I just took another look at Jeffrey Goldberg’s harrowing account of what’s been going on in Iraq, Iraq’s links with al Qaeda, and the record of this man, Saddam, whom so many wish to contain and appease. It’s about the best reality-check I can find.
PRE-EMPTIVE LOGIC: Hitch has a superb essay on then need to keep our sights on the evil of radical Islamism, as the anniversary of their massacre approaches. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:
It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.
Sorry, Hitch. It’s beginning to look as if we’ll have to wait for another catastrophe before we can carry this struggle forward.
GSWB SYNDROME: I was struck by a few of you who wrote in to berate me for bringing this subject up. You have, it seems to me, a good point (although, in fairness, a reader brought it up). Here’s one particularly tart email on the subject:
OK, enough. Accusing Howell Raines, James Carville, etc. of being liberals because they’re southerners and want approval from northerners is silly–just as silly as saying that Andrew Sullivan, a lower-middle-class Irish catholic lad and budding homosexual growing up in stuffy, class-obsessed England, was ashamed of his social class, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, and became a conservative in order to curry favor with his betters. People sometimes do things out of genuine moral and intellectual conviction, and being an open supporter of civil rights in the South of the 50s and 60s took a whole heap of moral conviction. Implying otherwise is just a cheap shot.
I think the guy has a point. I don’t think that you can reduce people’s political convictions to a pat analysis of their roots. There’s no reason a Southern white male might not come to be extremely liberal for his own good reasons. At the same time, there does seem to be something of a type among Southern liberal journalists and politicians, who often cite their own roots in explaining their political position. You only have to think of Ivins or Carville to see this. Raines constantly invokes this heritage to describe himself and his politics – he did so on the Newshour recently as well. In answering one question, he said, “I have to say that I think, you know, I often say the one thing that my part of the country learned from U.S. Grant is ‘concentrate your resources at the point of attack.'” This is the executive editor of the New York Times still talking about “my part of the country,” in referring to the South. Hard not to think it’s relevant and informative when he often says so himself.
SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE: Jimmy Carter, a president whose foreign policy brought the United States to its weakest international position in the second half of the twentieth century, is – surprise! – against doing anything militarily against Saddam. A few days after September 11, he wasn’t quite so dovish. Even Carter could see the evil when it flew into this country. But even then – even then – he preferred some sort of collective, protracted muiltilateral solution that would not involve “bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan.” Here’s the text of his speech on September 15. No big news that he wants to keep appeasing today:
I have had discussions with the White House and I have talked several times with Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, as Americans, I know that you and I are interested in the response that President Bush is evolving with his advisors. There has to be a response of strength, of punitive action against those that are guilty of this horrible crime against our country, and against our people. That’s a decision that is inevitable and absolutely necessary. But I think it’s also very good for us to give thanks to our President that there has not been any precipitous action, no bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan. That he’s determined to identify the culprits in this attack and those that directly harbor them … We need to garner as much as possible the full support of our natural allies, NATO obviously, Canada sure, Mexico of course, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, even China and Russia, who fear the same kinds of terrorist attacks that we have just experienced. But it’s also important for us to reach out to the moderate Arab countries and Muslim countries who have been known [even our best friends] to have permitted terrorist groups or cadres to exist in their own countries, and then to focus our attention on the punishment of the guilty and not the innocent.
The great thing about Carter is his consistency. He may well be an admirable man, but he’s also been consistently wrong about everything since the day he took office.
THE “GRANDFATHERED” WAR: Blogger Baseball Crank has an interesting aside on policy toward Iraq. He goes back to the foreign policy debate in the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign and found the following exchange:
“MR. LEHRER: — how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: I haven’t heard a big difference right — in the last few exchanges.
GOV. BUSH: Well, I think — it’s hard to tell. I think that — you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better. I mean, we don’t —
MR. LEHRER: With Saddam Hussein, you mean?
GOV. BUSH: Yes, and —
MR. LEHRER: You could get him out of there?
GOV. BUSH: I’d like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. But we don’t know — there’s no inspectors now in Iraq. The coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be. He is a danger; we don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard to — it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
MR. LEHRER: Do you feel that is a failure of the Clinton administration?
GOV. BUSH: I do.”
My point? The point is that the president stated his hope of removing Saddam Hussein even before he took office. 9/11 showed that we were even more vulnerable to his weapons of mass destruction than we thought before. This war against Saddam is therefore not new nor improvised nor in any way “grandfathered” onto any other war. It is now and long has been a critical element in securing the safety of the citizens of the United States.
The Dish 