Monday, 20 October 2003

Prague, Czech Republic: Ironically, on the same day that the National Review's Rich Lowry was trashing Madeline Albright (link via Instapundit), I was meeting Secretary Albright in a bookstore here in Prague.

Albright is a national heroine in her native country: She was born in Prague in 1937, her family fled the Nazis in 1939 (when Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" appeased Hitler by offering up Czechoslovakia on a plate), and then she rose to prominence in her adopted American homeland. Albright is currently in Europe on a book-signing tour, promoting her newly published memoirs, and by sheer coincidence her stop in Prague overlapped ours—and the bookstore was down the block from our hotel.

Naturally we couldn't pass up a souvenir opportunity like this, so we snapped up the last English-language copy of her book (the rest were in Czech), waited in line for about half an hour, and got Albright's signature. I haven't read the book yet, but her life story certainly looks interesting at first glance.

Meanwhile, over at NRO… do you ever wonder if the Right gets tired of pummeling the same old straw men again and again? Albright wrote an article in Foreign Affairs whose fundamental premise is almost beyond debate—that the Bush Administration pays no heed to what other nations think, lacks the patience or skill for effective diplomacy, and has alienated many countries, from Germany to Canada, that would usually be American allies. Rich Lowry, instead of actually responding to Albright's article, dusted off the hackneyed old straw man: Albright "is part of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment that reflexively wants to give France a veto over U.S. foreign policy," he says.

Let's be clear on this: No one has ever proclaimed that France should be given veto power over U.S. foreign policy. Ever. I challenge you to cite a single instance of anyone—Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, whoever—who has ever publicly (or, heck, privately) asserted that France should dictate American foreign policy. No one ever took this position—so why is Rich Lowry wasting all his energy opposing it, while leaving Albright's actual arguments unaddressed?

Many Democrats and Republicans thought it might have been useful to get United Nations support for the war in Iraq. Heck, President Bush was one of these people, unless you believe he was lying in his U.N. speeches, and sent Powell on a fool's errand last February. Even if the Congressional resolution that empowered Bush to invade Iraq had been contingent on getting U.N. support, it still wouldn't have granted France a veto: It just would have required that Bush go back to Congress—or, Rumsfeld forbid, that he actually show some diplomatic skills. Neither of these would have been tantamount to giving France the power to veto America's foreign policy; if anything, it would have given Bush more of an incentive to keep us from ending up in the situation we're currently in, where we can't even buy an ally to come relieve our troops in Iraq.

It's easy to win an argument against a straw man. (And you can just guess how much sympathy I have for the idea that Americans abroad are somehow less entitled to express their opinions.) If Lowry had actually responded to Albright, instead of wasting his effort on the straw man, I'm sure the results would be more interesting: A bit riskier for Lowry, perhaps—defending Bush from Albright's "weak on diplomacy" charge would be a real challenge—but nonetheless.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:00 pm. comments.