Bush has a business school mentality, and I think he feels that proper management requires giving a little to each of the factions he manages. Thus, a little anti-terrorism to the Rumsfeld crowd, a little electoral pandering to the Rove types, and a little diplomacy to the Powell/State department guys. Then he stands above the fray and figures that everyone’s a little bit happy and a little bit angry and so he must be doing a good job.

I suspect that this approach doesn’t even work when running a business, but I know that it’s a lousy way to formulate a foreign policy.

It should be added that in the one area of Bush’s competence and success, as a war leader, he now seems lost and directionless. His attempt to place the Iraq occupation under a U.N. mandate seems the height of folly, undermining everything America has achieved or hopes to achieve there. And reports are that Rove has told Bush there must be no more major military confrontations with terrorist states before the 2004 election.

The bottom line is, he’s done a lot against the terrorists, but they are still there and he’s not going after them aggressively enough, and so we find ourselves in an ongoing conflict with no victory in sight or even envisioned.

We need a much more ambitious strategy aimed at victory. I don’t know exactly what that would consist of. But Helprin’s idea of demoralizing the militants and returning the Islamic world to a salutary state of quiescence through massive display of force (which as Helprin admits would require a large scale build-up of the U.S. military) is, whether we agree with it or not, at least a coherent plan aiming at victory, something that Bush is not offering at all.

The best one could say for Bush’s approach is that it is damaging and ennervating the terrorists and that perhaps over time it would have the same effect as Helprin’s much more aggressive approach. But that seems very doubtful, especially given the signals he’s been giving to terror-supporting states like Syria and Saudi Arabia that they are safe from us. They’ve learned that if they make some slight concessions, some accommodating gestures to the U.S., that they can survive and continue their support of terror.

Well, just when I felt I had waited long enough to say that the results of my Bush experiment were definitive, Bush appears to have changed course and admitted the road map has “stalled,” though he’s changed direction so many times before that this probably means nothing and he will doubtless try to start it up again. This acknowledgement of a failure (or rather of a stall) does not persuade me that he planned out the road map in the calculating way that I had earlier suggested as a possibility. I think his conduct and words suggest that he really believed in it, and is now reluctantly being forced by events to recognize that it has so far failed. In other words, I still think he has followed a course of staggering folly.

Here’s the beginning of the story in today’s New York Times:

BUSH ADMITS MIDEAST PLAN IS STALLED AND BLAMES ARAFAT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — President Bush acknowledged today, for the first time, that the Middle East peace talks that he had thrown so much of his political capital behind had stalled, and he laid the blame solely on the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat.

Mr. Arafat, the president said, had undercut the efforts of the Palestinian prime minister embraced by the White House, Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned this month. While Mr. Abbas’s resignation on Sept. 6 effectively signaled the breakdown of talks over the United States peace plan, known as the road map, the president had not publicly conceded the setback until today.

“Prime Minister Abbas was undermined at all turns by the old order — that meant Mr. Arafat,” Mr. Bush said during a joint news conference this morning at Camp David with King Abdullah of Jordan.

Mr. Bush added, “That’s why we’re now stalled.”

At least publicly today, Mr. Bush offered no clear path for how he would achieve that goal or even how he would revive the peace talks.

He also did not mention Mr. Arafat’s nominee for a new Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, whom the administration has so far treated with reserve. Instead Mr. Bush simply repeated his demand that Palestinian terrorism must end, saying, “the people of the Palestinian territory must understand if they want peace, they must have leadership who is absolutely 100 percent committed to fighting off terror.”

“Mr. Arafat has failed in that effort, Mr. Bush said. “And hopefully, at some point in time, a leadership of the Palestinian Authority will emerge which will then commit itself 100 percent to fighting off terror. And then we’ll be able to consolidate the power necessary to fight off terror. And when that happens, the world will come together to provide the conditions for hope.”

