Month: October 2002

I have barely offered a word about the Washington sniper story, because I can’t see much to say, except it’s appalling, and I hope they catch this monster soon. If you watch the television, you will have heard all that you need to. And much, much more. But I have to say I disagree with Howard Fineman’s notion that the president has been delinquent in not being more outspoken. One difference bwteen this president and the last is that Bush doesn’t feel the need to be the country’s permanent emotional counselor, or to involve himself in every issue or event. Yesterday he made brief but sensible comments and showed that the feds were doing what they could to help. Beyond that, this is a police job. Period. Then there’s this observation by Fineman:

The macro reason [for Bush’s reticence] I sense from talking with one of the president’s top political aides. Karl Rove & Co. sort of like the way things are going in the congressional races right now: All the Iraq talk has had the effect of fragmenting the electoral season’s thematics, with no single topic around which to unify the opposition to the president. His cautious political advisers don’t want to do anything to change that dynamic. Why risk getting more deeply involved in a case that might still take days, weeks or months to solve?

I guess there may be some people in the White House cynical enough to take this view. But Bush’s relative restraint signals to me rather that he has a good sense of the boundaries of his job, respects delegation to others, and doesn’t feel the need to mouth off constantly about something that needs patience and diligence rather than talk. I wish more of the media would follow his example.

SAFIRE GETS IT: “The world must not allow Iraq to gain the level of destructive power that appeasement and misplaced trust permitted North Korea to achieve.” Amen. I’d forgotten the damning Jimmy Carter quote of the time, likening his “breakthrough” with the murderers in Pyongyang as a “miracle.” Here’s what I want to know: why hasn’t anyone in the press asked Carter and Clinton what they now think of their legacy in North Korea? Why are these people never ever called to account?

ANIMAL FARM: I just re-read the Orwell classic on the plane to and from Ohio. I’m prepping for the NYU panel tonight. Two re-inforced impressions, which have certainly occurred to many others before. One key shift toward totalitarianism in the novel comes when the old hymn “Beasts of England” gets replaced by Napoleon (the chief pig and Stalin figure) to a more generic song praising “Animal Farm.” Orwell’s point, I think, is that patriotism is, for all its faults, far more humane and progressive than its opposite. Today’s left would do well to remember that, I think. I was also struck by the sense that the apotheosis of Animal Farm makes it no worse than its human-run neighbors. Orwell’s distrust of capitalism was as intense as his loathing of Stalinism. I think he was wrong there – and guilty of moral equivalence. But I also think that it does no justice to him, as Hitchens argues, to ignore this and co-opt him for the right – even the neo-liberal right of today. Just some random thoughts on the plane. I’ll be talking briefly tonight about how “Homage To Catalonia” was inspiration for my own far less accomplished writing about the AIDS epidemic.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: “The conflict in Israel has sparked serious debate and inflamed tension on America’s college campuses, and Harvard University is no exception. Tensions among faculty and students have reached new boiling points since over two hundred professors petitioned to have the university sever its financial ties to Israel. Pro-Israel groups have accused colleagues and schoolmates of anti-Semitism, and many agree that the freedom to speak out at Harvard is in jeopardy. Geneive Abdo reports. (7:19)” – NPR’s online synopsis of a Morning Edition segment.

SOUTH KOREA SHIFTS: More signs that Bush’s approach is gaining favor in the Korean peninsula.

YOUNGER SIBLING ISSUES: Is it blasphemous to find this somewhat amusing?

“But as we barrel down the road to war with Iraq, maybe we ought to quiz our unilateralist president about why it is necessary for us to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq while North Korea gets the striped-pants treatment. Is it because North Korea has a million men under arms? Is it because Kim Jong Il never threatened to kill Bush’s father, or because he has no oil, or is not a Muslim?” – Mary McGrory, Washington Post.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Keep up the pressure on Paul K. I have known him for more than twenty years and, as I told you in an email sent a year or so ago, once regarded him as a Nobel Prize possibility. Alas, his politics and ego have become truly insufferable. Can you imagine an economist of his gifts falling back on the argument that the increasing relative compensation of CEOs has been a result of a change in the public’s willingness to tolerate inequality in income distribution? If one of his doctoral students tried this, he quick response would be, “well that is an interesting hypothesis, but how do you propose that we might submit it to testing?” Indeed, Paul is smart enough to see the obvious circularity in the whole argument. To wit: since we have more income inequality, it must follow that people are willing to tolerate inequality, and vice versa. As for Krugman’s argument that the increase in CEOs relative “take” results from the fact that they “appoint” board members, all I can say is that having served on boards of public companies for three decades and having looked at board composition from, say, the 1950s, it is demonstrably the case that boards were more “CEO picked” 40 to 50 years ago than they are now. In the “old days,” interlocking directorates and the like were the rule not the exception.”

