Obama/Nunn?

In a later post I hope to do some justice to the singular political phenomenon that is Sen. Barack Obama. Suffice it to say for the moment that I've been a bit of a skeptic in the past, but I may be starting to reconsider. His Achilles' heel is quite clearly his inexperience- in the general election a Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani could really go to town on his lack of executive-level credentials.
If Obama does emerge victorious from the primaries, he may need to find his own Dick Cheney to win the general election. That would be the Dick Cheney of 2000, the experienced, steadying hand on young W's shoulder, not the power-drunk ogre we've subsequently come to know and despise. For the equivalent sort of influence, Obama could do far, far worse than Sam Nunn. Frankly, he could do no better.

Re: The Anthropology of Insurgencies

If memory serves, the first place I ran across the argument presented in the George Packer article highlighted by BP, about how the war on terror should really be conceptualized as a global counterinsurgency campaign, was a couple of years ago in Michael Scheuer’s excellent Imperial Hubris. In general terms, I certainly agree with BP that it’s a far better way to think about our vendetta against al-Qaeda et al than the Bush Administration’s initial response, which was to try to smash or cow all states that might aid terror networks.

There was a catch, however. Scheuer argued, very persuasively I thought, that we are not under attack because of the values we represent, but rather for the specific policies we have followed. In a very dark conclusion, he warned that unless the U.S. fundamentally alters its policies towards the Middle East, we are in for a long and bloody war of attrition. I won’t go into specifics here about what changes he advocated, but you could probably guess at them. The point is that our image in the Muslim world stems directly from the policies we follow. No cosmetic tinkering, not the best propaganda from even our most skillful spinmeisters can mitigate the consequences of policies that alienate an enormous chunk of the world’s population. If, as in the case of the invasion of Iraq, our own policies become more radical, then we are digging ourselves an even deeper hole.

In a recent study, published by NYU’s Center for Law and Security, terrorism analysts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank attempt to calculate what effect the Iraq War has had on global terror. The results are sobering. Even discounting for Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a sharp rise in terrorist attacks from the period between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion to the period between the invasion and late 2006. There has also been a rise in fatalities, and an increased rate of attack on U.S. and Western allied targets. The situation will likely worsen when foreign fighters begin to slink out of Iraq, bringing their newfound skills home with them.

As BP put it quite rightly, the only metric that counts in a counterinsurgency campaign is convincing the local population that its security depends on cooperating with your forces. There was a time in Iraq when a smart counterinsurgency campaign might have turned the tide. That time, it now seems likely, was late 2003, and by early 2004 the future had practically written itself. In the face of insurgent intimidation, the Iraqi population found it could not count on American forces to protect it, and began the fateful turn instead to sectarian affiliations. The vilest of the insurgent groups, of course, are willing to turn Iraq into a charnel house to force the U.S. to leave. They will do this to the entire region if they can.

Any troop surge at this moment in time is nothing more than sticking one’s fist into a bowl of water; the water will be displaced, but it will come rushing back in when the fist is removed. The most important thing the U.S. can do now is quite obvious but incredibly difficult. It must act without delay to ensure that when the Iraqi civil war does break out, it does not drag Iraq’s neighbors into the maelstrom. It is also incumbent on the U.S. to work with all Middle Eastern governments in formulating effective countermeasures against the many terrorists operating in Iraq who will one day seek to return home or emigrate to the West. We cannot afford to be caught unprepared.

The Anthropology of Insurgencies

I discovered in an old New Yorker a fascinating essay by George Packer concerning the ways social scientists working with the US government have attempted to redefine the war on terror as a global counterinsurgency. "Terrorists" cannot be persuaded, can operate in isolation, and can only be dealt with coercively. Because the US government has defined the conflict as a "war on terror" its strategies have emphasized military action. But an insurgent, as Packer writes, "has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics." This means that "political, economic, and informational operations" are just as important as organized violence.

