One obvious victim of this weekend’s news: the notion that the Northern Alliance is a useless military entity. This was one of the many arguments used by those who don’t really want us to fight this war. In defense of the usual “we-can’t-win” rhetoric, allegedly hard-headed experts told us that the U.S. military strategy was way too slow and clumsy, that mere air-power wasn’t enough, that thousands of American ground-troops were necessary, and so on. As with every single recent prediction of the inadequacy of American airpower in the last few years, this nostrum is now looking a lot less cogent. Yes, the war has only just begun. Sure, the Northern Alliance doesn’t solve every problem. But by shifting the momentum of the war decisively against the Taliban, they have made victory much more reachable than a few days ago. I can see why the administration, so dependent on Pakistani intelligence, doesn’t want to alienate the Southerners in Afghanistan. But their extreme caution in assessing what is a smashing military victory disturbs me. Why not let the Northern Alliance re-take Kabul? The psychological impact on the Taliban will surely be profound. We can fix the city’s governance later. I suspect too much State Department micro-management here and not enough go-for-it military strategy. I was, as usual, dismayed by Colin Powell on Meet The Press. Why is this man declaring that we’d never contemplate using nukes against bin Laden? Why limit ourselves in any way? Why, in their public pronouncements, do the Bushies seem almost dismayed by their success rather than buoyed by it?
A VINDICATION FOR BUSH: Poring through the various media accounts of the mega-media-recount, one obvious fact remains. Here’s how the New York Times puts it: “[I]f Florida’s 67 counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida court on Dec. 8, applying the standards that county election officials said they would have used, Mr. Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.” Given what happened last November and December, this amounts to a re-re-recount of all the votes Gore and his allies wanted re-re-recounted. You could infer from this a further piece of evidence that Bush v. Gore was poorly decided, that the Supreme Court’s credibility was needlessly undermined by such a divisive and unsatisfying opinion. Or you could infer that it was entirely justified given the fact that no-one at the time could have known what the final result would be; that the methods for recounting were manifestly inconsistent with equal treatment of equal votes; and that the result was so statistically close, it was almost meaningless to give either candidate a technical victory and so the results of the first recount should stand. Either way, as the Washington Post succinctly puts it, “Gore’s election was not blocked by the high court, whatever one thinks of that intervention. Instead, Gore’s unrealized victory exists only under a controlled set of circumstances that even he was not seeking with his strategy of recounting votes in selected counties.”
A VINDICATION FOR GORE: At the same time, it’s clearer now that, by the slimmest of margins, in an ideal world in which voting intentions were immaculately reflected in actual votes, Gore would have eked out a win. Given the fact that there’s no way of knowing whether an actual state-wide recount of under-votes and over-votes in the practical circumstances of last December would have produced an identical result to the consortium’s, this is still a probability rather than a certainty. But it must comfort Gore that, in his own mind at least, he came about as close to being president as it’s possible to get without actually being president. No-one should begrudge him a small amount of satisfaction on that score. But it will come as no great comfort that his failure was ultimately of his own doing. It was his cynical and self-interested desire to count only undervotes in counties where he thought he could win that doomed him. Of all the options he could have picked after the election, he chose the sleaziest and ultimately the least effective. There’s some irony, isn’t there, in the fact that Gore was ultimately too hardball for his own good. He lost the presidency just as he lost the campaign: by an excess of guile. He was too clever by half – and lost his soul in the process.
BEAUTY AS A DRUG: Another blow for the notion that beauty and sexual attractiveness are entirely socially constructed comes in a study published in the Boston Globe. The sight of a sexy woman triggers all sorts of chemical responses in a heterosexual male brain, responses that are hard-wired and similar to those prompted by various drugs. ”This is hard-core circuitry,” [study author Hans] Breiter said, comparing its basic job to the same function found in lizards. ”This is not a conditioned response.” He went on: “‘These guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.” And this is a surprise? Has he been to a strip-bar in his life, I wonder? Now, the study I really want to read is whether similar responses in female brains can be found for male beauty. I bet it’s a much weaker response.
IS IT UN-ISLAMIC TO KILL WOMEN AND CHILDREN?: We’ve been told many times that it is. We’ve also been told that only nutcases like OBL believe such random murder is permissible under Islam. So it’s worth looking at a pre-9/11 piece from the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Watan, which discusses the issue. The conclusion? It’s OK to kill such civilians if they are implicated in any war effort, especially if they’re Jews. Such implication extends to voting for a government. Another case “when the killing of civilians and women is permitted is when Muslims must launch a comprehensive attack against their enemies or shoot them from afar. If civilians, women or children are to be killed in such attacks – although they must not be deliberately targeted – there is no blame on those who kill them, as these things happen in wars when bombs are fired at military posts situated between residential buildings, especially when these are the posts of the occupying army situated on Muslim lands. In such incidents civilians, women, and children are unintentionally killed, but Muslims get killed as well.” So because civilian workers in the WTC were involved in financial or economic affairs that support the American military through taxes, they are fair game. The only exception is a child-care center, if adults are reliably absent. All in all, according to this writer, Islam permits the murder of almost anyone and anything. I’m not sure whether it’s encouraging or dismaying that this piece was written before September 11. But it’s disturbing nonetheless.
YES, THERE IS ISLAMIC HUMOR: A heart-warming little piece in the London-based Al Hayat newspaper, where the Egyptian satirist Ali Salem muses about setting up a terrorist-training kindergarten. The message to send to the little ones? “”Dear children: ‘Hate the beaches. Hate the flowers and the roses. Hate the wheat fields. Hate the trees. Hate music. Hate all manner of artistic, literary, or scientific endeavor. Hate tenderness. Hate reason and intellect. Hate your families and your countrymen. Hate others – all others.
Hate yourselves. Hate your teachers. Hate me. Hate this school. Hate life and everything in it.'” Slowly, the cracks in the extremist Islamist façade are showing. Let’s do all we can to widen them.
TALIBAN PROPAGANDA IN THE OBSERVER: Take a look at this piece in Sunday’s Observer in London. It’s an interview with a Taliban-supporting suicide killer. To interview him, without alerting the authorities, the Observer clearly acquiesced in the possible murder of British and American soldiers. There is barely a word of context or criticism in the article. Every conceivable piece of pro-Taliban propaganda is relayed. Notice how the Observer quotes this man’s rabid anti-Semitism – “‘The American leadership has put too much attention to the short-term interest of the Zionist financiers, rather than the safety of the American people” – without comment, and even some praise. The would-be murderer’s rant is a “thoughtful conversation.” Can you imagine a newspaper interviewing, say, a member of the Waffen SS in the early days of the Second World War in order to encourage Brits that their struggle was hopeless, that “Zionist financiers” were behind the Allied effort, and that their enemy could not be stopped. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Taliban forces essentially collapsed across whole swathes of Afghanistan. No doubt a gloomy day in the Observer’s editorial offices.
INTELLECTUALS AND TYRANNY: Ever wondered why so many intellectuals – Heidegger, Sartre, Said, Chomsky – are somehow drawn to violent tyrannies, and in some ways romanticize and long for them? Here’s a useful little dialogue in the New York Times with my old friend Mark Lilla, now at the University of Chicago. I’m a third of the way through his book, “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals In Politics,” and highly recommend it for those of you with time and patience for philosophy. Mark’s dissection of Heidegger, for a brief survey, is close to being definitive.
The Dish 