THE BALI EFFECT

In Britain, a big surge in pro-war sentiment: up ten points in a week. Here’s what the Guardian says:

The Guardian/ICM poll shows that 41% of voters agree with the prime minister that it is not a choice between fighting either Iraq or al-Qaida. Fewer – 35% – disagreed and said they believed the United States had “taken its eye off the ball”. The level of support for a military attack on Iraq is now at its highest level since the Guardian started a weekly tracker poll on the question in August. Opposition to a war against Iraq reached a peak in the last week of August when it touched 50% and has now fallen to its lowest level at 37%. Support for a war against Iraq is strongest amongst men – 51% approve as opposed to only 34% of women – and among 25- 34-year-olds who approve by 52% to 25%. Opposition to war is strongest among women – 41% of whom disapprove compared with 33% of men.

I’m fascinated by the generation-gap. The big difference between the anti-war movement during Vietnam and now is that this time, the young are pro-war. Or rather today’s anti-war movement is essentially your father’s: it’s the same boomer peaceniks, unable to let go. I’ve long believed that 9/11 could reshape an entire generation’s attitude toward foreign policy. Slowly, the polls are supporting that possibility.

AUSSIE SONTAGS: Yep, they exist there as well, and are guaranteed special placement in the letters pages of the major liberal broadsheet newspapers. Here’s a selection. Try not to be drinking coffee as you read this extract from The Age:

I distinctly remember both John Howard and Alexander Downer being warned that their policies in support of America in Afghanistan and Iraq were likely to endanger Australian lives and lead to direct attacks that would kill innocent Australian citizens. And they tritely brushed these warnings aside because they didn’t fit their myopic policies.
Now it has happened, and I explicitly place the responsibility at the feet of Howard and Downer. They may as well have pushed the button themselves.
Carlo Canteri, Northcote

We are paying in blood for John Howard’s arse-licking, ignorance and xenophobic bigotry.
The Governor-General should sack him and ask a less tainted figure – Costello, Downer, Beazley, Rudd – to head a government of national emergency sworn in for, say, six months. Someone of some civilised understanding of human difference. Someone less likely to lead us, yawning and prattling vacuously, into the bloodstained front line of an unwinnable world war and conscript our children to fight in it.
Bob Ellis, Palm Beach, NSW

John Howard’s enthusiastic running as a lapdog of the US, promoting George Bush’s strategic interests on the other side of the planet, has brought terrorism to our doorstep, as sensible thinkers have been warning it would.
So, not only do we have to anticipate combat troops returning in body bags – but suffer the present reality of innocent civilians being slaughtered anywhere. Where next – the Australian mainland?
Prime Minister, I blame you.
Judith Maher, Elwood

These are obviously not the only letters; and they do not seem to represent anything but a fringe of Australian opinion. But the logic of Fisk and Pilger is quite clear. Either the West surrenders now – or worse will follow.

GOVERNORS AND DEMS: John Ellis (friend and donor) thinks his cousin, Jeb, is in trouble. And if the governorships keep going to the Dems, so is W in 2004.

FISKING MCGRORY: (Try singing that to the tune of “Waltzing, Matilda.”) I didn’t think it was worth the effort. But Volokh takes just a few sentences to illuminate, well, the abyss below. (By the way, she was vacationing in Florence not Venice. My bad.)

A REPORTING NOSE-DIVE: So says yet another critical piece about the Times’ new management. Don’t expect Romenesko to link. Meanwhile an insignificant but still funny correction a few days ago: “A chart yesterday showing the European Union’s steps to expand by 10 nations in 2004 and by two more in 2007 misstated the current population of member nations. It is 378.7 million, not billion.” 400 billion, 7 degrees Fahrenheit: we get their point, don’t we?

THE IRONY OF APPEASEMENT: Responding to my latest Salon “Idiocy Of The Week”, a few have alleged that I completely mistook the meaning of Harold Meyerson’s recent piece on why we shouldn’t go to war with Iraq. They claim he didn’t mean that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was actually containment and appeasement (although he used both those words), he was just kidding! What Meyerson really meant, they argue, was that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviets was the same as the left’s policy toward Iraq today and that if we call that Iraq policy containment and appeasement, we have to say the same thing about Reagan. If I missed that ironic pirouette, I can’t have been the only one. But even reading his word use that way, I think my argument just got stronger. What distinguished Reagan’s policy – what differentiated it from Nixon Republicans and Carter Democrats and most of the foreign policy establishment of the time – was that he broke from containment, let alone appeasement. As I summarized his policy in Salon, it included

a rhetorical and diplomatic break in 1980 with the detente of the 1970s; a huge and costly defense buildup; financing and military support of counter-Soviet insurgencies from Nicaragua to Afghanistan; the pursuit of Star Wars; the refusal at Reykjavik to accept any deceleration in space defense spending; the description in London of the Soviet Union as destined for the “ash-heap of history”; the call on Gorbachev in Berlin to “tear down this wall”; the insistence on autonomy for the member states of the Soviet empire (yes, that one was an empire); the establishment of a united Germany in NATO; NATO membership all the way to Russia’s borders; and on and on.

I’m sorry but I fail to see how anyone can construe that as containment, let alone appeasement, which is why Meyerson didn’t support it at the time. Sure, we didn’t actually try to invade the Soviet Union the way we are with Iraq. But guess why not? They had nukes! That’s precisely what we’re trying to prevent in Iraq. And the prevention is not simply to stop Saddam using such weapons against his neighbors, but his funneling such weapons to pliant terrorists from the inviolable security of a nuclear-protected terrorist state. It seems to me that in those circumstances, even a Nixonian like Kissinger would shift position, as indeed he has. Meyerson’s piece may or may not have been in parts ironic. But, on any reading, it was still idiotic.