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Idiot's Guide to the Axis of Evil

Mystery solved. On Sept. 6 of last year, Israeli warplanes struck a facility in the deserts of eastern Syria. The Israelis refused to explain what they had hit or why. The Syrians immediately bulldozed the site to block all further investigation. The U.S. government acknowledged the attack but declined otherwise to comment. And the world was left to speculate.

On Thursday, the Bush administration at last confirmed what had long been rumored: The Syrian facility was indeed a nuclear plant. The plant followed the same design as the Yongbyon plant in North Korea, and North Korean engineers and workers had helped to build it. North Korea and Syria had initiated discussions on the plant in 1997. Construction had commenced in 2005. When the Israelis struck, the plant was only weeks from completion.

All that would have been needed then would have been enough plutonium to start a weapons production cycle. Had the Syrians been allowed to proceed, they might well have been a nuclear weapons state by now.

This terrible story carries some significant lessons.

1) For years we have heard that it was impossible, inconceivable, that states such as Syria, North Korea, Iran or Saddam Hussein's Iraq could ever co-operate with each other. We were told that Shiite Iran could never possibly ally with Sunni terrorist groups such as Hamas or al-Qaeda. Yet again and again, over the past half dozen years, we have witnessed just that. North Korea did help Syria. Iran and North Korea did exchange technology. Iran did subsidize Hamas. Al-Qaeda leaders did find refuge in Iran.

You know, it's almost like they form an axis or something.

2) Many have urged the Bush administration to "reach out" to Syria. The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by Lee Hamilton and James Baker, suggested that Syria could help broker a solution inside Iraq. Before that, Clinton secretary of state Warren Christopher elaborately courted Syria, visiting Damascus more often than any other government on Earth. Yet the bad faith, aggression and recklessness of the Syrian regime continue unabated.

Happily, this latest deadly threat was intercepted in time. But can we at last recognize that Syria's Assad regime is part of the problem in the Middle East--not part of the solution?

3) Democrats and liberals have fiercely criticized the Bush administration for focusing on state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria and Iran, instead of focusing exclusively on non-state terror groups such as al-Qaeda. We've even heard it said that focusing on state sponsors of terror is a "distraction." But terrorists with nuclear weapons are a lot more dangerous than terrorists who lack them. Al-Qaeda's attempts to acquire nuclear weaponry have fizzled. It is from states such as Syria and Iran and North Korea that the threat of nuclear terrorism chiefly comes.

4) Military action against nuclear facilities can be effective--especially if those facilities are located far from population centres, as Syria's was. And despite Syria's command of terrorist organizations, there has been no Syrian terrorist retaliation. Something to think about in connection with the much more ominous Iranian nuclear program.

5) The revelations underscore the lethal naivete of the advisers around Barack Obama. As Gabriel Schoenfeld has pointed out on the Commentary magazine blog, Joseph Cirincione, the man most widely identified as Obama's top nuclear-affairs adviser, last September pooh-poohed as "far-right" "nonsense" the early rumors that the Syrian nuclear facility was indeed a nuclear facility.

Cirincione wrote on the Foreign Policy blog: "This [early news of the Syrian facility] appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria."

Cirincione seems to have been so determined to avert what he regarded as the threat of U.S. over-reaction--so eager to promote dialogue with Syria--that he blinded himself to the reality of a nuclear threat.

And this way of thinking is not, unfortunately, unique to him. It pervades the Democratic foreign policy establishment--and especially that portion of the establishment that has gravitated to Obama.

So here's the final lesson from this week's: For the safety of the world, these people have to be kept far, far away from political power.

Store Wars

The Meatrix

Demography Is King

By DAVID BROOKS

Fifty-five years ago, 80 percent of American television viewers, young and old, tuned in to see Milton Berle on Tuesday nights. Tens of millions, rich and poor, worked together at Elks Lodges and Rotary Clubs. Millions more, rural and urban, read general-interest magazines like Look and Life. In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree.

But that’s all changed. In the decades since, some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

Retailers, home builders and TV executives identify and reinforce these lifestyle clusters. There are more niche offerings and fewer common experiences.

The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.

In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.

The divide has even overshadowed campaigning. Surely the most interesting feature of the Democratic race is how unimportant political events are. The candidates can spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising, but they are not able to sway their opponent’s voters to their side. They can win a stunning victory, but the momentum doesn’t carry over from state to state. They can make horrific gaffes, deliver brilliant speeches, turn in good or bad debate performances, but these things do not alter the race.

In Pennsylvania, Obama did everything conceivable to win over Clinton’s working-class voters. The effort was a failure. The great uniter failed to unite. In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.

Over the years, different theories have emerged to describe the educated/less-educated divide. Conservatives have gravitated toward the culture war narrative, dividing the country between the wholesome masses and the decadent cultural elites. Some liberals believe income inequality drives everything. They wait for an uprising of economic populism. Other liberals divide the country morally, between the enlightened urbanites and the racist rednecks who will never vote for a black man.

None of these theories really fit the facts. It’s more accurate to say that the country has simply drifted apart into different subcultures. There’s no great hostility between the cultures. Americans have a fuzzy sense of where the boundaries lie. But people in different niches have developed different unconscious maps of reality. They have developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They have developed different communal definitions, which they can’t even articulate, of what they mean by liberty, security and virtue. Demographic groups have begun to function like tribes or cultures.

We can all play the parlor game of trying to figure out why Obama, a Harvard Law grad, resonates with the more educated while Clinton, a Yale Law grad, resonates with the less educated. I’d throw in that Obama’s offer of a secular crusade hits a nerve among his fellow bobos, while Clinton’s talk of fighting and resilience plays well down market.

But these theories only scratch the surface. The mental maps people in different cultures form are infinitely complex and poorly understood even by those who hold them. People pick up millions of subtle signals from body language, word choice, facial expressions, policy positions and biographical details. Efforts to rebrand a candidate to appeal to down-market voters are inevitably crude and counterproductive.

The core message is that even if you take away the ideological differences between the parties, you are still left with profound social gulfs within the parties. There’s poignancy to that. The upscale liberals who revere Obama have spent their lives championing equality and opposing privilege. But they’ve smashed the old WASP social hierarchy only to create a new educational one.

Elitist