Month: November 2001

“I was on Air Force One the day of the attack, working my way back to Washington via Louisiana and Nebraska… (LAUGHTER) … making sure that the president was safe and secure.” – George W. Bush, yesterday. Take a look at this transcript. I found it illuminating about the president. At home, in Texas, he seems more relaxed and the divide between public and private selves less acute. The self-deprecating humor is a part of that. Take this exchange from the Crawford high school:

“BUSH: The president and I have agreed to take a few questions from the students. I figure this would be a pretty good opportunity for you all to ask…
PUTIN (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Only questions. No math questions, please.
(LAUGHTER)
BUSH: Good idea. Particularly, no fuzzy math questions.”

The alternation of quick humor and sudden sincerity reminds me of JFK.

READING PUTIN: You can see why Bush and Putin get along. Here’s a Putin quote from yesterday: “Of course, it is very important to be born under a happy star and to have destiny facing your way. And indeed, I’m in agreement with the president, perhaps, God was looking quite positively on this. But there are different approaches to addressing such kind of problem. There are people deeply religious who usually say that God knows what is to befall a nation of people or a person. But there are people, no less devoted to God, but who still believe that the people, a person, should also take care of their own destiny and lives. And it gives me great pleasure to deal and to work with President Bush, who is a person, a man who does what he says.” That’s one hell of a quote. It raises the religious question explicitly, respects those who don’t share it, and then provides the clincher of the relationship: Bush is “a man who does what he says.” The media will focus on the lack of agreement between the two countries over the ABM issue. As usual, they’re wrong. The only fundamental issue at Crawford is al Qaeda. Bush artfully and constantly invoked the “evil ones” as an equal threat to the U.S. and Russia. Discussing humanitarian relief in Afghanistan, Bush said, “Part of the problem has been the Taliban. They’ve been stopping the shipments of food, believe it or not. It won’t surprise the president because he understands how evil they are. We’re just learning how evil they are in America.” In this statement, he almost seems to say that Russia is more aware of the problem than the U.S. One other small aside: yesterday a Russian president used the word “liberated” to describe the rescue of American aid workers from the Taliban. “Liberated.” It is a new and hopeful world.

THE OIL ALLIANCE: My bet is that one of the central subjects for discussion at Crawford was not only the post-Taliban government, but Iraq. But the biggest gift that Putin can give, he has already delivered. Which country is mainly responsible for a recent fight with OPEC? A fight that has led to complete disarray in the oil cartel? Yep, thanks to Russia, the price of oil may soon decline to $10 a barrel. That’s a huge boost to the American economy (way more important than an unnecessary “stimulus package”). And Putin did it. Oil is, in fact, a critical part of the new U.S.-Russian relationship. “We in Russia somehow tend to know about Texas rather better than about the rest of the United States somehow,” Putin said yesterday. “Except maybe for Alaska, which we sold to you. In my view, first of all, because, like in Russia, here in Texas the oil business is quite well developed, and we have numerous contacts in this area.” Numerous contacts? Well, at least one extremely high-level one. Part of the fun of watching this president is his own delight in saying little about what he’s really up to. You have to read the tea-leaves. And the oil stains.

THE UNABOMBER ON THE LEFT AND THE WAR: “15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.” I hate to say it, but that murderous nutcase was onto something, wasn’t he?

The BBC World Service, once a bastion of freedom and objectivity, continues its slide into moral relativism. According to today’s Guardian, the BBC will not describe the attack on the WTC towers as “terrorism.” It might alienate some listeners, presumably from the Islamic world. Perhaps they will soon begin expressing neutrality over whether the Jews were behind the attacks as well. Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.