This seems to be a superior way of framing world events. To argue, as the Bush administration has, that Iraq, Iran, Aceh, Chechnya, Palestine, the bidonvilles of Rabat and Paris, and the suburbs of Manchester and Hamburg are all part of the same "war" is to distort reality. In fact, such an argument is in the interest of Al Qa'ida and its colleagues. The propaganda strategy of jihadists like bin Laden consists of trying to persuade "we Muslims" (all lumped together in an imagined unity) that "we" are under attack from "them" (that is, the "Jews and Crusaders") all over the world. Fortunately, such a view is demonstrably false. Different conflicts have different histories, different dynamics, and different solutions. This is why the sorts of things that interest anthropologists - like subjective motivations, the structures of and rivalries within groups and network, or the roles of tribal and kinship ties - also ought to interest policymakers. Anthropological details can be used to detect and exploit opportunities.

Packer also argues that "winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion." Whether you are feared or loved is irrelevant. Incentives matter more. Building a school in Kandahar may win the US Army friends during the daylight hours, but what are locals to think when the Taliban shows up at night and says "Support us or we'll kill you"? The subjective cost to a local population of working with your opponents must be less than that of working with you.

Meanwhile, for those beyond the Taliban's reach, propaganda and the information war become paramount. As Packer writes, insurgents in Iraq do not destroy a Humvee to reduce the number of Humvees in Iraq by one. On the contrary, they destroy it so that they can acquire spectacular footage of a burning Humvee, post it on the Internet, and solicit support for their cause. The objective is to generate influence. Insurgents do not expect to win by destroying the enemy but rather by destroying his will to fight. Thus, Packer's sources refer to the Taliban's activity as "armed propaganda operations...[alternating] guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it’s all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency."

Perception is key. The Algerian insurgents never defeated the French army; by 1962, the reverse was true. But they were able to create the perception that the French were immoral and losing. Once that impression was fixed in the global imagination the outcome was not in doubt.

Packer's article emphasizes the power of ideas. If we disagree with Tawhid wa Jihad's ideas, we should promote persuasive alternatives. For example, we could co-opt, create, or sponsor groups with counter-messages. Moreover, a thorough understanding of how such groups recruit and operate could help us subvert them from within.

New media such as satellite television and the Internet have revolutionized communication. Propaganda is more accessible and powerful than at any time in the past. Consequently, founding schools or subsidizing educational exchanges can be far more effective than dropping bombs.

Similarly, with mass persuasion in mind, it is counter-productive to regard one's current opponents as evil. How are you going to have a productive conversation with someone you regard as a "totalitarian" or "Islamofascist" or "infidel"? It is impossible to persuade someone if you are incapable of understanding and sympathizing with his perspective. If persuasion is central to victory, a lack of empathy could spell defeat.

Matters of Interpretation

The Atlantic Monthly informs us that Rudy Giuliani has been learning "evangelese" to reach out to Southern Christians, a sharp departure from his earlier public rhetorical style. Here in an unspecified country I noticed an Arabic-language tafsir (exegesis) of the Qur'an written for elementary students. Early on, the book addressed the verse "Al Kafiroun" ("the infidels", or "those who deny the truth"):

"Say: O you unbelievers, / I do not worship what you worship / Nor do you worship what I worship / And you will not worship what I have worshipped / And I will not worship what you have worshipped / To you your religion and to me - [true] religion."

In English and in the West, Islamic apologists cite this verse as evidence of Islam's inherently tolerant, easygoing nature. (I have provided a literal translation; the last line is usually freely translated as "To you your Way and to me mine," implying an non-sectarian attitude.) But I found a different interpretation in the books for schoolchildren: "Here God explains that in matters of truth we can make no compromise." In the book's view, believers should be aware of the vast difference between unbelief and belief, between true religion and lies.

Different words are used for different audiences. Adult English speakers read about tolerance. Muslim schoolchildren read about the need to have the proper attitude towards those who reject Faith. Which audience is the more discerning, and which interpretation the more convincing?

With those thoughts in mind, I came across Francis Fukuyama's commentary in Prospect Magazine regarding identity politics. The article, clearly inspired by the proliferation of trans-national and violent Islamic supremacist organizations in Europe, considers the origins of such extremism. Fukuyama argues that anomie, a conflicted identity, and a sense of rootlessness makes people susceptible to "radical" thought; it is an "open question" whether there is anything specific to Islam that might exacerbate such psychological tensions. But Fukuyama closes the question by proceeding as though the answer were negative.

