Year: 2003

“Oh no, some Americans have changed the name of toast and fries in a pathetic protest of what we feel is an obstruction of our genuine security concerns. How exactly is that a bigger deal than France, this week, officially banning the booing of their National Anthem, an offense now punishable by prison time and cash fines? We Americans may be jingoistic flag-waving primitives, but we’re still allowed to jeer the national anthem.” – from the Letters Page. More jolly frog-bashing <a href = follows.

Some alternative interpretations.

“I do not believe in vile acquittals, phony appeasements, easy forgiveness. Even less, in the exploitation or the blackmail of the word Peace. When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It’s suicide.” – Oriana Fallaci, in her stirring piece in the Journal this morning. It really is a tour de force. I don’t agree with all of it, but I do understand and believe in its fundamental message. We are at war; we are under attack; this new war against Iraq is not a pre-emptive war started by us. It is the second part of a long and perilous self-defense against the forces of Islamism and totalitarianism. In all the petty shenanigans of the new League of Nations, we should try not to forget that, as Fallaci rightly reminds us. Remember, remember the 11th of September. That’s still what all this is about.

Who else do you think this is:

One senior official referred to the frantic negotiations with an epithet and put the blame for the delays on the Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who had insisted on the new resolution to gain crucial political support at home.

C’mon, Rummy. Patience. It’s worth another day to get those nine votes. It’s not over till it’s over.

AND AGAIN: Check out this piece from CNN:

To the dismay of the U.S. officials involved, the secret effort [for Iraqi military surrender] was first publicly hinted at Tuesday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. When asked at a press conference how the Iraqi military could signal support for the U.S. effort, Rumsfeld said, “They are being communicated with privately at the present time. They are being, will be communicated with in a more public way. And they will receive instructions so that they can behave in a way that will be seen and understood as being non-threatening.”

First offending a critical ally, now his own administration. He’s a great defense secretary but his lack of an edit function in public isn’t helping anyone.

THE JEWS: Here’s a quote worth reading:

We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity. Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.

Chomsky? Moran? International ANSWER? Nah. It’s our old friend, Patrick Buchanan. And it’s an even older charge, dual loyalty. Buchanan goes off on a somewhat deranged tirade – with some truly ugly moments:

Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.

Does anyone else hear the rhetorical echo here of “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer”? It seems to me that it should be perfectly legitimate to talk about the influence of, say, AIPAC, in Washington; and indeed, the force of thinkers sympathetic to the state of Israel on American foreign policy. As Mike Kinsley tartly notes, if AIPAC can boast of its own influence, why can’t others decry it? But the notion that this war needs justification beyond what is obviously America’s and the West’s self-interest seems to me to be paranoid and a little creepy. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments again – but as a red-blooded British-born Irish Catholic, I need no Jewish heritage to appreciate them. And the fact that Buchanan doesn’t even fully address the broader reasons and instead goes off on a rant against some American Jews is proof enough of where he’s coming from. These are ugly times. And they just got uglier.

The most concise and devastating piece yet on the alternative to war against Saddam appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now. Here’s the money quote from Walter Russell Meade:

Sanctions are inevitably the cornerstone of containment, and in Iraq, sanctions kill. In this case, containment is not an alternative to war. Containment is war: a slow, grinding war in which the only certainty is that hundreds of thousands of civilians will die. The Gulf War killed somewhere between 21,000 and 35,000 Iraqis, of whom between 1,000 and 5,000 were civilians. Based on Iraqi government figures, UNICEF estimates that containment kills roughly 5,000 Iraqi babies (children under 5 years of age) every month, or 60,000 per year. Other estimates are lower, but by any reasonable estimate containment kills about as many people every year as the Gulf War – and almost all the victims of containment are civilian, and two-thirds are children under 5. Each year of containment is a new Gulf War. Saddam Hussein is 65; containing him for another 10 years condemns at least another 360,000 Iraqis to death. Of these, 240,000 will be children under 5.

That’s the difference between the French and much of the American “peace” movement. The French are at least candid about their hope that a pretense of disarmament could lead to renewed trade with Saddam. The more legit peace protestors, when they occasionally diverge from haranguing the evils of America, presumably want the sanctions maintained. That’s neither justice nor peace.

Dan Drezner makes a hopeful case for future Iraqi democratization in TNR Online. He looks at over-looked factors such as proximity to emerging demcocracies (Turkey) and the impact of defeat in war:

The area specialists aren’t necessarily wrong; democratizing Iraq won’t be easy. But the conditions aren’t nearly as barren as these experts suggest, and the potential upside is enormous. If a democratic transition were to succeed in Iraq, then Syria, suddenly surrounded by established democracies (Israel and Turkey) and emerging democracies (Iraq and Jordan), might start to feel nervous as well. Combine democratization in the Fertile Crescent with the continued liberalization of Morocco, Bahrain, and Qatar, and suddenly the neocon vision of a fourth wave of democratization spreading across the Middle East begins to look plausible.