An email provides some balance to my link to Dana Milbank’s Washington Post article yesterday about president Bush’s sloppiness with facts:

Good dish . . . with the notable exception of touting Milbank’s article. Although he accuses the President of lying (6 times by my count), his evidence is less than compelling.
His main thrust, that knowingly false statements were proffered, center on three statements concerning RPVs, Iraqi nuclear capabilities, and union obstructionism over homeland security: “And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States; there was no such report by the IAEA; and the customs dispute over the detectors was resolved long ago.
Only an idiot would think an RPV had the range to hit the US mainland–obviously the President referred to US assets in the Persian Gulf region (or terrorist applications assuming other transport); Milbank later quotes the “no such” report by the IAEA–which states that Iraq was 6-24 months away from nukes at the start of the Gulf War (and Bush mangled less than Milbank did); and the union’s silly dispute over radiation detectors was in fact indicative of why the proposed department of homeland security could do without union.
Milbank’s statements are, if anything, more dubious than the President’s. Then he goes on to make some basic logical errors. In the first, he quotes the President’s assertions that a terrorist received medical attention in Iraq, then suggests there is no evidence the government knew about it (a point both unlikely and irrelevant). Then he quotes a statement that Iraq “could” provide terrorists with nukes, and claims it contradicts a CIA report suggesting they “wouldn’t.”
Finally, he closes with a basic error in arithmetic: “Other times, the president’s assertions simply outpace the facts. In New Hampshire earlier this month, he said his education legislation made “the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time.” “In fact, the 15.8 percent increase in Department of Education discretionary spending for fiscal year 2002 (the figures the White House supplied when asked about Bush’s statement) was below the 18.5 percent increase under Clinton the previous year. . .”
In fact, a 15.8 % increase is “bigger” than a previous year’s 18.5 % increase (115.8 x 118.5 = 137.22; 137.22 – 118.5 = 18.72% ). Dana might wish to define an “increase” as a multiplicative factor, but dictionaries, math books, and common usage all refer to addition.
God knows this isn’t the most eloquent president we’ve ever had, and his tendency to mangle common English makes for some non-sequiturs. But as far as I can tell, the outright prevarication level has dropped precipitously since the last administration. Milbank’s selective quotes make it difficult to determine if there is any justice to his claims, but he has failed abysmally in his attempt to make a cogent case. And if this is the best available argument that Bush is a liar, he must be pretty darn truthful.

A worthwhile amendment, I think. I’m in Indiana today, talking to students. Hope to check in late in the afternoon.

It’s too much to hope for, I know. But I can’t help feeling that this mass amnesty is a truly epochal event. John Burns, living proof that greatness still exists in the New York Times, has been writing riveting accounts of what’s going on. This passage staggered me:

Iraqis said they knew of no previous occasion, in Baghdad, when people had taken to the streets to march on a government building, and then had persisted in protests even after secret police fired automatic rifles into the air, as they did today.

Some who attended a protest at a secret police headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad on Monday said there were at least 700 people taking part who for some time defied orders that they disperse.
“Where is my son? I demand to know where is my son!” one middle-aged woman in a black cloak cried, as she huddled with a group of women at the head of 150 protesters who staged a noisy rally today outside the Ministry of Information beside the Tigris River in central Baghdad.

Similar cries went up from other women desperate to know what had become of long-lost husbands and sons and brothers, in some cases sisters and daughters, who disappeared into the vast network of prisons and detention centers as long as 20 years ago. The details that stuttered out as the women told their tales were like episodes from the nightmares of Soviet Russia: Men and women, and even teenage children, picked up by anonymous enforcers, usually in unmarked cars, and never heard from again. As officials pushed reporters back, ordered security guards to fire warning shots into the air, and pleaded with the women to still their cries, the women’s accounts of their wrenching doorstep partings, and of the dates198019871991199219971999 rang out like the tolling of a sexton’s bell.

