The media was full of panic stories over the weekend. We’re losing! Bin Laden is still alive! Abdul Haq was killed! Quagmire! The usual panic-mongers – poor Maureen needs a vacation – are having cows. The cynics, like Frank Rich in Saturday’s Times, can’t wait to get back to lambasting the president for his corporate ties and the mess that’s pretty evident in our attempt to mount a homeland defense. Some of such criticism is valid and important. The administration does need a kick in the butt on its passivity and disorganization in the face of bio-warfare. But much of the rest is so September 10. Look, this is going to be a long, long war. To his great credit, president Bush told us as much weeks ago. The Washington Post gets it right today with another sane editorial (the Post is fast becoming the essential national newspaper in this conflict). Sure, we need to adjust. More ground troops and fiercer attacks on the Taliban are necessary, as John McCain has argued. Military considerations – acts of self-defense, remember – should take immediate precedence over diplomatic coalition-managing. What Powell doesn’t seem to understand is that there’s no more persuasive diplomatic argument than military victory. So I’m sorry, but Ramadan should provide no respite for our war. And we have some good news. Much of the Taliban hard infrastructure is history. Much of the military machinery for an effective campaign are now in place. If Bob Woodward is to be believed, the anthrax campaign might have been pioneered by domestic crackpots. If this is true (and I still have my doubts), then it’s very good news. It means that whatever second strike al Qaeda was planning against us has either failed or been postponed. It means that the gruesome logic that would have meant massive escalation in response to a foreign government’s bio-terror can be avoided. We’ll see. But I’m an optimist on this war. We’ve already taken a much-delayed strike at al Qaeda’s network; we have revamped our laws to get a better grip on them; we have cut off their financing; we have set up a credible if still imperfect international police effort to track them. Let’s keep our perspective and keep our nerve. These are very early days. And the cause is just.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The London “Left” intelligentsia are now completely defeatist, look on the situation as hopeless and all but wish to surrender. How easy it ought to have been to foresee.” – George Orwell, July 1940. It took the left intelligentsia almost a year in 1940 to submit to defeatism. It has taken them three weeks to get there today against a far less formidable foe. I was reminded of this quote by a terrific piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Sunday’s Observer. Orwell also got something else uncannily right: “These people live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events, not even the turning out of a single shell.” Orwell: now more than ever.
SONTAG REMEMBERED: Mercifully, no professor ever forced me to read Susan Sontag and the only things I had really read were “Illness As Metaphor,” which I read when I got HIV and found completely useless, and “Notes on Camp,” a slight attempt to posture as someone who’s hip enough to understand gay subculture. (To be fair, she made several good points.) I hadn’t read any of Sontag’s other work, and so was surprised to find how deep her hatred of America is. No-one should have been surprised by her knee-jerk blame-America-first reaction to September 11. Here’s a quote sent to me by a reader from the penultimate essay in “Styles Of Radical Will,” first published in 1966. It speaks for itself: “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization? The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the “Mongol” hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.” Now, the question is this. When someone hates this country that much – and in a dark, racist way – how is one to interpret her ambivalence about a war for the survival of American and Western freedom?
The Dish 