I’m not sure I’m as hopeful. But the situation isn’t as hopeless as the State Department makes it out to be. (On that subject, Lawrence Kaplan’s devastation of Foggy Bottom in the current TNR is terrific as usual. But you’ve got to pay up for the piece.)

POSEUR ALERT: “It’s time to create a new vocabulary of dissent, one that makes a clear connection between war fever and thug power. There’s no more urgent task. The dawgs of war are about to be unleashed. Thousands will die, billions will be spent and most of us will have to do with less. These are the wages of following a leader who is strong but wrong. He’s the man; we’re his bitches.” – Richard Goldstein, in the Nation.

Check out this advertisement recently published in the Weekly Standard:

The text is not what I’m getting at. I’m all for the right to free speech – even hateful hysteria. But the imagery is truly shocking. It’s out of Der Sturmer. It’s portraying a gay priest as an animal, a wolf or a dog. It descends into the most vicious anti-gay stereotypes – the limp wrists, the foppish clothes, the clerical cape. If the equivalent kind of image of a black person – huge lips, Afro hair, bongo drums, etc. – or of a Jew – hook-nosed, money-counting, devious – were presented to a respectable publication, it would never see the light of day. Yes, it’s an ad. But even ads are vetted for basic standards of taste and decency. This one is a piece of Goebbels-style hatred. And yet the Standard’s editors seemed to have no problem with it. How depressing.

From the email in-tray:

I’m out on the street smoking a cigarette and this black dude, wearing a “No War Against Iraq” T-shirt and a bag on his shoulder, comes up to me and asks, “Sir, are you against the war or for the war?” “For the war,” I say, at which point he pulls a T-shirt out of his bag that says, “Kick Saddam’s Ass!,” and tries to sell it to me. I said, “No thanks,” and he moved on. Is this a great country or what?

A similar thing happened to me at the “Women For Peace” march last Saturday. I asked one of the button-vendors if he had a “Go Saddam!” button. He said he didn’t, but it might be a good seller. Then as I walked away, shaking my head, he yelled back: “We’re gonna kick that guy’s ass!” He seemed quite enthusiastic about it. War profiteers. It says something about where we are that they’re almost reassuring. More letters can be found here.

Alan Cowell’s report from London on the alleged precariousness of Tony Blair as prime minister is a masterpiece of hyperbole. If you know anything about British politics, you will immediately recognize the people quoted upfront in the piece as extremists of various sorts. Tam Dalyell is described as a “maverick.” He’s actually a far-left extremist, whose visceral anti-Americanism is legendary. To make him your source in your lead while consigning the second most important figure in British politics, Gordon Brown, to the last paragraph is simply bizarre. The inference is that left-wing MPs could simply vote Blair out of office. But Blair controls the committee which would allow such a vote to take place and it’s solidly behind him. Clare Short, for her part, is not in any sense “influential,” as Cowell describes her. She too is from the pacifist left of the party, and Blair’s decision to ignore her has been widely viewed in London as a sign of Blair’s strength, not his impending demise. Cowell concedes there is no threat to Blair’s parliamentary majority. To get a measure of where opinion currently hangs, check out the Guardian this morning – one of the major press opponents of his policy. It still dissents but accompanies this with admiration of Blair’s honesty. Of Blair’s political future, the Guardian opines:

For his pains, hot and furious criticism has been heaped upon his head, sometimes in this newspaper. It is possible that the damage will be lasting, possible that his standing is permanently impaired. But there is one thing Mr Blair cannot be accused of: he may be wrong on Iraq, badly wrong, but he has never been less than honest.

That doesn’t sound like the sound of an impending coup to me; and a few calls to London this morning confirms this. Yes, some far-left Labour party members would be happy to see him go. But even the Daily Telegraph concedes that the left agitators “[a]t present represent a small but vocal minority and there is no sign yet of widespread support for challenging the Prime Minister.” I’m not saying Blair isn’t in trouble. He’s far more exposed than Bush. But the tenor of the New York Times’ story reeks of Rainesian intervention to me. Cowell must know this story is excessive. But his editors have a war to undermine.