Much of the “stupidity” attributed to Bush based on things like his seeming to pander to radical muslims, apparent support of “peace process,” and various domestic actions might also be explained by the assumption that he is practising a realpolitik. We have to remember the left is out to trash him on anything they can, and they have the media wing of their party under complete control. It would be all too easy to smear Bush as racist and prejudiced if he spoke truly about Islam; if he got tough on the Israeli - Palestine situation, he would be trashed as never having tried to seek peace. Such arguments would not carry much weight with the people who read this forum, but they would probably be quite effective on large numbers of relatively uninformed and apathetic voters in the crucial middle, especially when endlessly funneled through the megaphone of the NY Times and the broadcast networks. Bush needs to seem to be going through the motions that comply with the unrealistic assumptions about the world and about human nature that most of his fellow citizens entertain. I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said that human beings have only a very limited ability to accept reality. Instead, they wallow in wishful thinking, and to be successful, a president must accommodate it.

Thucydides ignores my whole starting point of this discussion, which was the concession that Bush in initiating the road map may have been practicing Macchiavellian realpolitik. I then concluded that further evidence, namely Bush’s subsequent persistence in the road map despite the fact that it was a manifest disaster, made the realpolitik explanation increasingly difficult or impossible to maintain.

At what point would Thucydides concede that a political leader is persisting in a destructive policy, not because he is cleverly trying to disarm his political opponents, but because he fails to see the policy’s destructiveness, i.e., because he is incompetent?

If the realpolitik theory is correct, Bush must persist in paying lip service to peace process, road map, and other concepts which meet the need of the public to see human beings as au fond reasonable, and subject to compromise. Even though the process is shown again and again to be futile, he must seem to persist in it, so long as the public is not prepared to accept that the Arab world is utterly wedded as a matter of psychological need to an irredeemable hatred of the Jews, which serves as a compensatory fantasy for their own deep sense of inadequacy and failure. As I said, raising this issue frankly would expose Bush to leftist attack that could have considerable effect. He can’t really set out to educate the public out of assumptions that are so fundamental to a sense of self identity that nothing short of a shattering inner personal change would have effect. And perhaps, if things are as I describe, the best policy is to keep on with what seems to be idiotic muddling, while trying behind the scenes to change the dynamic. The real test is whether Arafat is eventually cleared out, and the Palestine Authority changed into something else than a terrorist government. What is hard to know is whether anything in fact is going on behind the scenes to change the dynamics. Surely Israel’s regular killing of Hamas and other leaders is taking its toll, and perhaps completion of the fence will frustrate the terror weapon. While it is very frustrating to listen to State Department - U.N. - liberal nonsense, it must be admitted that these are significant developments that would probably never have occurred under the former U.S. president.

An interesting and reasonable reply by Thucydides. He’s saying that political realism in modern circumstances requires a leader NEVER to renounce liberal premises openly.

But I disagree, especially in this case. I disagree because President Bush had ALREADY renounced the liberal premises of the “peace process” in his June 2002 speech in which he said—recognizing reality and rejecting insane lies—that there would be no more “peace process” until the Palestinians had definitively and actually gotten rid of terrorism. That speech scattered the liberal haze of nine years of “peace process.” Bush was not harmed or destroyed politically by that stand, but gained power and leverage from it. And then HE THREW IT ALL AWAY, when he started up the road map in direct contradiction to his June 2002 position. In my view, his gross violation of his own stated principles was far more damaging to him than sticking with his principles would have been. It was, in short, a supremely UNREALISTIC act.

So Thucydides and I have a different view of realism. He says realism means going along with utopian lies, for the sake of protecting oneself from one’s enemies, even as one tries to sneak around the lies in practice. I say realism means speaking the truth.

Bush threatened a suspension of peace process, but this was not credible, because as much as I would like to see it, he simply couldn’t move to an intransigent position for the reasons given earlier. Had he persisted, the consequences would have begun to build. Politics is the art of the possible, and we must face the fact that most of our public simply can’t accept the realistic way in which we see this matter.

If Bush had stayed consistently with that position, argued for it, shown the insanity of the opposite position, he could have helped move the world away from the insane and evil liberal belief system that is responsible for the horrible mess in the Mideast. That would have been leadership and realism. Instead, he folded, helping legitimize the illusions and delivering the world into further madness. That is NOT realism.

By Thucydides’ reasoning, a leader must always subscribe to, or appear to subscribe to, the prevailing view of the elites. Therefore Reagan when he called the U.S.S.R an “evil empire” was being unrealistic, because he greatly upset liberals when he said it. (In fact, they never got over it and are still indignant about it to this day.) Yet Reagan’s “unrealistic” act of speaking the moral truth embolded the people living under that tyranny and helped lead to the demise of the Soviet Union.