A comparison might shed some light on the question. Hindus from India and Buddhists from Thailand and atheists from China also experience anomie and feel torn between cultures. There are millions of them living in America and Europe. Yet the Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists tend not to follow international, chauvinist, supremacist, and separatist ideologies or organizations. There is no Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist equivalent to Hizb at-Tahrir or al-Ghurabaa' and its successors. In the climate that the latter groups cultivate, religiously-inspired violence is a flower that grows easily.

Could Fukuyama be discouting intolerant Islamic ideology on the grounds that it must be outside of the mainstream or theologically illegitimate? In the first place, regardless of whether it is legitimate, such ideology exists and is persuasive to many. Were it not, the British security services would not be monitoring dozens of serious active plots; nor would their French counterparts would not be worried when al-Zawahiri commands Algerians to strike "infidel" France.

Fukuyama's problem, like that of so many Westerners, is that he does not take his opponents' arguments seriously. Instead, he retreats into the Western political thought with which he is already familiar, considering non-Western philosophies exclusively through the lens of Western philosophy. This train of thought, however, takes Fukuyama to a rather provocative destination:

"Liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values."

Some thoughts on Hillary Clinton and the Iraq War

Interesting article today in the Times on the trouble Iraq is giving Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, and conversely how Barack Obama's consistent opposition to the war is at the moment looking like a huge advantage in the battle for the Democratic nomination. Interesting also to note that though he merits several mentions in this story, John Edwards doesn't really figure in here; he is chiefly invoked to cite the precedent of a politician publicly acknowledging that their vote to authorize Bush to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein was indeed a mistake. The question, therefore, is why hasn't Hillary done the same; in other words, gone for the cathartic mea culpa with the possible effect of galvanizing her candidacy among the Democratic base.

Perhaps she privately believes that she made the right decision in the circumstances, and that her vote was indeed not a mistake. That, of course, would be a perfectly plausible explanation for why she has not gone the Edwards route. She may believe that the threat posed by Saddam in October 2002, based on what most of the West’s intelligence services believed at the time, justified aggressive moves aimed at disarming him, and that a resolution authorizing force was warranted. At the time, she may have believed that the Bush Administration was not hell-bent on war, and that a Congressional resolution could play a role in convincing members of the UN Security Council to agree to highly intrusive inspections. If that was what she believed, then on the first count she would have been dangerously wrong, and on the second she would have been generally correct. She would certainly have realized that the resolution would make it far easier politically for Bush to go to war if he did come to that conclusion; yet in October 2002 the political climate heavily favored conservative hawks, and Democrats were under pressure to demonstrate solidarity with a very popular Commander-in-Chief.

Regardless, Hillary might certainly have believed that the Bush Administration would handle the invasion’s aftermath with a baseline level of competence. Her rhetoric at present is heavily focused on blaming the Bush Administration for the all-around miserable handling of the war, from conception to what is now looking like a bloody endgame, and while I happen to believe that she is correct in taking this approach, it does have the added benefit of minimizing the significance of the support of moderate Democrats like herself at the outset.

It is also quite possible, perhaps even likely, that she does privately believe her vote was a mistake. There is of course an enormous distinction between wars of necessity and national survival and wars of choice. The Iraq War, even to its most fervent supporters, was always an example of the latter; indeed, it was embarked upon in part in a misguided attempt to demonstrate that the U.S. could fight wars of choice pretty much at will. Yet even in the first year after 9/11, it had to have been clear to Hillary Clinton that Iraq would be a war of choice, and furthermore, had her husband still been president at the time, it would not have been a war of his choice. He might have threatened force to gain resumed inspections, but that would have been the scope of the policy. Indeed, there must have been something about this war of choice and its particular architects that would have proved quite troubling to Hillary Clinton in late 2002. Al Gore, nursing his wounds in political exile, nevertheless sensed it: it seemed unwise to put such trust in a president and his advisors who wished to divert resources from a job still unfinished in Afghanistan to carry out what seemed suspiciously like an old vendetta. What did this instinct say about the prospects for an orderly post-war occupation?

Hillary, however, perhaps because she believed strongly from her years as First Lady, based on the intelligence Bill (and she) had been privy to, that Iraq still possessed a stock of WMDs and fielded a weak army, perhaps out of political expediency, and quite possibly for both reasons, chose to ignore that feeling of unease and give Bush her support. In retrospect, it is quite obvious he did not deserve it; but at the time Hillary Clinton and many others ignored or rationalized the multitude of warnings.

