Pervez Musharraf has postponed plans to return to Pakistan to re-launch his political career. Earlier this month, the former Pakistani military ruler had announced he would end more than three years of self-imposed exile in London and Dubai. However, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has warned that Musharraf will be arrested upon arrival to face charges related to the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But perhaps the biggest reason Musharraf isn’t returning is because hardly anybody in Pakistan would shed a tear if he were arrested and tried given his heavy handedness with the Supreme Court and the opposition when he was in power. Despite the less than stellar performance of the Gilani, Zardari and the PPP, Musharraf remains a deeply unpopular figure in Pakistan and isn’t likely to return anytime soon.
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Musharraf Postpones Return to Pakistan
Two anniversaries, this month and next, for what is probably the most intelligent cop show ever to hit the small screen. One anniversary is to be celebrated. It was 25 years ago this month that “The Dead of Jericho,” the first of 33 episodes of the splendid Inspector Morse series was broadcast in 1987 in the UK. It was immediately popular in Old Blighty and remains so in re-run today, more than a decade after the last new episode hit the air. New Morse episodes routinely drew television audiences of 15 million and more in a country of 60 million. Few television series can truthfully be called a phenomenon. Morse can. Morse also played to enthusiastic audiences when it migrated to the U.S. a year later, airing mostly on PBS stations. By now Morse has been watched and enjoyed in almost every country advanced enough to have a television transmitter. The second anniversary, in February, is a sad one. It will mark 10 years from the too-early death of John Thaw, the talented and versatile British actor who brought the quirky but ever-fascinating Morse to life on the screen. Thaw lost his battle with esophageal cancer just two years after the last new episode of Morse was aired. He was only 60 at his death, though he looked older. Not because of his illness, but because he was one of those guys who looked 40 at 25 and turned gray in their thirties. Thaw appeared in several popular television series. The Sweeny in the seventies and Kavanagh Q.C. later had their fans. Of his movies, Goodnight, Mr. Tom may be the best known. It’s the story of a cranky old-timer in a small rural English town who makes an unexpected bond with a youngster evacuated from London during the blitz. It’s a movie that could have been saccharine in the hands of a lesser actor. Thaw made it both moving and believable. But Morse was Thaw’s triumph, his greatest performance, and the role he will be most remembered for. The character of Morse is compelling. The scripts are intelligent, based on a series of award-winning novels by Colin Dexter as well as some original television stories. The episodes are out of the British mystery tradition with complex plots and lots of suspects and red herrings. They’re two hours long and deal intelligently with themes in the way good literature always has. The series is beautifully filmed in and around photogenic Oxford. The soundtrack alone — featuring the classical music that the character Morse and Thaw personally loved — is worth the price of admission. There’s hardly a rock or a rap riff to be heard in the entire 33 episodes. So Morse is not your standard “up against the wall red-neck mother” (or UK equivalent thereof) cop opera where comic cut-out bad guys are identified, chased, cursed, cuffed around, and jugged, all in one hour with time out for commercials. It’s a vast understatement to say the program went against type.
With fewer and fewer people attending the spiraling Episcopal Church, some prelates seem to see opening the doors to Wall Street Occupiers as a potential solution. Since Occupiers lost their protest encampment at Boston’s Dewey Square, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has hospitably opened the doors of its Cathedral Church of St. Paul to the Occupiers to perpetuate the “conversation” about social justice. “The issues raised by the Occupy movement are important to be discussing in society, and so I’m happy to offer our cathedral to provide hospitality and a venue so those conversations can continue,” enthusiastically chimed cathedral dean the Very Reverend Jep Streit. According the diocesan website , Occupation “general assemblies” would begin at the cathedral on December 13 and would continue three times a week.
