Would anyone have guessed that the Taliban would have essentially abandoned Kabul by now? Or that Washington would be trying to rein in military success? So much for the New York Times’ prediction of “quagmire.” (I notice that the Times today cannot bring itself to celebrate this success. Why not? What’s their problem?) What we are dealing with now is the first class conundrum of sweeping success. The most pressing task, as the Washington Post argues, is the use of the opportunity to inflict real damage on the fleeing Taliban forces and to find and kill as many terrorist leaders that we can. Yes, we also need to ensure order in Kabul. And yes, very little Pashtun territory has yet to fold. But to control almost half the country within a month can hardly be deemed a failure – and by airpower and special forces alone. Moreover, the psychological and propaganda impact of taking the capital cannot be under-estimated, as Charles Krauthammer powerfully argues today. Let’s take Kabul now. Then on to Kandahar and, at some point, Baghdad. Yes, Baghdad. We have a job to finish.
LETTERS: Dismay at victory at the BBC; why I was too kind to Gore; etc.
ISLAMIC CORRECTNESS: In what seems to be an editorial gaffe, the Guardian just published a superb and – yes! – liberal article, arguing for an honest inspection of the intellectual decay of modern Islam and a brutal investigation of what now passes for Islamic thought. Among the reasons Ibn Warraq cites for the West’s squeamishness in this regard are, as he puts it, “plain physical fear; and intellectual terrorism of writers such as Edward Said. Said not only taught an entire generation of Arabs the wonderful art of self-pity (if only those wicked Zionists, imperialists and colonialists would leave us alone, we would be great, we would not have been humiliated, we would not be backward) but intimidated feeble western academics, and even weaker, invariably leftish, intellectuals into accepting that any criticism of Islam was to be dismissed as orientalism, and hence invalid. But the first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth.” Wow. Such a simple statement. And in the Guardian, of all places. Are we really seeing a shift among the intellectuals after September 11?
ON THE OTHER HAND: Some intellectuals still don’t get it. For those of you who read French, here’s Jean Baudrillard’s dollop of evil pretension about September 11 in Le Monde. It’s endless, of course. It makes no real sense, and in so far as it does is repulsive. Baudrillard’s main point is that our uni-polar technologically-adept world somehow wants to be destroyed by terrorism. Here’s a classic bit: “Because with its unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing. That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic – that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it’s a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up. To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it.” At its best, I think, this is projection – a pseudo-intellectual gloss on French schadenfreude at the attack on America. Yes, that resentment and hatred is real – and I guess we all have some small nihilist part inside us. But to say it is definitive of all of us in this matter is obscene. What we have here is a classic example of an intellectual confessing that deep inside he loves murder and chaos and destruction. But we knew that already, didn’t we? Check this sentence out: “The allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is fortunately universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center, the perfect twins, precisely embodied such a definitive order.” Notice that “fortunately.” This is a man infatuated by murderous anarchy. He describes not our moral bankruptcy but his own.
KRUGMAN: Several of you have wondered if my revulsion at Paul Krugman’s increasingly hysterical attacks on the good faith of this administration is equivalent to supporting the pork-laden, corrupt and unnecessary “stimulus” package recently passed by the House of Representatives. You can infer from that sentence that the answer is no.
The Dish 