Thus I reject Thucydides’ concept of realism.

thucydides wrote:
“Politics is the art of the possible,…”

And when the culture has gotten to the point where only liberal answers are possible, then politics becomes the art of the liberal.

Indeed, one ventures to ask why Thucydides, being a conservative or traditionalist, would even be interested in politics, given the fact that, as Matt points out, he assumes that politics must always be liberal politics.

I had an email conversation with a leading paleoconservative writer a few months ago about Israel. His writings were quite one-sided in opposition to Israel. After the usual time wasted in quibbling over historical details, I simply reduced it to this question:

“Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that Israel has been 100% wrong, and the Palestinians 100% right, throughout their mutual history. Now, given that the Palestinians continually swear, particularly in their Arabic writings, that they will not be satisfied until “the Jews are driven into the sea,” what should Israel do today?”

First, he denied that the Palestinians say any such thing, claiming that Nasser made such a quote decades ago and that Israel’s defenders have been reciting it ever since. So, I had to painstakingly document what the Arab press in general, and Palestinian leaders in particular, have said in very recent years. At that point, the discussion pretty much came to an end. He had no answer.

Even President Bush’s original precondition for the road map — that the PLO bring terror to a halt — was far too weak. That does not require them to renounce their desires to exterminate all Israelis. Would we negotiate with any entity that was committed to nothing less than our extermination?

The Road Map was of course unworkable from the start. Bush was still right to push it, however. Just because the Israeli right happen to be correct on something does not mean that it is in either our or Israel’s best interests to support them on it.

What supporting the Road Map did was give Bush diplomatic cover as he prosecuted the war on Iraq. Moreover, it leaves America in a position to help Israel out as an honest broker later on. A statement of unconditional support for Israel would do little to help them, and a great deal to hurt us.

And if Israel ever does decide that a military solution is the only solution to their problem, the best help we could give them would be to stay out of the whole mess.

Mr. Auster and Matt do me an injustice by suggesting that my views amount to an endorsement of liberal politics. It is simply that in an environment where so many basic attitudes derived from the left (Jean-Francois Revel used to refer to “pidgin Marx”) have become deeply ingrained, a successful politician must choose his battles. Reagan was right to say “tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev,” and to call Soviet Russia the Evil Empire, because most of the public already thought that way, or were close enough to it to be convinced by a forthright statement from a leader, even if the elites were shocked. It was politically effective for him to do so. However, I don’t think the public is anywhere close to accepting the reality of the Middle East, which is tantamount to a malevolent mass psychosis of the Arab peoples as regards Israel. An optimistic view might be that Bush is actually engaged in a slow process of bringing them to that point by further demonstrating the futility of the process, while not giving up abruptly in such manner as to enable his enemies to say he never “tried for peace.” I too am enormously frustrated by all this, for nothing is more damaging to the credibility of the war on terror than waffling on terror practised by Arafat. However, we conservatives must recognize that we operate in an environment that is far from sympathetic, and what seems eminently reasonable to us will not necessarily be acceptable to the public. We must proceed with caution, and select our battles carefully. I simply wanted to suggest that Bush’s actions may be consistent with this, even though I have no way of knowing for sure that they do.

I admit the possibility that Thucydides’ analysis of Bush is correct, though I personally doubt it.

Thrasymachus wrote: “What supporting the Road Map did was give Bush diplomatic cover as he prosecuted the war on Iraq.”

Wrong. Bush started the road map after the major military action was completed. Second, what kind of cover has he had? Almost the whole world opposed our war on Iraq.

It seems to me that every modern President has entertained the delusion of bringing about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. And each one seems to actually believe they can succeed, always oversimplifying the nature and scope of the struggle, when any half-brain can see that the posturing is, well, just that.

Maybe someone like President Carter really was stupid enough to believe it, and maybe our current President is too. But it seems to follow like a script each time, a different twist or turn in the plot here or there, but essentially the same story.

What makes each successive President walk onto this stage to act out this tired old parady? Why do we insist on placating the Arab world, even as we jeopardize the security of Israel and stability of the region? Why do we continuously play this silly game?