The Journal yesterday wondered whether we have another Ceausescu on our hands. Right now, it’s wishful thinking. The deeper point, though, is that once this kind of regime relaxes its grip even slightly, the unraveling could come quickly. Remember the last evil empire? The main fear is that chaos would follow and terrorist elements might loot or use some of the most lethal weapons in Saddam’s arsenal. Which means we must be ready to go in sooner rather than later. But all of this must, broadly speaking, be an encouraging sign. Bush’s hard line is already paying dividends. We can only pray we can disarm Saddam and liberate Iraq without war.

WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE: The Koreans, North and South, understand what the current administration is all about. I loved this quote in the Financial Times:

Paik Jin-hyun, professor of international relations at Seoul National University, said the North was using nuclear weapons to “blackmail” the US into supporting its crumbling economy. “North Korea seems to misunderstand the nature of the Bush administration,” Mr Paik said. “What may have worked with [President Bill] Clinton will not work with [President George W.] Bush. Trying to use nuclear weapons to blackmail this US government. .. is the worst possible tactic.”

Telling, isn’t it? Claudia Rosett sees the bigger picture today as well.

YES, I KNOW: This Dilbert poll of the weaseliest people, institutions, religions, countries, etc. is highly unscientific. But I also thought it was dead on. Enjoy, if you haven’t already.

HE’S BACK: If you live in Montana, and care about fighting back against the kind of sleaze that Max Baucus has engaged in for years, for goodness’ sake, vote for him.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Please send me pieces in college newspapers equating Israelis with Nazis and the like. Here’s a recent piece in the University of Cincinnati News Record. A sample paragraph:

These inhumane acts of violence are justified as God’s Divine law. Moses received the Ten Commandments to guide the Jews in their new freedom. The first divine commandment is “You shall not kill,” although it has been changed to, “You shall not kill a Jew.”

As I said, keep me posted.

AT LAST, MODERATE MUSLIMS: Good news from Indonesia.

WHAT GAY IS: I tend to concur with this analysis by Julie Burchill, denigrating all those too-easy magazine Most Powerful Men in America lists and the like:

The Power Lists are really gay, but in a bad way. They’re not gay like most of my male friends are, which means they read loads of books, take loads of drugs, make great jokes and have nice boyfriends. No, Power List strivers fit the teen-slang meaning of gay, which is “tragic straight” – that is, they spend more on a suit than a family of four would on a holiday, use moisturiser and carry handbags but still demand the right to call the sexes “equal but different”.

I don’t buy into all of Burchill’s definition of feminism. But I like her celebration of gayness. In fact, it’s one of the first short descriptions of the current gay male world that makes it sound like something you’d want to be a part of.

I caught this via Jay Nordlinger’s always worthwhile column, “Impromptus.” After John McCain’s hilarious dig at Barbra Streisand on SNL last Saturday night, this is another sign that our comedians get it. It’s Letterman’s take on Barbara Walters’ nauseatingly sycophantic interview with the murderous thug and dictator, Fidel Castro:

TOP TEN SIGNS BARBARA WALTERS IS IN LOVE WITH FIDEL CASTRO

10. Her first question: “How’d you get so dreamy?”
9. Squeals like a schoolgirl every time he tortures a dissident.
8. She’s wearing his varsity dictator jacket.
7. Re-named her newsmagazine “Veinte/Veinte.”
6. Told him, “You have led a violent overthrow of my heart.”
5. Has same look Diane Sawyer had when she and Khomeini were dating.
4. Breakfast, lunch and dinner: pulled pork.
3. New sign-off line on “The View”: “Socialism or death”.
2. When asking him about Camp X-Ray, she accidentally called it “Guantana-marry me.”
1. The long, mangy beard hairs on her blouse

Cheered me up, anyway.

ANTI-WAR BIGOTRY WATCH: “What is ‘self-evidently bizarre,’ however, is that Sullivan seems to be publicly losing his mind. It happens to a lot of people with AIDS. Dementia sets in, eventually, and, no matter how many drug cocktails they take, in the end virtually all succumb to mania and mental deterioration.” – gay Buchananite polemicist Justin Raimondo, Anti-War.com, setting a new level of discourse for the anti-war movement.

KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “While hired guns do not flourish at Harvard or the University of Chicago, however, in Washington they roam in packs.
Portrait of a hired gun: He or she is usually a mediocre economist — someone whose work, if it didn’t have an ideological edge, might have been published but wouldn’t have had many readers. He has, however, found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge. In particular, he has learned that pretty good jobs in think tanks, or on the staffs of magazines with a distinct political agenda, are available for people who know enough economics to produce plausible-sounding arguments on behalf of the party line. Ask him whether he is a political hack and he will deny it; he probably does not admit it to himself. But somehow everything he says or writes serves the interests of his backers.
Most of these hired guns work on behalf of right-wing causes: it’s a funny thing, but organizations that promote the interests of rich people seem to be better financed than those that don’t. Still, the left has enough resources to front a quorum of its own hacks. And anyway, love of money is only the root of some evil. Love of the limelight, love of the feeling of being part of a Movement, even love of the idea of oneself as a bold rebel against the Evil Empire can be equally corrupting of one’s intellectual integrity.
How can you tell the hacks from the serious analysts? One answer is to do a little homework. Hack jobs often involve surprisingly raw, transparent misrepresentations of fact: in these days of search engines and online databases you don’t need a staff of research assistants to catch ’em with their hands in the cookie jar. But there is another telltale clue: if a person, or especially an organization, always sings the same tune, watch out.” – Paul Krugman, two years ago.

I think Dana Milbank scores a few decent points against the president in this piece. Nothing terrible, but still sloppy.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “We have a major national security problem on our hands. There’s a man — a deceitful man — who has consistently lied to the world, jeopardizing the safety of Americans. As long as he stays in power, we are at a greater risk of terrorist attack. As long as he continues to disregard the truth, spouting lies into the air, this international bully will threaten our safety. This man must be stopped: George Bush.” – from the Daily Pennsylvanian.

A DEFENSE OF GRIDLOCK: I love Jack Shafer when he’s this ornery.

HOW DUMB ARE THE BRITS? They make Mary McGrory look informed. Barely any knows who’s in the cabinet; and only a quarter can recognize Saddam Hussein. A useful antidote to Anglophilia.

RIGHT-WING HOMOPHOBIA WATCH: It especially applies to gay Republicans.

CLINTON’S SHOCK: A cartoon on the North Korea news.

THE ORWELL PANEL: More details: 7 pm this Thursday night at Jurow Hall, Main Building 100 Washington Square East New York University.

A GAY MAN AND HIS CHURCH: An email that says it all:

I must say that I am absolutely horrified by the story from the Sunday Herald. I am a young gay man considering a vocation with the Society of Jesus. Ever since I was 14, I have heard the call of the Lord to his holy priesthood and I have wanted to do nothing more than serve the Church. After puberty and the realization of my sexual orientation, I was deeply depressed and I knew the Church would never accept my as a gay priest. I vowed to hide my sexuality for the rest of my life and I have remained chaste and closeted for all of my 21 years.

Two years ago, I picked up your book “Love Undetectable” and was totally enthralled. Your frankness and honestly about your own struggles with homosexuality and the Church parallel some of my struggles even to today.

After the sex-abuse scandals erupted last year, I was shaken to my core all over again. I just knew there would be a witch-hunt against gay priests and all those horrible experiences I faced at 14 came back to me. I fear what will happen to me now. I am scheduled to begin the application process to the Jesuits next year and I am very scared. What happened to my Church? All I wish to do is serve God and his flock as faithfully as Jesus did and now I am faced with being probed and examined to be “outed” by a hierarchy obsessed with expelling all remnants of homosexuality. I feel so lost and so alienated from the Church in these times. The worst part is the fact that I cannot share my pain with my parish priest or my vocation spiritual director for fear of rejection from the only life I have ever passionately desired.

Ask yourself: how can anyone defend a policy of routine discrimination against men such as these? I am grateful for your many emails about this; and I’ll continue to hope that this horror won’t come to pass.

ANTI-AMERICANISM, CTD: David Frum reports from Britain and finds less of it than you’d think.

KRUGMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS: “Economists also did their bit to legitimize previously unthinkable levels of executive pay. During the 1980’s and 1990’s a torrent of academic papers — popularized in business magazines and incorporated into consultants’ recommendations — argued that Gordon Gekko was right: greed is good; greed works. In order to get the best performance out of executives, these papers argued, it was necessary to align their interests with those of stockholders. And the way to do that was with large grants of stock or stock options.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that these new intellectual justifications for soaring executive pay were as much effect as cause. I’m not suggesting that management theorists and economists were personally corrupt. It would have been a subtle, unconscious process: the ideas that were taken up by business schools, that led to nice speaking and consulting fees, tended to be the ones that ratified an existing trend, and thereby gave it legitimacy.”
– Paul Krugman, criticizing the subtle, unconscious corruption of academic economists being paid nice speaking and consulting fees, October 20, 2002.