“No strategy in Afghanistan is assured of success, but there is no notion as naive as that which supposes that you can destroy a tactic (such as terrorism) or an idea (such as fundamentalism) by means of bombs or missile strikes or special forces … There is plenty of evidence to suggest that if Afghanistan is attacked, the Afghans will side with the lesser Satan at home against the Great Satan overseas … But if we seek to bludgeon Afghanistan into submission, we will lose the war on terrorism, while inadvertently slaughtering some millions of its inhabitants. We can choose, in other words, between futile genocide and productive peace. It shouldn’t be too hard a choice to make.” – George Monbiot, the Guardian, October 2.

“For Mr Blair knows better than most how ill-timed was the capture of Kabul by the Northern Alliance. Far from this being the “VK Day” event claimed by some of the more excitable commentators, it has happened at a pace that makes it a serious setback to hopes of securing a lasting political settlement in Afghanistan. Put at its simplest, the Northern Alliance is simply too powerful for comfort, with little sign of the Pashtun population, the largest single ethnic group, joining what Mr Blair called the “uprising against the Taliban.” – The Independent today! Meanwhile Pashtun revolt in the South seems to be growing. Do these people ever ever learn?

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Huge earth-shaking explosions, horizons filled with flame and smoke, doomsday clamour and an indiscriminate devastation: these are the familiar, unnerving symptoms of a bankrupt policy, of plans lacking or gone awry, of exponential escalation and dread futility. Familiar because the world has seen the Americans go this way before, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and in Iraq, with no good result. Unnerving because the impression strengthens that President George Bush has no clear idea how proportionately to attain his ends or even what those ends may ultimately be. Futile because carpet-bombing, whatever its immediate consequences, looks to all but an implacable American public like an act of desperation prompted by a failure of imagination. Every towering column of dust and ash obscures ever more completely the twin towers whose appalling downfall was the root of it all. With every unguided bomb that drops, with every pinpoint missile gone astray, with every child maimed and with every redoubled cry of Taliban defiance, the military assault on Afghanistan becomes more of an obstacle to justice in its broadest sense, less a legitimate part of the solution.” The Guardian, November 2

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Perhaps Britons have simply decided that bombing is not an effective way to defeat al-Qaida. Maybe some of them accept that aerial assault can only boost Osama bin Laden’s standing in the Muslim world, spectacularly confirming his claim that this is a clash of the west against Islam – pitting the richest country in the world against the poorest. Perhaps they now accept that killing Bin Laden would merely make a martyr of him, and that his chosen hideaway was the worst possible place to pick a fight. Maybe they have heard the Afghan national epigram: “When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.” – Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian, October 31.

The two best insta-analyses of the war so far, in my opinion, are Anatole Kaletsky’s superb essay in the Times of London and Will Saletan’s typically insightful piece in Slate. Will focuses on the irony of the fear transfer – from us to them. Kaletsky thinks about the extraordinarily important instructive quality of the Taliban’s rout: “The defeat of the Taleban has shown to the entire Muslim world that the mullahs’ vision of an ultra-orthodox Islamic Utopia is a catastrophic delusion. Not only does returning to medievalism lead to economic catastrophe. Even worse, it produces political humiliation and military disgrace. In a battle between religion and technology, between medievalism and modernity, between theocracy and democracy, the West has long known which side was bound to win. The collapse of the Taleban may now teach the Islamic world the same lesson.” The deeper point is that at this stage in world history, when technology is poised to unleash immeasurable benefit but also immeasurable danger to mankind, the Western powers have made a decisive point: we will respond to terror. I don’t think we can under-estimate the importance of this for the future of the world. The Taliban and al Qaeda are only the beginning. But what a beginning.

“The Democrat’s version of a recovery plan could hardly do more damage to the U.S. economy if it were designed by Osama bin Laden himself.” – Stephen Moore, National Review Online. In fact, if we pass it, the terrorists will have won.

HERBERT ON RACIAL POISON: Don’t miss Bob Herbert’s smart and brave column taking on the Democrats’ self-defeating racial obsessions in New York City.