Oil! Oil!!! OIL ! ! ! ! ! !

Did I mention “oil”?

Take oil completely out of this picture and imagine what the international political dynamics would be like.

Once again: that’s OIL!

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/14/bush.mideast/

March 14th was the speech. As I recall, it was the first news about Administration plans on Israel after the Powell trip failure.

And no it hasn’t worked to give the Bush Administration any international cover. But I do recall that the diplomatic offensive on Israel was very strong leading up to the war. I never particularly understood the rhetoric of “Bush needs to handle Israel before Iraq” but that was what everyone was saying at the time. The Administration considered itself vulnerable on that for some reason.

And Joel, do not worry, the oil will start running out soon enough. That is when the real mess will start. We will stop playing these silly games with the Arabs, and start playing them with China and Russia instead. I somehow wonder how staunch an ally Israel will remain to us in that game, but it is not something I trouble myself about.

To expand on Joel’s point, far from OIL making us go AGAINST the Arabs and FOR Israel, it makes us repeatedly APPEASE the Arabs and go AGAINST Israel. The anti-war/anti-Israel party thus have it 180 degrees wrong, just as they have it 180 degrees wrong when they blame Arab terrorism on Israeli intransigence, when it fact it’s due to Israeli weakness and appeasement.

In reply to Thrasy, yes, the road map was mentioned before the war, but no big deal was made of it. And the big “peace” offensive (based on the ridiculous notion that Arab-Israel peace was the necessary pre-requisite for U.S. war on Iraq) was attempted and dropped months before the war started.

Mr. Auster’s follow-up is dead-on. It infuriates me to hear the “No Blood For Oil” slogan, when it is clear that it is ISRAELI blood that is being spilled over our lust for oil — but those who repeat that cliche clearly do not have that in mind.

Our oil dependence is catastrophic, by now I would say it is _treasonous_.

I have concluded that we have the MEANS to break from it, but do not yet have the WILL. The oil conglamerates have too much power over government and over Wall Street to permit it. And of course the Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, have the clout and the money to influence our policies on this point, which presents yet another security risk. Much as Chinese money was used to help prop up President Clinton, to the detriment of our security as nuclear technology was quietly passed along.

A Traditionalist Conservative platform must include a plan for transitioning away from oil to renewable resources for fuel. Imagine what it would mean to our farmers! who would grow high biomass crops, decentralizing the supply — no more having to transport our fuel thousands of miles. Not only would this change the course of the Middle East, but it would be a boon to our own Mid-West! No more dependence on hostile regimes! No need to prop up despots! No need to enrich people who would destroy us! No need to equivocate over Israel’s legimate self-defense and the terrorists who blow up innocents!

There are other sources we can look at besides this as well. Methanol could become our own source of fuel; we could even become exporters. We have the land, the technology, the manpower. Henry Ford demonstrated at Iron Mountain that this is entirely feasible. We just need the leadership.

The Traditionalist platform, so far, includes other proposals that seem no less improbable than this. But are we not motivated only by what is true? By what is right? And eliminating our dependence on oil — is this not the right thing?

President Bush is not pursuing this farce because he is stupid. He is doing it out of perceived necessity, as previous Presidents have done, due to the profound significance of oil to our economic well-being. (To say nothing of the role oil has played in his own family’s wealth.) As impossible as it might seem to break from oil — well, stupidity isn’t curable is it? ;-) Our dependence on oil is at least theoretically correctable.

Where there is no vision, the people perish!

The “vision” Proverbs speaks of is not to be found on this earth.

A “plan” to reengineer the entire world economy is not conservative. Fortunately the U.S., Canada, and our north Atlantic allies are very rich in oil, the price of which has been falling relative to inflation for a century.

The same paleo fantasy which holds that we can be free from political and military struggle with other nations is behind the belief that we can be economically independent from other countries. There is considerable room to discuss whether our current policies serve our national interest, but the realities of oil can’t be wished away. And when newer technologies supplant it, we’ll find that world supplies of manganese or whatever we need then are in the hands of insane African despots or the like.