If that is the case, however, then why hasn’t she co-opted the base by going the route of John Edwards?

I think that the answer lies in the particular political calculus Hillary is utilizing as she charts her delicate course. The most potent challengers in the Democratic primary (at the moment, Obama and Edwards) look to be coming at her almost exclusively from the left; yet to win the general election she will be forced to appeal to the Reagan Democrat types that rejected John Kerry in 2004 but deserted the Republicans in droves this past November. These voters emphasize a strong national defense, and most, like Hillary, supported Bush on the road to war (Sen. Jim Webb is the exception that proves the rule). Yet they, like her, have by and large soured on it and its inept civilian leadership. In short, Hillary Clinton’s Iraq position is actually the most mainstream of any of the major candidates in either party at the moment, far more so than those of McCain, Giuliani and Romney.

She is also mainstream in her focus on the challenges of the present and future rather than re-fighting the battles of the past. Most Americans are far more concerned with how to get our troops out of Iraq while preventing states across the Middle East from mobilizing for war. Quite a bit of the Democratic base, however, seems most interested in cathartic admissions of past misjudgment from those leaders who are seen to have erred most grievously. Having been right about Iraq, or at least being able to admit one was wrong, may be evolving into the litmus test of the 2008 Democratic primary.

For Hillary to call her vote a mistake would of course be taken to represent honesty, and might give her a boost among the base. Yet it would also do two potentially highly negative things: first and most importantly, it would send a message to the moderate and conservative voters who will be decisive in the general election about who calls the shots in the Hillary campaign; and secondly, it will reverberate across the entire Democratic primary field, truly becoming the litmus test for serious consideration and having a chilling effect on debate about the serious foreign policy challenges that confront us in the future and may in the final recourse have to be dealt with by force. A primary that has as its foreign policy keystone a disavowal of the entire American effort in Iraq, no matter what other rhetoric accompanies it, will have the effect of convincing a plurality of Americans that the Democratic Party as a whole impulsively shies away from using force to defend national security.

In the case of Iraq, this was the right decision. It is also presently the case in Iran. But in the future it may not be, and at present it is absolutely the wrong posture for the Democratic Party if it wishes to retake the White House. Hillary Clinton understands this; Barack Obama has never been anything other than consistent in his opposition to the Iraq War, and I think he understands it too. Intellectual heterogeneity has always been a great strength of the Democratic Party, and hopefully activists in the base will understand that.

A good Hong Kong site

A great site I've been directed to lately for pan-Asian (can I use that term for stuff other than food?) news is the Asia Sentinel. It's kind of like Slate but with lower production values and run by a bunch of gweilo reporters in HK. It's definitely worth checking out for analysis as well as reports on stuff you might have missed. They're also one of the only news sites I've yet seen which covers the English-language Hong Kong media beat; it's good to have somebody keeping tabs, because it seems like most days the SCMP and Standard are the reporting equivalent of tapioca.

Notes on a Crisis

Over holiday I had an opportunity to pick up John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History (recently out in paperback), and I’d heartily recommend it to pretty much everybody. As a relatively short overview of the Cold War it’s peerless (come to think of it, I don’t know what its peers would be in this case), and Gaddis has always been a great history writer, the type who can elucidate a giant, global point and then without missing a beat zoom down to earth to illustrate it with the perfect individual example (his description of John Paul II’s first visit to Communist-ruled Poland after being elected pontiff is worth the price of admission alone).

I could go on and on about this book, but that may be grist for another post. I bring up Gaddis and his work here merely to state what may seem like an obvious point about the conduct of foreign policy. In his scholarship, Gaddis has focused on the question of strategy and how it is formulated and executed. In foreign policy, a wise strategy, grounded in reality and the possible and feasible, yet navigating towards a fixed and attainable point on the horizon, can survive the blunders of an incompetent captain or two. Yet when the stakes are high, a shoddily formulated or blindly utopian strategy is gambling with catastrophe. If I’m reading Gaddis correctly, one of the chief reasons he gives for why the world survived a 45-year standoff between two nuclear-armed superpowers is that the underlying American strategy of containment, formulated during the earliest years of the Cold War, was sound. None of the presidents that were left to implement it was perfect, and they all made mistakes; yet by sticking by the template we survived while the USSR eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Yet what we are seeing now from the Bush Administration is the utter collapse of this tradition, and the substitution of an approach that is characterized by its fantasist, ad hoc, and politically expedient characteristics. Simply put, there is no strategy the Bush team is consciously pursuing in any region of the globe, save a blind faith in the idea that American power trumps everything, including reality. I’m obviously not the first one to say this, and this is obviously not a new trend. The “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war gave way to the “Freedom Agenda” when it became clear that the neither of the criteria established for intervention under the Bush Doctrine, WMD and links to international terror networks, were present in the test case of Iraq. The Freedom Agenda, of course, fell largely by the wayside when it was established that American foreign policy in the Middle East was empowering extremists and emasculating moderates, rather than the desired reverse.