Yesterday, I suggested that in some ways, we’re headed backward toward the nineteenth century. This stimulating, long, essay by Lee Harris in TCS argues the opposite: that weapons of mass destruction together with fantasist Islamism or nihilist totalitarianism make our predicament completely and world-historically new. I wish I could see a way to rebut this theory easily, but I cannot. I’ve learned a lot from Robert Kaplan’s analysis of a complete security breakdown in whole parts of the globe; what I haven’t put together coherently in my own head – because I’m afraid to? – is what the combination of world anarchy and destructive technology could lead to. In the past, we conceived of the threat of warfare coming from rival states which had built up various means of economic and thereby military strength. But now we have the reality of completely weak states, or parasitic states, or failed states or neo-states (like al Qaeda) getting nukes by buying them, or stealing them or smuggling the component parts. They can also find ways to detonate them anonymously so that the civilized world is incapable of rational response or even rational deterrence. It seems to me that the chances of something like this happening are extremely high.

THE PRE-EMPTIVE OPTION: Which leaves us with very few good options. But the obvious one is pro-active pre-emption: going in and getting rid of such regimes and entities, destroying them, or occupying them. But doing so – invading terrorism-sponsoring states, before they have formally attacked us – violates the basic principles of the international order we have understandably come to cherish. So we have a profound – and new – conflict between security and sovereignty, between a catastrophe-free world and international law. You might be able to find a way to square this cricle if all the civilized countries in the world agreed about the nature of this new threat and exercized collective security against rogue states – but it would have to be collective security with one standard for the civilized world and one for everywhere else. Our current U.N. (which includes rogues states and makes no distinction between them and others) naturally doesn’t recognize such a double-standard. Moreover our civilized partners simply don’t believe that the threat is that grave. Even after 9/11, even many Americans don’t believe the threat is that serious. This is therefore the key context of our current impasse. Europeans simply don’t believe that we’re living in a radically more dangerous and unstable world. Or they think that mild measures can temporarily solve the problem – like porous and largely inneffective inspection regimes in Iraq. So we are at a deadlock. And if we cannot get consensus on Iraq – with umpteen U.N. resolutions and the precedent of a previous unprovoked war – what hope is there of getting consensus if Iran’s mullahs go nuclear? Or North Korea’s nut-case gets several nukes? Or someone else out there we have yet to hear from decides to go to heaven via a suitcase nuke in L.A.?

A DISMAL THOUGHT: I’m left with the conclusion that we will only get such a consensus in favor of pre-emption after the destruction of a major Western city, or a chemical or biological catastrophe. In this sense, Blair and Bush may simply be ahead of their time. And what they see as the potential threat is so depressing and terrifying that it’s perhaps only understandable that the world for a while will wish to look the other way. The truth is and we may as well admit it: we have failed to convince the world, just as Churchill failed to convince the world in the 1930s. And as 9/11 recedes a little, we are even tempted to falter in this dreadful analysis ourselves. The difference between now and the 1930s, of course, is that we may now have Churchill in office – but before the world has become convinced of his rectitude: history repeated as a deeply tragic farce.

STILL, SKEPTICISM: To add to the complications, we may be right about the basic analysis but wrong in this particular case. Perhaps North Korea is more potentially dangerous and therefore worthy of more immediate attention than Iraq. We live in an opaque world, however good our intelligence, however solid our leadership. I liked this point of Harris’s:

Once the world-historical magnitude of the risk is understood, it is possible for men of good will to differ profoundly over the wisdom of this or that particular response – and not only possible, but necessary. But this must be done in a climate free of pettiness and personalities: the cult of naxefve cynicism – that oxymoron that characterizes so much of what passes today for intellectual sophistication – must be dismantled and as soon as possible if we are to make our response as intelligent and as creative as it must and can be. To call prudence appeasement is wrong. But to call the United States’ response a bid for empire is simply silly.

I’m a little chastened by that criticism. Some on the far left and right are indeed appeasing, or even sympathizing with the enemy. Others on the near left are putting partisanship before strategic clarity. (Others on the left are fully clear-sighted about what is at stake.) But some criticism of our Iraq policy is well-intentioned and based not on denial but mere prudential disagreement. On balance, I think war against Saddam now is essential. In fact, in retrospect, I fear we may have lost a lot by not going to war unilaterally months ago. But the most important thing – and this is the main import of Harris’ essay – is to remember the new realities we’re all trying to make sense of. Just because they’re truly terrifying doesn’t mean we can safely try to forget them. And it is impossible to keep that context clear in our minds without also constantly remembering that day eighteen months ago. There really is a connection between 9/11 and Iraq – at the deepest and most meaningful level imaginable. We may endure more such days before we summon the will to do what we have to. Or we may have the luck and the leadership to prevent it. I’m praying for the latter.