Agricola speaks of the “paleo fantasy which holds that we can be free from political and military struggle with other nations … “

That belief of the paleocons shows their deep connection with Thomas Jefferson, who also hated war because it would increase the power of the state, and who believed that all war was avoidable. Thus his infamous Embargo policy of 1807-09, which ruined New England economically and brought his own presidency to a humiliating close. His (quintesentially liberal) notion was that all men are driven by rational self-interest, including commercial self-interest, not by passion. Therefore if America, instead of threatening the use of force against the warring powers of Europe who were interfering with our shipping, cut off all trade with them instead, those powers would stop their hostile behavior toward us. He rejected military preparedness as a matter of principle. His policies greatly increased tensions and helped lead to the War of 1812.

The basic, utopian thought process is the same as with the paleos. War is bad because it enlarges the state. Therefore we will imagine that war is never necessary and we will not deal with or prepare to fight foreign threats even when they present themselves to us. And anyone who does see the existence of foreign threats, i.e., anyone who sees reality, is a “monarchist” (Jefferson), a “fascist” (modern liberals) or a “neocon imperialist” (paleocons).

It was Madison’s decision to invade Canada that was the direct cause of the war of 1812 (which we lost). When the plan of the war “hawks” to take Canada at a blow failed, I imagine that Jefferson’s idea of not going to war with the British Great Power started looking pretty good about then.

War is bad because it enlarges the state. But you can realize this without being a pacifist. Historically, we have gone to war much too often and for bad reasons. There are some good wars, but they are far fewer than is commonly supposed. That is no utopian point, but a deadly practical one.

Thrasy underestimates the rejection of reality by both Jefferson and the paleocons. Jefferson as a matter of principle eschewed military preparedness because he thought, to paraphrase his modern liberal descendants, “violence never solves anything.” The paleocons still rail against America’s involvement in World War II. Buchanan would have accepted a world in which Hitler would be “the master of Europe,” and America “the mistress of the West.” The idea that people who could accept Hitler controlling half the world are “practical” is laughable.

The rejection of reality is clear on another thread here. An antiwar poster discusses the “unjust” treatment of non-Jews by the Israeli state. The contrast between the way which Israel treats non-Jews and the way a Palestinian state would treat Jews is too stark to need discussing. Paleos and libertarians so frequently emphasize that Israel is socialist, and an apartheid state, as if Syria or Iran are free market, tolerant societies.

I’m willing to consider arguments that support of Israel is not in the U.S. national interest, but it’s obvious that the destruction of Israel by savages would be a loss for decency and civilization. Why do non-interventionists always have to twist themselves into such unseemly positions of moral equivalence?

“Why do non-interventionists always have to twist themselves into such unseemly positions of moral equivalence?”

Because they are not acting on the basis of fact, reason, morality, and enlightened self-interest, but on the basis of passion, resentment, and hatred.

Consider Clark Coleman’s account of his correspondence with a well-known paleocon about Israel. Mr. Coleman said to him, you engage in these one-sided denunciations of Israel, while ignoring the fact that the Arabs seek Israel’s destruction. The well-known paleocon replied, Arabs don’t seek Israel’s destruction, that’s a distortion of a quote of Nasser’s from decades ago. Mr. Coleman then showed him a list of recent quotes by Arabs calling for the destruction of Israel. The well-known paleocon didn’t reply. So this paleocon completely ignored the actual threats to Israel, and when they were pointed out to him, he refused to acknowledge them.

I would encourage Mr. Coleman to publish this exchange as I think it would be most informative as to the real mentality we are dealing with here.

I wonder if Thrasymachus isn’t oversimplifying the cause of our entry into the War of 1812. There was much more to it than that, particularly concerning the British blockade impeding our access to Russian hemp imports, which were vital to our economy and to our military.

Well, I am going to decline to publish the email exchange, as I don’t have permission from the other party. But I will comment about the general paleo-con/paleo-libertarian responses to the war in Iraq.

A general rule of persuading others is that you should not claim more than is necessary. I would think that a paleo opposition to the war would have centered upon a few conservative ideas:

1) Government tends to expand its powers during wartime, so the burden of proof (from a conservative point of view) should always be on those advocating war.

2) Because nations are not “proposition nations” but are cultural entities, and because culture matters greatly in supporting a particular political structure, it is foolish to think that we can easily build new nations and new governments in cultures that have known little of Western values for millenia.