“Kandahar, the spiritual and administrative heart of the Taliban, was quiet.
I sat in a small office down a narrow lane not far from Mullah Omar’s house with the young assistant of a senior Taliban official and talked – of Islam, of the West, of Afghanistan and of the blasts that, 10 days earlier, had demolished two American embassies in East Africa killing 224 people and injuring 4,500. The young Talib asked me if I thought the Americans would attack Afghanistan. After all, he said, Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect, was known to be hiding there. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they wouldn’t be so stupid.'” … When I think about the huddled masses of the refugees, about the small, stone-covered graves that are appearing outside every village, about Mohammed Ghaffar, the white-bearded waiter at Kabul’s battered Intercontinental hotel who grimly counted off the regimes that have successively run and ruined his country on his fingers, I know we have to halt the escalation before it is too late. But when I listen to Rumsfeld and Bush and Blair and Straw and their macho, ignorant and fatally flawed rhetoric it is hard to be optimistic.” – Jason Burke, an “Afghanistan expert,” from an essay called “Why This War Won’t Work,” The Observer, October 21.

“Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success – now that Milosevic has been defeated – of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies.” – Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrong yet again, the Independent, November 2.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “General Van Tien Dung, 84, lead strategist of the victory of North Vietnamese forces against the Saigon and U.S. regimes, also expressed his doubts about a U.S. victory over Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. “I’m certain that they will fail,” declared the ex-defense minister, who brought the North Vietnamese troops to a lightning-fast victory during the Ho Chi Minh campaign that ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War. “War doesn’t end the hate. It just adds more gasoline to the fire, provoking more hate and a harder vengeance, above all on the part of those who have sworn to die for their religion,” added General Van Tien Dung. “How will the United States put an end to this war? How will it get out of it? Its soldiers will find themselves with geographical difficulties that the Soviets could not surpass before,” the general concluded.” – Agence France-Presse, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it’s already in one. The United States is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it. Soon, a new credibility gap will emerge as the Pentagon attempts to massage the news.” – Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “”I don’t know how long this was supposed to take but it’s certainly going a lot worse than expected. We have leading opposition figure captured and executed … defections from the Taleban not happening on any large scale .. Afghan support for the Taleban appears to be on the increase and, if anything more was needed to dim the support of our allies for this whole adventure here we have another Red Cross warehouse has been bombed because of what is called human error. This is a war in trouble.” – Daniel Schorr, NPR Weekend Edition.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “You can spend so much time defending the moral legitimacy of bombing Afghanistan and damning Noam Chomsky to hell that you never need to get around, really, to the question of what the real-world consequences of this war are likely to be. Five and a half million Afghans starving, as predicted by Oxfam, if the military campaign prevents delivery of humanitarian relief? Thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American suicide missions? A protracted war with a determined, hardy foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later?” – Katha “Your Stammering Is Eloquent” Pollitt, The Nation.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word “quagmire” has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad…A week ago, the Pentagon said the military capacity of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan had been “eviscerated” by allied bombing raids; now ranking officials describe those leaders as “tough characters” who remain full of fight… The Northern Alliance, whose generals bragged for weeks that it was about to capture the pivotal city of Mazar-i-Sharif, has failed to do so. Nor have its tanks made any progress toward Kabul.” – R.W. Apple, New York Times, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Many of the Afghan women who have been warning us about the Taliban for years say that bombing would be the surest way to unite most Afghanis around them.” – Gloria Steinem, Village Voice.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “It now looks, with 20/20 hindsight, as though we should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar baby that is Afghanistan. We’re running out of time for three reasons: winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.” Molly Ivins, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Having found refuge in places that America cannot or will not bomb, it appears the Taliban will rule Afghanistan through the winter, thereby handing the United States a humiliating and gratuitous defeat … Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be the least prepared to attain America’s battlefield objectives… [The Alliance] remains far weaker than its adversary, it boasts far fewer troops, and lacks the determination of its foe … Its forces lack fuel and ammunition, remain pathetically divided, and seem in no rush to march to an American timetable.” – The New Republic, November 8.