Forget the broad coalition for action against al Qaeda. Forget the U.N., which has once again been shown to be essentially useless in a real crisis. Forget the E.U., which also dissolves into constituent parts at the first sign of gunfire. The only real alliance worth anything right now is a tripartite arc from Washington through London to Moscow. In Afghanistan, British and American troops are jointly fighting the war. The Brits have also been a handy bridge for Washington with the other European powers, as well as an indispensable diplomatic tool. The Russians for their part have provided hard intelligence, accommodation on missile defense, and lower oil prices. In the coming decade, I predict a massive Western investment in oil exploration in Russia – a giant quid pro quo after September 11. And last Friday, Tony Blair joined two remaining dots by offering a new role for Russia within NATO. On Saturday, straight from Crawford, Putin called Blair to thank him. Putin’s statement read: “Moscow highly esteems the practical reaction of the British leadership to the Russian president’s repeated suggestions on the need to alter the mutual relations between Russia and the Western alliance in response to new challenges.” So we have a new entente cordiale between two old imperial powers and the current hegemon. This arc might come under strain if Washington aims next for Iraq – and, so far, the Brits have expressed panic at the very idea. But I deeply doubt that, when the crunch comes, the Brits will fiercely protest an Iraqi extension of the war. Blair has too much invested in this new alliance to watch it unravel now. Same with Putin. He sees the new alliance as a way for Russia to leap forward in international relations. And Bush finally has two foreign leaders he can trust. Neither unilateralism nor multilateralism: this trilateralism could actually work, i.e. do more useful things than employ professional diplomats.
HUMAN NATURE: I had dinner last week with William Hague, the former Tory leader, in Washington. He said one thing that stuck in my mind. We were discussing the images from liberated Afghanistan of women throwing off their veils and feeling the sun on their faces for the first time in years. How could anyone have believed that these women actually wanted to live like that? We have become so saturated with the nostrum that culture is everything, that we cannot judge or understand others brought up with different faiths or histories or legends that we have forgotten a simple thing. Some things are simply against human nature. There is barely a child anywhere in the world who wouldn’t take some pleasure in flying a kite. There is no human who has ever lived whose life wasn’t improved or enlightened by some kind of music. A religion that attempts not to channel human nature for good, but to suppress human nature altogether is doomed to failure. What we saw in Afghanistan is not some shift to a different political order. What we saw in Afghanistan was human nature rebelling against a cruel and evil abstraction. We are seeing human light in a theocratic darkness.
IT’S OFFICIAL: “Mr. Clinton now has to defend himself from the charge that he did not do enough to capture Osama bin Laden.” – Rick Berke, New York Times today. And when I dared to say this weeks ago, the Clintonites went berserk. Always trust content from andrewsullivan.com! In a few weeks, even the Times will concur.
THE PHARMACEUTICAL DEBATE: Yes, other issues haven’t gone away. Here’s a webcast of a panel I was on last week on the subject of the allegedly evil drug companies. I know it sounds dreary, but it was actually very lively and sparked some interesting exchanges. I was up against Merrill Goozner of the American Prospect and Ron Pollack of Families USA.
YES TO MILITARY TRIBUNALS: Look, I’m a pretty solid civil liberties guy. But this has nothing to do with civil liberties. The murderers of September 11 are not criminals. They are soldiers in an army protected by a foreign power which attacked American soil. They should be fought and captured or killed abroad. If they are in this country, they should be hunted down in exactly the same way as soldiers. I agree with William Barr and Andrew McBride in the Washington Post that this is not a radical move. It would be a radical move to treat these people as civilians subject to the usual protections. Our tortured attempt to do exactly that in the past – remember the Lockerbie fiasco? – is one reason why al Qaeda thought they could get away with mass murder this time. It’s time once and for all to state as clearly as possible that terrorism is not crime. It’s war. The fact that President Bush grasped this critical point early on is extremely good news. It means he knows what we’re up against. And his own personal involvement in such matters implies that this provision will be used carefully and sparingly and with full political accountability. As for the death penalty, this is one exception that, to my mind, makes sense. In a just war, when society itself is threatened by the lives of fascist mass-murderers, there is every justification for executing convicted prisoners of war. Of course, there is one way to avoid this altogether and that is to kill as many of these thugs as possible in the theater of war. We should show them the same mercy they showed to the men and women who showed up for work on September 11.
NOW, IRAQ: A very useful piece by Dean Godson in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph makes a simple point. What we’ve learned in Afghanistan is that airpower works, that regimes we believed had support are actually quite weak, and that regime stability, so beloved of the first Bush administration, is not always the most important goal. With that in mind, why shouldn’t Saddam Hussein be vulnerable? As Condi Rice said this weekend, it matters not whether we can prove that Saddam was involved in September 11 or the subsequent anthrax attacks. What matters is that he is trying to get chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in contravention of U.N. resolutions. He is acquiring those weapons as a means to control his own people and to attack the West. We already have a casus belli. In some ways, Iraq would be easier than Afghanistan. Iraq has no major supporting neighbor, like Pakistan for the Taliban. Airpower could be much more effective, because there are more targets. Saddam is already pinned down in only a third of his own country, and is unpopular even among his own Sunni minority. The usual suspects claim that the main opposition to Saddam, the Iraqi National Congress, is divided, incompetent and unscrupulous. Sounds exactly like what they said about the Northern Alliance. As for regional conflagration, the State Department has it backwards, as usual. The main impact of our firmness with al Qaeda will not be greater Muslim revolt; it will be a broader awareness within the Muslim world that we should not be messed with. There will be fear. And there will also be greater hope among those people now trampled by the Baathists in Baghdad. We let those people down once before. Let’s not do it again.
The Dish 