Month: March 2002

By and large, Nick Lemann’s series of interviews with various Bush administration muckety-mucks is reassuring. They all seem to get it. Alas, Lemann doesn’t. Lemann points to an old document, fathered by the nexus around Cheney, that almost a decade ago argued that the United States has an interest in preventing any rival super-power from emerging. He then links that to this administration’s robust post-Afghanistan extension of its war against terror to Iraq. It’s not a crazy link. It’s just an unnecessary one. There’s no need to find some buried or arcane reason for the administration’s recent policy. September 11 was a reason. Lemann still thinks of this event as some sort of context for the new war, or as a rationale. Sure, he notices that it precipitated big re-thinks among many of the people he interviewed. But he still doesn’t seem to absorb what that day revealed. It showed that a small but highly organized group was capable of anything against the citizens of the United States, including the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. That made continued toleration of Iraq’s menace simply unacceptable to the American people and untenable for any responsible president of the United States. What Bush has done is simply react to a seismic event – with common sense and determination. It was far from some “great doctrinal shift.” It was the least any president can or should do.

THEY STILL DON’T GET IT II: Then there’s Bob Wright, writing in the somewhat listless post-Kinsley Slate. Bob gives a report-card on the war on terror and finds much to be leery of. His basic argument seems to be: if you don’t want more terror, suck up to the prejudices of the terrorists. What he means by this is rendered quite clear by his opening paragraph:

Good news: The Bush administration has finally “thrown the prestige of the White House behind addressing Middle East violence,” according to the New York Times. This should be welcomed by Americans who get the picture-who see that, because hatred of America will translate into American deaths with growing efficiency as technology advances, the festering Palestinian issue is a long-term security threat to the United States.

The premise here is that hatred of America – or at least the hatred that leads directly to Islamo-fascist terrorism – is rational, that America can prevent it, and that one way of doing that is to cater to the demands of the haters. As is often the case with this kind of argument, Wright doesn’t specify exactly how one can deter the al-Aqsa brigades, for example, or Iranian-financed Hezbollah or the PLO. His message seems to be: ‘Just calm everything down and they’ll hate you less. And whatever you do, don’t fight back. It will only make them madder.’ Of course, Wright won’t come out and say he doesn’t want a regime change in Baghdad. He’s happy to see a war against Iraq – but only as a last resort. Apparently, one massive war started by Iraq, Iraq’s use of weapons of mass destruction, its avoidance of U.N. inspections, and violations of umpteen clauses of the Gulf War settlement doesn’t mean we’re yet at the last resort. Besides, Wright is skeptical of the whole idea, regardless of timing:

Of course, that invasion [of Iraq] could itself in some ways increase American security, but it would also have the downside of increasing the amount of Islamic hatred of America. So, one way to summarize the Bush Middle East policy is this: Let’s stop the carnage that is making America more enemies every day-at least, let’s stop it for long enough so that America can make some more enemies.

I think that means Bob thinks that an invasion of Iraq is a net loss, and would increase Islamist hatred for the U.S. He seems utterly blind to the fact that our victory in Afghanistan does not seem to have invited a wave of Islamic anger, or a ramping up of terrorism. For some reason, the terrorists reacted to a massive assault by running away. Who woulda thunk it? And ordinary Iranians reacted to the “axis of evil” speech by increasing their resistance to their evil regime. Go figure. I know the word ‘appeasement’ is thrown around a lot – but what other word is there for a policy that argues that confrontation of evil can only, in the long run, exacerbate it?

Two sites that recently caught my eye and are well worth visiting. The first is by one Father Shawn O’Neal, a parish priest in North Carolina. He’s smart, he’s sincere, and not a knee-jerker in any direction. His perspective is particularly welcome during the current crisis in the American Catholic church. The second is a more fully-fledged news and opinion blog by one Pejman Yousefzadeh, a first-generation Iranian-American, who’s as pro-war as any other war-blogger, but again, from a unique vantage point. Yes, he defended me rather devastatingly against Eric Alterman, but this is not mere gratitude. His account of his own love for America, written a couple of weeks ago, is stirring and beautiful, and reminds me what we should be far more impatient with the excuse-makers for Iran’s corrupt elite than we have been. Here’s a passage worth reading (scroll down to the last part of his entries for March 21) from Pejman’s blog:

The day after they were married, in Tehran, Iran, my mother and father went to the American embassy to initiate and complete the paperwork necessary to let them emigrate to the United States. That was 31 years ago this May. Some newlyweds embark on a honeymoon. My parents embarked on a new life. And they forged that new life here. It never fails to amaze me that I won the greatest lottery in the history of the world; I was born and raised in America, as a lifelong American citizen. No Roman emperor, no Persian Shah, no Mongol Khan, no Russian Czar ever enjoyed the kind of freedom and good fortune that I have been privileged to enjoy all of my life, all thanks to my geographic location, and to the fact that I have for a lifetime been the proud owner of an American passport, and American citizenship. All of my life, and especially since September 11th, I have humbled and prostrated myself before my God in gratitude for the favor He has shown me in this regard.