Gentlemen, gentlemen, let’s have some order here. You are both brilliant, witty, tall, and distinguished students of our country’s glory-soaked history, but let us, as they used to teach in school, be clear. Jeff Lord is quite right to point out that intervention in Central and South America is as American as baseball (damn straight; where would the national pastime be otherwise? and how else would those Latin athletes be laughing at those clever Yankee (the race not the club) merchants and their famous free market? You show ‘em Albert!). And not only South and Central America, as you well know. But neoconservatism is not the issue here, and Jim Antle is quite right to say so. Neoconservatism is a set (scarcely a system) of ideas that evolved in conversations between, and exchanges of essays by, a group of friends, all more or less of the WW II generation or just after — Irving Kristol, Daniel P. Moynihan, Robert Bartley, Leo Rosten, and a few others, notably Nathan Glazer and peripherally Mel Lasky (he and Tony Robinson and Stephen Spender were in a damp office in London). They were joined by still others, such as Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy and The American Spectator ‘s Mr. Tyrrell. The conversation was almost entirely concerned with domestic issues — civil rights and the public policies that ought, or ought not, to follow their legal and constitutional consolidation in the ’50s-60s, welfare matters (e.g., “conservative safety net welfare state” vs. reliance on private goodness and free markets), and many more. The foreign policy of the first Bush administration — the resort to war to enforce international borders — was widely perceived, and surely not inexactly, as a traditional exercise of state power, and it received broad support in our country as well as amongst others, including old allies like France and Britain and new-circumstantial ones like Syria and old-circumstantial ones like Saudi Arabia. Some of them even helped us, as per the Foreign Legion contingent that stayed in the rear, but I have it on good authority that was not for want of volunteering, only Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell were in the unilateral-chain-of-command mode where they felt comfortable and did it their way. The second war began as old-fashioned get-the-varmints warfare, but evolved with the nation-building ambitions of the move into Iraq. The notion of pre-emptive defense and punish-the-dictators and battle-cry-of-freedom-and-democracy beyond our own borders was not a neoconservative notion. It may have been a Wilsonian one, but I leave that to specialists in the matter, as it is not certain President Wilson’s “make the world safe for democracy” fantasy was more important in his own mind and in its effect on 20th century history than his “self-determination for all peoples” one. And anyway, neither the president nor his top men were neos in any recognizable sense, certainly not Mr. Rumsfeld or Mr. Cheney or Miss Rice, nor Mr. Wolfowitz, who is widely called a neo but who had taken his distances from the Committee on the Present Danger in the ’70s-80s when, organized by Democrats such as Mr. Nitze and Mr. Rostow and Mrs. Kirkpatrick and others and that attracted Senator Jackson as well as President Reagan (before he was president) and was championed by the then-neos, except Mr. Luttwak, but he too always took his distances from them, as did Prof. Bloom and Prof. Wohlstetter, Mr. Wolfowitz’s great teachers. Please correct me if I am wrong in any or all of these characterizations, I am quite open to being corrected on points of fact, history, and even, yes, judgment. But, and this is an important but, the neos via several of their key surviving members or their presumptive heirs, applauded and rationalized the enterprise, with some notable exceptions. And also but, and this too is an important but, are we really in neoconservative territory now? Well, you have to work it out for yourselves and I am happy to see you doing this in a spirited and courteous way. We will have to hope in the sound judgment of future historians and note only that it — and let us not, please, go Clintonesque and start arguing about what “it” means — did not work out as planned, but that is what the neoconservatives — the original items, taking a cue from Robbie Burns — taught us to expect of the best laid plans o’ mice an’ men.