3) Given that the justified invasion of Afghanistan has already presented us with the monumental task of building such a new nation in that country, taking on a second (and even bigger) nation-building task threatens to stretch our resources, a.k.a. “imperial overstretch”, which is well documented in history.

4) War takes the focus off what is needed domestically, e.g. controlling immigration, both legal and illegal, and controlling borders, and instead lulls the citizenry into thinking that there is a panacea overseas somewhere.

I think that these points could strike responsive chords across a spectrum of conservatives, and they do not constitute divisive, unpersuasive political rhetoric.

Instead of just sticking to these points, paleos have drowned out these ideas (which they have sometimes made, but which they don’t focus on) by screaming the following points ad nauseam:

1) There never were any WMDs. George Bush and his advisors lied to us.

2) This war is all about Israel’s interests, not America’s interests.

3) This war is all due to the Jewish neocon cabal, who not only put Israel’s interests first, but have a blood lust for world empire, etc.

These (and similar) claims are very subjective, will likely never be “proven” but will be accepted or rejected based on how prejudicially receptive the listener is when first hearing them. They will tend to be more divisive and less persuasive than the arguments I listed. Furthermore, the first argument is subject to disproof. Having one of your arguments disproven weakens your whole case, so you don’t make weak arguments that are unnecessary to your case.

A good lawyer learns that if he tells the jury, “Here are 4 reasons that my client is not guilty:” and then lists one weak, implausible argument followed by three good ones, he has damaged his case terribly. Far better would have been: “Here are 3 reasons …” and omit the weak one. A juror in the first case might think, “Hmmm. This guy is not above feeding me a bunch of bull, so I don’t know what I can trust from him.”

The paleos think the best approach is to fling as many arguments out there as possible and hope some of the mud sticks. There seems to be more animus towards neocons and Israel than rationality in their motivations. They really cannot see straight on the issue, so their arguments become mere foaming at the mouth.

An excellent statement by Mr. Coleman. This is one of the best critiques of the anti-war paleocons I have seen.

Agricola writes: “A “plan” to reengineer the entire world economy is not conservative.”

How is it ‘conservative’ to continue our dependence on foreign oil?? There are times when these terms ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ become overused to the point where they lose all coherent meaning. Next thing my anti-oil position will be called ‘racist.’ ;-)

“Fortunately the U.S., Canada, and our north Atlantic allies are very rich in oil, the price of which has been falling relative to inflation for a century.”

Great. But the Arab countries can still sway the supply and price enough to hurt us. And enriching them over this substance poses a long-term threat to our country and to our ally Israel. Frankly, I think the latter problem is the greater, but I still recall the long waits in lines at the gas station during the Carter years, where you could only buy gas on certain days depending on what the last number or letter on your license plate was. :-o It was a real mess, and showed how our dependence makes us very vulnerable.

Of course, I recognize that we can’t be completely independent economically from other countries, but how that justifies an argument that we ought to _remain_ dependent on oil in particular escapes me.

“There is considerable room to discuss whether our current policies serve our national interest, but the realities of oil can’t be wished away.”

Exactly. And I am asserting that our dependence on oil does not serve our national interest. And I’m not about wishing it away, we ought to DO something about it! And we DO have the means. But I brought this up specifically in connection over our policies on the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. Surely you would recognize that our oil dependence is a major factor in this. I would argue that it is THE driving force behind our two-faced policy in dealing with Israel. We harm Israel by enriching (and arming) her enemies, and we harm her by restraining her legitimate defense against those who seek her destruction. And we do it largely because of OIL.

“And when newer technologies supplant it…”

Excellent! So you do have a long-term vision on this! :-) I appreciate your use of ‘when’ rather than ‘if.’ Maybe we’re not so far apart after all

Well, oil *is* black! Gas lines during the Carter years were caused by domestic price controls, not “dependence” on foreign oil.

As for the rest of the thread: mainstream, respectable conservatives have to carefully monitor what they say and even what they think, since it might interfere with their friend’s magazine or their employment prospects. I’m happy to not be a neocon so that I don’t feel any pressure to say or believe anything but what I think. But why, when paleos have the freedom to say anything they want, do they want to rant about Bush being Goebbels and Israel being the real enemy?