Now a major newspaper in Pakistan has received an anthrax package. No doubt it’s from some pro-life extremists in Utah. It will be very interesting to see what examination of the package reveals about its origin and whether it is connected to the American attacks. But guess what? Karachi is playing down the anthrax threat! According to a report last week in Pakistan’s News International, “Requesting anonymity a senior ministry of health official in Karachi confirmed that Aga Khan hospital has reported the first case of anthrax in Pakistan and the matter has been referred to top federal authorities in Islamabad who were considering the pros and cons of making a public disclosure about the advent of anthrax in the country.” Hmmm. More evidence that Karachi and Washington may well have serious information about the anthrax that they are keeping to themselves until the appropriate moment. I have no proof of this, and I could be wrong, but there’s an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.
WHAT COURAGE REALLY MEANS: “However, if the loftiness of spirit that reveals itself amid danger and toil [i.e. courage] is empty of justice, if it fights not for the common safety but for its own advantages, it is a vice. It is not merely unvirtuous; it is rather a savagery which repels all civilized feeling. Therefore the Stoics define courage well when they call it the virtue which fights on behalf of fairness. For that reason no one has won praise who has pursued the glory of courage by treachery and cunning; for nothing can be honorable from which justice is absent.” — Cicero, “On Duties” Bk. I, 62. I guess Susan “morally neutral” Sontag hasn’t brushed up on her classics for a while.
WAGING WAR AND PEACE: Here’s an editorial from the Boston Globe which beautifully captures the complete incoherence of what one might call the Talbot position, which is that we should wage war and peace at the same time. The Globe seems to believe that there is no moral difference between the collateral, unintended killing of civilians by forces acting in self-defense and the deliberate, intended massacre of civilians as an act of terrorist warfare. The inference is that unless America can fight a war with no civilian casualties on the other side, then the war is unjust or “unacceptable.” Taken to its conclusion, this is completely equivalent to saying that only a perfect war can ever be waged, which is to say that no war can be waged. It’s defeatism under the guise of moralism. And it is as immoral as it is incoherent.
The Dish 