefully ignored in the proposals to make America's homeland more secure. After September 11, John Ashcroft didn't even want to know whether terrorists were buying guns, for fear of--well, of effective law enforcement, I guess. And when two domestic terrorists with sniper rifles managed to shut down Washington, D.C., Ari Fleischer famously declared that "values," not the availability of high-precision sniper rifles, were the issue.

As a result, I went to Moore's movie with the hope that it would help move the gun issue back into public debate. But most of the film wasn't trying to engage in public debate at all--at least where that term is understood as analyzing a problem in order to discover a solution. Moore's approach is rather that of cultural critique, focusing his mocking eye on a twisted middle-American world where banks hand out guns and barbershops sell ammunition. And like all too many of his culture-war counterparts on the right, Moore seems content to heap scorn on those with whom he disagrees, rather than presenting effective arguments for his positions or meaningful suggestions for reform.

In any full-length documentary, of course, there are bound to be at least some good ideas. In this case, the best was Chris Rock's proposal for making bullets cost $5,000 apiece. (Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), by the way, has had similar thoughts.) You'd think twice about shooting somebody if a bullet cost $5,000, Rock reasons, and there would be no more innocent bystanders. "He must've done something--they put fifty thousand dollars' worth of bullets in his ass!"

But good ideas tend to get lost in the quicksand of Bowling For Columbine. The format of Moore's documentary lends itself to impression rather than argument--as in the hilarious, racist cartoon sequence that tells the history of the United States as a story of trembling, paranoiac white people. Among its claims is that the same year Congress disbanded the original Ku Klux Klan, the NRA was founded to take its place. Moore obviously doesn't place weight on this cute coincidence; 1871 also saw the foundation of the German Empire and of Smith College, a successor to the KKK if I've ever seen one. But he greatly enjoys hinting at positions through image and innuendo that he couldn't reach through evidence and reasoning.

The thesis of the film, to the extent that one exists, is that the high rates of gun violence in America are caused by a media-generated and unjustified fear of crime, especially fear by whites of crime by blacks. Between local news, C.O.P.S., and the Summer of the Shark, Americans are whipped into a state of perpetual frenzy, shaking in fear when they're not drowning their sorrows in consumer goods. Thus, we buy lots of guns to "protect" our families, which in fact make us even less safe.

To establish his case, Moore relies on a rather tenuous argument by elimination. The problem can't be our easy access to guns, because in Canada--Moore's version of Eden--guns are found in an even higher percentage of households. It can't be our violent culture, because other countries share (if not produce) our movies and video games. It can't be widespread poverty, because Canada's unemployment rate is twice that of the U.S. It can't even be our history of violence, because so many peaceful countries (like Japan and Germany) have oceans of blood on their hands. The only distinguishing characteristic that Moore can find is that America has a culture of fear. In the case of gun violence, at least, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But the argument from elimination doesn't quite work. In as generous a welfare state as Canada, high unemployment may not mean quite so much deprivation as it would in the U.S., as Ben Fritz points out in his comprehensive critique of the film. Similarly, the guns purchased in Canada may be less deadly or more highly regulated, and the history of the violence in the U.S. has been far more individualized as opposed to the state-sponsored violence of Germany or Japan. The members of the Michigan Militia, a group whose truly marginal influence doesn't disqualify it from getting plenty of screen time from Moore, are clearly drawing on this frontier tradition of individual self-defense; their fears stem from anti-government fantasies that receive no confirmation whatsoever on the local news.

Moore can certainly make the claim that we have more crime on our local news than we should, and that Americans therefore live with an unjustified level of fear. According to Moore, gun violence has been dropping dramatically in recent years, while media mentions of gun violence over the same period have been increasing even more dramatically. Thus, the fear created by these media representations is entirely out of proportion to the facts.

Yet there are three reasons why this claim is inadequate as an explanation for gun violence. First, Moore's conclusion depends on the assumption that the media's emphasis on crime used to be commensurate with the levels of gun violence in America, but has since grown to disproportionate levels. Otherwise, we don't know that violence hasn't been under-reported in the past, and that the media aren't just now devoting an appropriate amount of time to what is admitted by all to be a terrible scourge. We also, at least with only Moore's film as evidence, can't test the possibility that the epidemic of gun violence started before the local news turned into All Fear, All the Time™, in which case an alternative explanation is necessary. Moreover, if Moore wants to claim fear as what distinguishes America from other countries, the better comparison would be between local news in America and local news elsewhere, and Moore never gives us any evidence on that score.

Second, Moore's argument is undermined by his own statistics. If these increasing media representations of crime result in additional fear, and if this additional fear results in additional gun violence, then why on earth has gun violence been going down? And if gun violence is highly sensitive to influences other than media representations (which it must be if the two statistics can experience dramatic shifts in opposite directions), then there's little evidence to support the claim that the sensationalism of local news is the root cause of the problem--and by implication the only potential grounds for a solution. Why not focus on limiting gun access, or reducing poverty, or improving police work, or any of a thousand things that might have brought us such dramatic declines in gun violence over the past few years? This discrepancy doesn't by itself prove Moore wrong; maybe there's some 'threshold' level of media frenzy that has effects on violence, and above that threshold extra fear doesn't matter. But if that's Moore's argument, it goes entirely unsupported in the film.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Moore's emphasis on fear doesn't really fulfill his apparent goal of explaining what happened at Columbine. None of the school shootings he describes in such great detail were the result of the killers' media-heightened fear of their fellow students. For Moore's thesis to make sense, most gun violence in America must be committed by people like Bernhard Goetz, who shot four black teenagers thinking that they were muggers. At most, this kind of fear is responsible for a large number of additional guns in homes, and thus for the high level of access to guns that enables a substantial portion of crimes as well as accidental gun deaths. But fear isn't what causes people to pull the trigger; it's just the proximate cause that explains why there are so many guns in our homes, and the real problem is access to guns. And if Canada indeed has so many more households that own easily accessible guns, then by Moore's logic it should have similar or higher rates of juvenile gun violence. But it doesn't, and so Moore's argument fails.