For everything there is a season, as they say, and this appears to be the season of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian menace. The chatter now seems to be about the possibility of forming an American-Israeli-moderate Arab states alliance to counter rising and malevolent Iranian influence across the region. The focal point of all of this tension is the Iranian nuclear program, but Iranian activities in Lebanon, Syria, and especially Iraq could also serve as flash points. Iran is clearly a potent and worrying source of trouble, but at this point anybody who believes that Bush and his team have the requisite judgment and ability to contain Iran’s ambitions while navigating around a violent confrontation probably chugged the Kool-Aid long ago.

It is frightening the extent to which those in the know are frightened about the prospects and probability of war with Iran (the situation is similar in Israel, where a “1938”analogy has apparently become the conventional wisdom). James Fallows, the Atlantic correspondent whose pieces on the Iraq war were so illuminating chiefly because of the exemplary source network he has built up within the national security bureaucracy, writes in his latest piece that if Congress really wants to do the U.S. some good, it will lay down the Iraq issue and instead focus what power it has on making it exceedingly difficult for the Administration to launch airstrikes against Iran.

The fear among the well-informed is not that there is an incubating plan to hit Iran, exactly. It is, rather, that the Bush Administration has resolved that to salvage Iraq and American influence in the region, it must demonstrate strength and intimidate Iran into backing down on the nuclear front and standing down in Iraq; that to do so, the U.S. will engage in a campaign of rhetorical and on-the-ground escalation, and that this will be mirrored by the Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs. The truly frightening scenario is that in a desperate bid to save his presidency, or else as the result of a chain of blunders with tensions running high, Bush will decide that airstrikes against Iran are the only way out of the trap. And this, as has been aptly documented and speculated upon elsewhere, would be cataclysmic and seed a disaster that would eventually make Iraq pale in comparison.

We now receive news that an Iranian diplomat has been kidnapped in Baghdad, and the Iranian government has stated that it is holding the U.S. accountable. It is incidents such as this, surely not the last, which will tempt leaders of both countries into a spiral that they will not be able to control.

It is also excruciating to note that even absent a direct U.S.-Iran conflict, the collapsing Iraqi state and the incipient Iraqi civil war threaten to engulf the entire region, with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt likely to back Sunni proxies while Iran tends to its coreligionists. As the Baker-Hamilton Commission made abundantly clear, the U.S. must not hesitate a second longer in engaging in serious regional diplomacy, with all relevant actors, to prevent this scenario from becoming an inevitability.

It is terrifying to confront this situation with leaders in whose judgment we have lost every shred of confidence, and yet that is the situation we now face.

Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together

The South Arabian office is somewhat preoccupied. Having driven the rebels out of Moghazal al-Qoblat, our advisors are accompanying local teams to claim the mountain redoubt of Misfaat al-Khodhra. Cut off from their sponsors in Khaheshmikonam, their options will be limited. Once the operation is finished you will enjoy a full situation report. For now, more literary diversion:

"Flowers, tears (if you insist), departures, and struggles are for tomorrow. In the middle of the day when the sky opens its fountains of light in the vast, sonorous space, all the headlands of the coast look like a fleet about to set out. Those heavy galleons of rock and light are trembling on their keels as if they were preparing to steer for sunlit isles. O mornings in the country of Oran! From the high plateaus the swallows plunge into huge troughs where the air is seething. The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together."

Albert Camus, "The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran"

Who is Bien Pensant?

