I must say I found Adam Shatz’s long essay in the Nation about the Left’s response to 9/11 to be pretty fair, comprehensive and occasionally fascinating. What its conclusion amounts to, I think, is that the crime of 9/11 has still not finished throwing that diverse coalition we call the Left into a deep and long-lasting crisis. Check out this paragraph:
Some of the people I interviewed opposed going to war in October because they feared a bloody quagmire and didn’t trust the Bush Administration, but changed their minds a month later when the Taliban unexpectedly fell. Others went in the opposite direction, coming out against the war only after US bombing began to inflict heavy civilian casualties. A few people supported targeted strikes against Al Qaeda training bases, but not the overthrow of the Taliban – not because of any sympathy for the regime but because the Bush Administration might be emboldened to overthrow other governments. Others argued, in contrast, that we shouldn’t be bombing Afghanistan unless we were willing to send in ground troops. Some said that a struggle against radical Islam is necessary, but that we should be waging it in Saudi Arabia, not in Afghanistan. And many of the people who cautiously supported the Afghan intervention passionately assailed the war on terror as a new cold war, a danger to both American democracy and security.
To be honest, I’ve held a number of these positions myself.
Although it’s hard not to snicker at the pretzels these people have twisted themselves into, it’s also admirable, isn’t it, that some are thinking through their conflicts honestly. There are some contemptible people in the anti-war left, but there are also some people thinking for their lives. Thank God.
ISN’T SHE LOVELY? Baby pictures from the Hamas website. Charming. But, hey, it’s just another culture isn’t it, professor Fish? The pics come courtesy of a blog I unaccountably left out of my August round-up: the always great Little Green Footballs.
IRAQ AND BUSH: Thanks to readers who’ve tracked down old statements by president Bush on Iraq. I was particularly struck by this piece from the Boston Globe in December 1999:
Thursday night, when asked what he would do about Hussein, his father’s nemesis during the war to free Kuwait, Bush was a tad belligerent. He would not ease sanctions, he said. He would not negotiate with Hussein, he said. He would help opposition groups, he continued, and he would make ”darn sure” that Hussein lived up to agreements he signed in the early ’90s.
“And if I found in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I’d take him out,” Bush declared. ”I’m surprised he’s still there. I think a lot of other people are as well.”
When the moderator, Brit Hume, inquired further, Bush either pulled back, clarified, or contradicted himself. ”Take him out?” Hume asked.
”Take out the weapons of mass destruction,” Bush responded.
Yesterday morning, Bush was asked again about Hussein, and how he planned to take out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
”That’s up for Saddam Hussein to figure out,” Bush said during an early morning news conference, declining to elaborate. ”He doesn’t need to be building them. … He just needs to know I’ll take them out. It’s important for a future commander in chief to state our intentions and the means will be evident to him.”
It’s so odd that so many are now calling for a debate about Iraq, as if we haven’t had one before. We’ve been having a debate for a frigging decade. The only reason for the call for a new debate is because the appeasers have so far lost the argument and want to try again. This is a democracy and we should have such a debate – even until we go blue in the face. But it seems to me that the insistence that president Bush “make the case,” is simply a ploy for many on the left to avoid taking a position. Well, pretty soon, they’ll have to. I can’t wait.
HARPERS CALLS ME AN ANTI-SEMITE (I THINK): I guess you can tell where Lee Siegel is coming from when he argues in the latest Harpers magazine (not online, alas) that the Bush administration is composed of near sociopaths, that Paul Krugman is “an economic genius,” and that Richard Goldstein is “perhaps the most gifted gay journalist in the country.” He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, as he is to his view of my own work. He’s entitled to think that,
reading [Sullivan], you feel that he is not thinking, exactly; rather, one side of his brain is merely fondling the other.
Or this gem:
[I]t is hard not to picture the two sides of Sullivan’s brain as two kittens, playfully cavorting with a little rubber figure called Michael Oakeshott.
Two kittens? Why not bunny rabbits? But what Siegel is not entitled to is the preposterous idea that because a) I once considered running an ad on this site for the pharmaceutical companies, and then didn’t, my views are “bought and paid for,” and b) because a friend donated $500 to the site’s expenses, he “bought” a favorable mention in the Dish. The friend is Charles Francis, someone who has done more than anyone to build a bridge between gays and Republicans in recent years. His donation was swiftly disclosed on the site, and still is, and the notion that I would need $500 to support his efforts, when I’ve been banging on about the same themes for over a decade, is simply loopy. Then there’s c) which almost beggars belief. I can’t do better than to cite Siegel’s logic:
More recently, 9/11 gave [Sullivan] the opportunity to recover the fig-leaf of seriousness he repeatedly reaches for; you could see him railing against Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism in The New York Times Magazine, sentiments I would second whole-heartedly were they coming from a writer who really believed them himself. But Sullivan also likes to publish anti-Semitic jokes on his website, which he then virtuously adduces as evidence of rising anti-Semitism.
Now think about that passage for a minute. I think he’s saying that my long years of concern about anti-Semitism, my blogging exposing it, my documented history of love for Israel, and my constant attempts to engage and oppose religious fundamentalisms of all kinds – these are all elaborate fakes, designed to cover what is actually an anti-Semitic, Fundamentalist heart. I do not “really believe” what I write. When I condemn an anti-Semitic joke, I’m really endorsing it. Siegel’s evidence? You just read all of it.
The Dish 