Moore faces a similar problem with his interlude on the youngest school shooting in America, a 6-year-old who turned a gun on a fellow first-grader. He had taken the gun from his uncle's house, where he was staying after his mother had been forced off the welfare rolls. Moore lingers on the injustices of welfare reform, but it's ambiguous what role poverty plays in his account of gun violence. As a cause of unsupervised children, perhaps? But if unsupervised children are the problem, the religious right couldn't agree more--just shows how selfish today's women are, going out and getting jobs of their own. And in Moore's portrayal, unsupervised children are only a problem because they can steal guns from their uncles, not because of any potential flaws in their upbringing.

In placing so much emphasis on the culture of fear, Moore seems to be skating around some obvious issues. Why, for instance, does the U.S. have such a high rate of crime? And why does so much of that crime involve the use of guns? The UK has higher rates of assaults and robberies than the U.S., but it also has many fewer cases in which firearms are used to commit those crimes. Can this discrepancy really be explained only by different levels of fear-mongering on the local news?

But Moore never deigns to consider such objections. Instead, he prefers to use the film as a platform for his political agenda, much of which is entirely unrelated to gun violence. Moore, along with Marilyn Manson, holds that at least part of the root cause of Columbine and similar violence may be the propensity of the U.S. to use force abroad. In particular, Moore and Manson make a great deal of hay out of the fact that on the same day as the Columbine shootings, the U.S. undertook its heaviest day of bombing in the Kosovo campaign.

Watching this segment of the movie, one can't avoid the feeling that Moore's grasping at straws. The implication that the Columbine killers were influenced by U.S. imperialism is at least as loopy as the religious right's contention that they were brainwashed by violent video games and Rammstein. In fact, it's even loopier, since one assumes the teens spent far more time listening to heavy metal than they did watching C-SPAN and CNN. By dragging U.S. foreign policy into the debate, Moore makes the common assumption of ideologues of all stripes, namely that all the evil in the world is conveniently caused by the same things that they already dislike. (This is why, after Sept. 11, the religious right was blaming gays and abortionists and the dogmatic left was blaming U.S. hostility to the Kyoto accords.)

Moreover, Moore's presentation of U.S. foreign policy is a high-water-mark for moral equivalence. As "What a Wonderful World" plays in the background, a series of clips document America's sad record of foreign involvement in the last half-century, with no effort to distinguish what, if anything, is being fought for. Bombs falling on buildings all pretty much look the same, it seems; what could it matter who is in the buildings, or why the bombs might be falling at all? But intentions matter, and something has gone deeply wrong when a film places American support of Pinochet and Saddam Hussein in the same context as the NATO campaign in Kosovo. Is there really no difference between installing autocrats and intervening to stop them from getting away with genocide? Had NATO acted responsibly to stop the massacre at Srebrenica, presumably this too would have made Moore's catalogue of imperial aggression, and I assume that he simply couldn't find good footage of the Battle of the Bulge. (Moore even includes U.N. famine relief efforts in his chamber of horrors--witness the $245 million described as "aid" for the Taliban that in fact, as Fritz notes, went to U.N. relief programs. No wonder schoolkids are driven to murder-suicide--we gave money to feed Afghanistan!)

Constrained as it is by support for his tortured politics, Moore's filmmaking faces a persistent danger of slipping into dishonesty. As a friend of mine noted, those with whom Moore agrees are interviewed in a calm, relaxed, respectful setting, and are rarely surprised by the questions Moore asks. Those with whom Moore doesn't agree (K-Mart spokespersons, Dick Clark, Charleton Heston) have questions sprung on them out of the blue, and are predictably mocked when their on-the-spot answers are less than fully articulate--or when they choose not to continue the interview. Can we really believe, at the end of the film, that the NRA's case has been presented as fairly and accurately as Moore's own? And while the film is merciless to a local television personality who plays to the camera while reporting a school shooting, can we really believe that Moore never once does the same? After all, as he tells the audience in his most plaintive tone, he had promised those poor Columbine victims that K-Mart's policy on ammunition sales would change...

It's a testament to Moore's style of filmmaking that he would be able to alienate so thoroughly someone predisposed to agree with him. To be honest, I don't have any answers about what caused Columbine, although I think Ross Douthat's eloquent suggestion is worth considering. But regardless of the chain of cause and effect, there seems to me something inherently dangerous about America's gun culture, placing as it does so much value on what are essentially instruments of death. Maybe the gun culture actually is at fault for our high rates of violence--the culture of fear, perhaps, keeps the NRA strong, and a strong NRA keeps sensible gun laws from being passed. But arguing for this chain of causation, let alone proposing realistic solutions that could sever it, takes a lot more work than merely asserting that the chain exists. And for Moore, at least, that isn't nearly so fun as badgering PR executives with blindingly white skin and immaculate blow-dried hair.

I haven't watched many documentaries, but I think it's a good test of them to see whether the film still makes sense when you try to write down its conclusions on paper after leaving the theater. Unfortunately, when the curtain falls and our disbelief is no longer suspended, Bowling For Columbine dissolves into air. Columbine linked to Kosovo? School shootings born of the Summer of the Shark? Why should anyone believe that? I don't know, and Moore's not telling.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has posted a compilation of the film's factual inaccuracies. Many of these have been reported elsewhere, but not all in one place.