Bien Pensant is a very old, very good friend of mine who, in what is perhaps a lapse in otherwise impeccable judgment, has agreed to join forces with me on this blog. He's working in a Middle Eastern country, after a stint in North Africa; any more information I'll leave to his discretion to provide.
Suffice it to say, I'm very excited to have BP on board. Our on-again, off-again collaboration dates back to junior high school and "Mark and BP ask the Big Questions," an attempt at investigative journalism that failed to clear the high hurdles for publication in "The Purple Crayon Express", and nearly earned us suspensions to boot.
But that's another story for another day. What's important at present is that BP's on-the-scene knowledge of the Middle East is intimidating, and he's a fantastic writer. I'm elated that he's opening up The Quiet American's new Middle Eastern bureau (if I may be so bold); there's no better man for the job.

Poetry of departures

by Philip Larkin

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:

He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think,
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or take that you bastard;
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object;
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

Say it ain't so...Gavin.

I checked in for local news on Sfgate.com today, and was greeted by this bombshell: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom apparently had an affair with the wife of his good friend and campaign manager, and on Thursday was forced to own up to it and beg contrition. What follows in the story, if you care to read it, is an analysis of what effect this may have on his re-election campaign for this year, as well as his hopes for attaining higher office in the future. Also some irrelevancies about how conservative commentators are going to pin this on "San Francisco values" and use it to make Nancy Pelosi look bad (I despair of the Chronicle sometimes).

The truth is, even though I grew up just across the Bay from San Francisco, in Berkeley, the city that even SF residents think is a bit loopy, I really don't know how this is going to play for Newsom's chances for re-election. Okay, so it's obviously not going to help matters, but there is some truth to the traditional “San Francisco values” smear. The counterculture winds blow strong there still, and in stark defiance to the conservative sexual mores that still dominate public life in much of the rest of the country (and there are of course other obvious exceptions beyond SF), there’s something that goes beyond simply tolerance for thumbing your nose at it all. Clinton, after all, is beloved in the Bay Area, and it’s not for the moderate, DLC-type policies he followed while President. He’s a free spirit, simply put, and we love him for it. (As a side note, that’s the political tradition I come from, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the two presidents I admire the most are Kennedy and Clinton.)

But that said, and as the Chronicle rightly notes, what stinks here is not just that the mayor had an affair, but that he had an affair with the wife of his campaign manager and friend. The element of betrayal comes into play, of a real breach of honor that goes way beyond simply nookie on the side. That’s the idea, far more than the basic fact of the affair, which will not sit well with SF voters and may doom him down the road if he ever hopes to pursue the governorship or a Senate seat. What’s more, this all comes in the midst of what can be described charitably as a near-breakdown for Newsom as both a mayor and a man. There’s a several-car pileup on the highway, and into it comes plowing an 18-wheeler. Even San Franciscan tolerance has been tested by the Newsom’s behavior lately; as the Chronicle puts it, “…the scandal came on the heels of headlines that have put an unflattering spotlight on Newsom's personal life -- from coverage of a messy divorce to public displays of affection and dalliances with a series of girlfriends, including a 19-year-old restaurant hostess, to sightings of the 39-year-old mayor drinking at bars and bistros across the city.” Yes, you read that right. If this man isn’t the second coming of JFK then I don’t know who is.

Now, I haven’t been following San Francisco politics very closely for the past couple of years, but the comments in the Chronicle article about a general sense of drift and inattention emanating from the mayor’s office square with my own perception of recent events, particularly the ongoing saga of the Niners’ plans to move to Santa Clara. At the moment, Newsom does not strike me as a mayor who is effectively deploying the powers he has to influence events and shape the city agenda, to put it mildly. The focus, desire, and ambition just seem to be draining away.

I’m sure there are many people in the Bay Area and, for that matter, across the country who are welcoming this development. They come from across the political spectrum, primarily on the left in the Bay Area and on the right nationally. You may have guessed by now that I don’t share that sentiment: the truth is, Newsom is one of the few politicians that I’ve really admired and liked in recent years, and frankly, I’m willing to forgive him a lot. As I note earlier, I tend to forgive easily when it comes to the personal foibles of politicians.

What makes me like Newsom, even to the point that I’m still inclined to think well of him after this really, really lousy thing he’s done?