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American International Policy and the Neoconservative Legacy
“We pride ourselves in punching above our weight here,” said the Australian minister of justice at a recent seminar in Hobart, Tasmania, on prisoner rehabilitation. His words ring true across a whole range of political, economic, social, and spiritual issues in this increasingly important country still known in the Northern Hemisphere as “Down Under.” A three-week speaking tour across six Australian states has given me an upbeat perspective on Down Under, from its churches to its culture and character. Yet the Aussies themselves are often surprisingly downbeat, or at least restrained, when it comes to explaining their burgeoning sense of successful nationhood. They mutter gloomily about “the GFC” (global financial crisis) as if they had not noticed that their banks, their currency, their small deficit, their debt, and their mining industry have been largely unscathed by it. Perhaps it takes a visitor to analyze why the new Australia has been so little afflicted either by the pessimism of old Europe or the self-doubt of contemporary America. Since the national religion here is sport, the role of God in Australian society is easily obscured. All glory, laud, and honor is more frequently accorded to cricketers than to Christians. Yet despite a general secularism, many churches are full. There is even a Bible Belt, the northwestern suburbs of Sydney, where the younger generation flock to evangelistic places of worship, most notably Hillsong, whose Sunday congregation exceeds 20,000. Hillsong is an octopus of a church whose Pentecostalist tentacles have created six Australian campuses and two international worship centers in London and New York. I spoke at Hillsong’s hub, which is a modernist complex of buildings set in a business park 30 miles north of Sydney Harbor Bridge. At this location its principal auditorium seats 3,000. When it was opened by former prime minister John Howard, more than 7,500 worshippers turned up, most of them in their teens and early twenties. The astonished prime minister, himself a dutiful Anglican, kept inquiring: What is happening? Why are these young people coming to this church in such huge numbers? These questions are asked by many other Australians in tones that range from the envious to the imitative. Yet there is no great mystery about Hillsong’s appeal to the rising generation. The church has been led for the past 20 years by a dynamic pastor, Brian Houston, whose style has much in common with U.S. church leaders like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. The preaching is biblical and spirit-filled, placing much emphasis on the relevance of church life to daily working life. More than 500 small groups, which Hillsong calls connect groups, act as a network of spiritual links to the main campuses. This network is energetically organized from the hub. So is church giving to good causes. At one recent Sunday service the Hillsong congregation donated $160,000 in a single offering to a charity that fights the trafficking of Asian women into prostitution. Asians loom large at Hillsong and in the national consciousness. Long gone are the days of White Australia and its racially exclusive immigration policy that would not even allow Asian spouses to become citizens by marriage. “In this country two Wongs don’t make a white,” cracked a 1960s minister as he refused to grant entry to the wife of a locally born Chinese Australian footballer. The quip accelerated the demise of White Australia. Today more than 12 percent of the country’s 24 million population are Asians—and rising. So are Asian businesses and students. At every venue on my speaking tour, particularly at universities, the largest element in the audience consisted of ethnic Chinese participants. Australia’s churches are being revitalized by Asian believers. The country’s second city, Melbourne, used to be notoriously staid in its ecclesiology. This was heavily influenced by Scottish Presbyterians and Baptists, who exercised a puritanical hold on licensing laws, Sunday shop closures, and pub opening times. Not anymore. If a resurrected Queen Victoria could come back to modern Melbourne, she would surely be amused by the high-spirited enthusiasm that sets the tone of the place. She might even go dancing in the aisles of once-gloomy churches built by the austere divines of her reign. One ponderous inner-city edifice of 19th-century Anglicanism has now been reborn and renamed as the CrossCultural Church of Christ. Half of its services are in Mandarin and two-thirds of its worshippers are immigrant families who hail from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, and mainland China. These new Australians are exuberant and expansionary in their faith. In the prosperous suburbs it is common to find church notice boards in Chinese calligraphy. At the bottom of one of them I read the telling line: English language service 10am every third Sunday . WHY IS THIS happening? Cynics say that God must have a sense of humor to preside over the rescue of European Christianity by representatives of the once-feared Yellow Peril. A more positive explanation is that spiritually minded Chinese, when liberated and geographically remote from the anti-Christian restrictions of the PRC, become on fire with thanks and praise for the blessings they receive in their new homeland. Australia has well been described as the lucky country. It became prosperous in the 20th century as a farm for the British. Now it is booming as a quarry for the Chinese. But these material riches are only one part of the story. As an island continent of climatic extremes, Australia has developed its own spirituality of survival and good neighborship. Bush fires, cyclones, tidal waves, droughts, earthquakes, floods, and pestilences are an integral part of life here. A people who cope regularly with the eccentricities of God are more tolerant and forgiving toward the eccentricities of man. One of the areas where this inclusiveness shows up is in the treatment of convicts. They have an affectionate status here, because they were the original settlers as deportees from English jails. I was touring the country to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Prison Fellowship Australia, the antipodean offshoot of the charity founded by Charles W. Colson. His vision of offender rehabilitation and redemption is perhaps more vibrantly fulfilled here than in any country of the world. That is because from the Hillsong campuses to the old cathedrals and the new Chinese churches there seem to be plenty of dedicated Christians willing to volunteer to help the prisoners described by Christ as “the least of my brethren.” Their work adds an impressive dimension to the spiritual life of Australia.
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Soaring Down Under