“My critics seem to think that there was something odd about Enron’s willingness to pay a mere college professor that much money. But such sums are not unusual for academic economists whose expertise is relevant to current events… Remember that this was 1999: Asia was in crisis, the world was a mess. And justifiably or not, I was regarded as an authority on that mess. I invented currency crises as an academic field, way back in 1979; anyone who wants a sense of my academic credentials should look at the Handbook of International Economics, vol. 3, and check the index…

I mention all this not as a matter of self-puffery, but to point out that I was not an unknown college professor. On the contrary, I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms. They thought I might tell them something useful… The point is that the money Enron offered wasn’t out of line with what companies with no interest in influence-buying were offering me. You may think I was overpaid, but the market – not Enron – set those pay rates.”
– Paul Krugman, January 21, defending his getting paid $50,000 for a two-day weekend Enron Advisory Board meeting because the market set the fees.

“More broadly, Sullivan (and Virginia Postrel, who I did read) seem to believe that successful academics are poor mousy types who live in ivory towers, who never receive offers to be paid to talk about what they know. That’s not the way it is. Academic economists who have established international reputations in policy-relevant fields are constantly called by governments and companies, seeking their services – and yes, offering to pay for them. Think about it: how could it be otherwise? …

By 1999, 22 years after I got my Ph.D., having published 15 scholarly monographs and around 150 professional papers, I was certainly in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls (though I didn’t get there until around 1995). So the Enron offer didn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly didn’t corrupt me – as my articles about them surely prove.

So where are we? Ms. Postrel says that I should have known that something was wrong because I was offered far more than someone in my position should expect; in saying this, she only shows that she doesn’t know anything either about the
modern academic world, or about what corporate consultants are paid. Mr. Sullivan thinks that I misled readers by not reminding them that corporations invariably pay their boards; it would never have occurred to me that people didn’t know that. And he claims that I was an Enron crony. Maybe he should look up “crony” in the dictionary. Doesn’t being a crony mean that you (a) know people well and (b) do them favors? I didn’t, and I didn’t. What’s left here is a crazed determination to find something wrong with my behavior when I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone? Or is it just green-eyed envy?”
– Paul Krugman, lambasting critics of his $50,000 sinecure from Enron’s “advisory board” as being “green-eyed with envy,” January 23, 2002. Unlike some other Enron beneficiaries, Krugman kept his money.

“Ask the average leftist today what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. Ask him what he is against, and the rhetorical floodgates open. That tells you something. Similarly, ask the average anti-war activist what she is for with regard to Iraq, what exactly she thinks we should constructively do, and the stammering and stuttering begins. Do we just leave Saddam alone? Do we send Jimmy Carter to sign the kind of deal he made with North Korea eight years ago? Will pressuring the Israelis remove the nerve gas and potential nukes Saddam has in his possession? Will ceding the West Bank to people who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center help defang al Qaeda? They don’t say and don’t know. But what they do know is what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the “racist” war on Afghanistan, and on and on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder some have started selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park.” – from my latest Sunday Times piece on the anti-Semitism hijacking the anti-war movement.

What on earth is going on in Iraq? I have no way of knowing what Saddam’s strategy is behind the sudden release of so many prisoners. Its probably a desperate plea for support. But we know from history that the moment a tyrant begins to relax his grip, forces are unleashed that he can find hard to control. The superb New York Times reporter, John Burns, has been writing peerless reports from Iraq (they make Nick Kristof look like a college stringer), and he delivers these two paragraphs today:

A 68-year-old retired high school mathematics teacher, who gave her first name as Samiya, said she heard of the amnesty while driving across Baghdad, and headed straight for Abu Ghraib in the hope that her 59-year-old brother, a chemical engineer serving a 30-year prison term, would be freed. When asked if her brother was a political prisoner, the white-haired woman turned away, then said he was the victim of denunciation by a “jealous colleague” at work. Then, she launched into an encomium for Mr. Hussein. “We love our president because he forgives the mistakes of his people,” she said.
Once the prison gates collapsed, the mood changed. Seeing watchtowers abandoned and the prison guards standing passively by or actively supporting them as they charged into the cell blocks, the crowd seemed to realize that they were experiencing, if only briefly, a new Iraq, where the people, not the government, was sovereign. Chants of “Down Bush! Down Sharon!” referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, faded. In one cell block, a guard smiled broadly at an American photographer, raised his thumb, and said, “Bush! Bush!” Elsewhere, guards offered an English word almost never heard in Iraq. “Free!” they said. “Free!”