A bit of background: Back in 2003, Newsom, still a young Supervisor (the SF city council is the Board of Supervisors), was the heir apparent to Mayor Willie Brown, the gleeful imp who had dominated SF politics (and some years prior to that, California politics as Assembly Speaker) for two terms that many believed were plagued by corruption. Newsom hadn’t been born into money, but he had befriended a young member of the powerful Getty family, and the wealthy SF dynasty essentially became his patron as he moved up in the business world (he was a restaurateur), and then the political world. He was a moderate on the Board of Supervisors, and clashed repeatedly with the dominant progressive faction. Although he seemed to have a sound grasp of policy and a highly reasonable political outlook, economically moderate and socially liberal, I was still a bit skeptical back then about the circumstances of his rise to power and his tight relationship with the Gettys. I was nevertheless greatly relieved when he won a much tighter that expected victory over Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales, the kind of well-meaning San Franciscan of socialist convictions who would have reduced the city to irrelevancy in four years and economic insolvency in eight.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Newsom made an infamous decision that will forever shadow his reputation and that personally made me prouder to have been born in San Francisco and to have grown up in the Bay Area than I have ever been before or will likely ever be again. Responding to Bush Administration attempts to push a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in advance of the 2004 elections, Newsom decided to begin sanctioning single-sex marriages right on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a very public flaunting of the national Republican Party and a highly questionable and probably illegal move in regards to the California state constitution. As the Bush Administration forced a confrontation in Congress over the gay marriage amendment, its allies pointed to San Francisco as evidence that altering the Constitution was indeed a step that was justified by a clear and present danger. Meanwhile, in San Francisco itself, thousands of couples, many of whom had been together in marriages in all but name for a decade or more, lined up at City Hall for a simple ceremony that they had hoped for but nevertheless had seemed to be the providence of a distant future. Mayor Newsom presided over many of the ceremonies himself.

There was speculation that Newsom had pursued this policy to outflank his opposition on the left at the outset of his term, and indeed the policy did have this effect. When asked what sort of impact this move was likely to have on his future political ambitions, Newsom demurred; he said he believed that San Francisco views on the issue were the template for national views a decade hence, and that in the long run his initiative would come to be seen as a harbinger of positive developments far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. At present, it does not appear that Newsom’s prediction will bear out, and I do not think it will be seen as prescient in the time frame of the next decade that currently forms the horizon of Newsom’s political career. Yet given what we now know more clearly about Newsom’s personality and character than we did then, it seems to me more likely that his decision was an impulsive one, compelled by what he sensed was a despicable drift in national politics in early 2004.

That brings me to the reason why I admire Gavin Newsom as a political leader, and why the latest news strikes me as a tragedy on multiple levels. San Francisco and the Bay Area are proud to stand for some of the most attractive and enduring values of the American political tradition: freedom of speech and expression, openness, the desire to help the less fortunate, and above all, tolerance and acceptance of the multitude of differences among individual people. And yet it is also the case that in consistently standing for and espousing these liberal ideals, the people of the San Francisco Bay Area give the appearance of rejecting the values and institutions that form the heart of the conservative tradition in American politics, the tradition that speaks most powerfully to those in much of the rest of the country. The result, of course, is that people in these regions return the favor by denigrating San Francisco and “San Francisco values”. Sometimes, I must add, they have good reason to do so. The recent SF school board decision to terminate the SF JROTC program was pure lunacy, as disgracefully ideological as almost anything the radical right has come up with recently; Newsom, incidentally, vocally expressed outrage, although it seems he was powerless to stop the business from going forward.

As mayor, Newsom has not sold out the San Francisco liberal tradition; far from it, as his actions on same-sex marriage demonstrate. He has also not faltered under pressure from an increasingly reactionary and dogmatic left. What he has tried to do is demonstrate to both San Franciscans and the country as a whole that “San Francisco values” are not inconsistent with America’s most cherished institutions. As the couples who lined up at City Hall for their chance at marriage amply demonstrated, Newsom believes that San Franciscans and their values can at their best reinvigorate key institutions of American life, and that engagement rather than disdainful dismissal is the proper political posture for a San Francisco that wants to remain politically relevant in a nation where the conservative tradition is strong.

I hope to see Newsom carry this idea into a second term as mayor, and beyond to higher office. Yet I now worry that the recent reports of Newsom’s personal failings will not only destroy his promising political career, but will also irrevocably taint by association his public agenda and the beliefs he has espoused.