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On the increasing success of terrorism, as evidenced by the Bush administration’s being yanked around on a string by Arafat and his Islamo-fascist allies:

Here is a brief comparison for you: Like the negative campaigning in US politics which is so often referred to as “the politics of personal destruction”, terrorism works. Every year, politicians launch low brow and even slanderous attacks on the character of their opponent, every year the public acts disgusted, and every year they go to the polls on election day and cast their ballot for the candidate who slung the dirt. Its a time honored tradition. The fact is that as much as the public complains about such tactics, mud-slinging politics works.

The terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no different. Leaders from around the world can give some truly powerful lip service to the idea that terrorism is a scourge which should not be accepted. But terrorism creates and escalates violence, and violence gets attention. Attention gets results. That is why terrorism will continue to be a prominant tactic in the future of international politics.
I hope President Bush can prove me wrong.

So do I, brother. So do I.

“[T]he weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the OP ED page for 100 years.” – Martin Niesenholtz of nytimes.com. You think the Times op-ed page would publish most of what’s being written on blogs? Ahem. Niesenholtz is betting Dave Winer $2000 on the proposition that “[i]n a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” Check out the discussion. By the way, I think an opinion site that actually gets writers to put their money where their mouth is makes a lot of sense. Drama + hackery = readable journalism.

Michael Ledeen has a typically astute column on Iran today. My favorite line: “Iran and the PLO have been cooperating intimately since 1972, but the truth is always welcome, and one probably shouldn’t quibble over a mere thirty years.”

Could Bush-Rice be the potential Republican ticket in 2004? The attractions are obvious. Rice does several things for Bush. She helps eradicate the gender gap, the biggest liability for Republican candidates. She could also help Bush to achieve his dream of winning more than the paltry ten percent of black votes he did in 2000, a demographic group Democrats desperately need to keep locked up to keep an edge in presidential politics. Rice – coming from the South and Mountain West, but also provost of one of California’s greatest universities – makes geographic sense as well. And, best of all, she’s a trusted conservative. Her instincts are Bush’s: realist, uncompromising but flexible in a pinch. And he trusts her deeply. When you think about it, it’s hard to think of any rival in the cabinet with the same credentials for a future vice-presidential nomination. And what it would do for the image of the Republican party as a whole would be momentous… (For more, see the full piece, just posted, here.)

The front-page story on a modern seminary in the Times today struck me as an important one. It echoes what others are telling me – that, in fact, today’s screening process is far better than it used to be, that more openness is slowly ending the celibacy and sexuality closet, and that better – if far fewer – priests are the result. I hope this trend gathers pace – but it suggests that, in an odd way, the current crisis is less about today than about the seminaries of a generation or so ago. It took time for the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s to be assimilated into the Church’s pastoral training of priests. While priests were living in a world where celibacy was increasingly seen as morbidly weird, the Church forgot that it needed to aggressively reach out to men for exactly those reasons. So it left them to cope on their own – with occasionally disastrous results. Now the Church beginning to deal with this issues – candidly and forthrightly. Far better than simply ratcheting back the clock fifty years, assuming celibacy is a given and needn’t be discussed at length, and pretending the world is as it was in the era some Church conservatives so admire.

THE OSCARS: Who cares?

“Being Dutch, living in the city where Pim Fortuyn has caused a landslide in the city council after the last local elections, having been on the university where Fortuyn was forced to give back his professor title at the time I was studying there, I have to say you emphasize a very small and rather unimportant aspect of his victory march through Holland. The man is unable to set up any government at all. Period. He’s not hijacking the postmodern left, he’s a populist – he’s postmodern in a sense he’s got no direction at all but just the opposite direction of wherever the winds blows.” – from a Dutch reader. This – and your take on Alterman on the Letters Page.

“Here’s a little blurb from Bruni that caught my eye: ‘McCain’s hyper-activist foreign policy and rogue state rollback program, under which the United States would dramatically ramp up efforts to arm and finance rebel forces in any country with a leader we found noxious, could be more than a little scary, but few reporters sounded any alarms.’ In other words, McCain was the only candidate talking proactively about the war on terrorism in the 2000 campaign? Amble into that.” – from a Book Club reader. More thoughts on Bruni on the Book Club Page today.

In the last couple of days, two things have been revealed in the Middle East. The first is that the Iranian-Palestinian link is now incontrovertible. Iran is using the Intifada to wage an unofficial and undeclared war on Israel. I wrote about such a connection immediately after the recovery of the Iran-sponsored boat ferrying serious weapons to Palestinian terrorists was seized by the Israelis a couple of months ago. When such reports appear on the front page of the New York Times, as they did Sunday, you know there’s not much doubt of their veracity. The second fact is that, despite a major climb-down by the United States, Palestinian terrorist violence continues unabated while negotiations continue. If Arafat is allowed to travel to the Arab summit, he will have proved that his Arab terrorist alliances will not be used against him, that terrorist violence, far from making his life more difficult, works in getting the attention of the United States, and that the U.S. is so rattled by Arab opinion, that the Palestinians now have a near-veto over the timing of our confrontation with Iraq. Game, set and match to Arafat. And president William Jefferson Bush keeps helping him.