Ah that war-monger Bush. No wonder Iraqis hate him.

The argument that immediately surfaced in the media following the North Korean revelation about their nukes has been: See? Why shouldn’t we invade North Korea now? The Bushies are sooo inconsistent. They just want to invade Iraq for oil/empire/the hell of it/the mid-term elections, or fill in the latest Dowdian allegation. But the difference between North Korea and Iraq is so simple it’s astonishing some people don’t see it. So let’s put this as clearly as we can: North Korea has a nuke; Iraq, so far, doesn’t. Got that? When a rogue state succeeds in getting weapons of mass destruction, our options are severely limited. The question with Iraq is simple: in trying to stop Saddam getting a nuke, do we follow the same policies as Clinton and Carter in 1994 with North Korea, or do we try something else? Amazingly, large swathes of apparently intelligent people seem to think we should try the Carter/Clinton approach to Iraq. My view is simple: if we do not disarm Saddam now, we never will. And if we don’t, a full-scale nuclear, biological and chemical war is inevitable in the Middle East; and that war, with the help of terror groups like al Qaeda, will soon come to LA and New York and London and Washington. So the choice is a dangerous war now; or a much more destructive war later. I know democracies don’t like to hear these as the two options; democracies rightly, understandably hate to go to war. But these choices, in my view, are the only ones we actually have. So what’s it gonna be? Or do we still want to change the subject?

ONE AT A TIME? Then there’s the latest anti-Iraq war argument. The old line was that we have to go after al Qaeda, not Iraq, because al Qaeda is the bigger threat. We can’t do both. But the obvious response is: why on earth not? The military says it can be done as a practical matter. As a political matter, a victory against Iraq would, in my view, likely help the war on al Qaeda, opening a trove of intelligence, demoralizing anti-American forces in the region, and acting as a model for a post-tyrannical Middle East. So we’re left with the next argument. Defanging Iraq will so inflame the Muslim “street” that other Muslim countries will stop cooperating with us in the war on terror. Tony Judt yesterday cited Indonesia and Pakistan as evidence for this. The trouble with this argument, it seems to me, is that the Indonesian government wasn’t cooperating much at all until the Bali massacre. Are they going to cooperate less now? Or less if another wave of terrorism hits in the wake of Iraq? If anything, the record suggests that they’ll only crack down when faced with a real threat.

AND PAKISTAN? As for Pakistan, it seems to me that Judt’s case is stronger. Musharraf has indeed been walking a tightrope. But if our policy is to fight terror without in any way pissing off the “Arab street,” we might as well pack up and go home. Ideologically, most of Arab public opinion, shielded by the police states most Arabs live in, hates the U.S. regardless of what we do. What we’ve learned is that although this hatred is constant, their respect for us isn’t. Under Clinton, they held us in contempt. Hence the steady rise of al Qaeda and the growing belligerence on the West Bank in the 1990s. Under Bush since 9/11, they’re far more circumspect, as well they should be. The Afghanistan campaign was therefore the best argument against Islamic extremism the Arab world has heard in a long, long time. Besides, Musharraf is a realist. If America takes Tony Judt’s advice and simply lets Saddam continue to develop nukes, poison gas, and smallpox, then Musharraf really would have an incentive to placate the extremists. After all, America’s biggest enemy in the region would now be invulnerable and have any number of weapons of mass destruction to wreak havoc. But a successful war against Iraq would do the opposite. It would give Musharraf the momentum to keep going. That’s why this is not the time to lose our nerve. In fact, it’s time to steel ourselves and press on. Our problem right now is our passivity. We need to take this war to the enemy sooner rather than later. Or they will bring it back to us. In fact, they already are.

PEDOPHILES MAYBE; GAY MEN NEVER: Rome, it seems, is unwilling to back the zero-tolerance policy toward child-abuse endorsed by the American bishops. No surprise, I suppose. This is a bureaucracy that defends its own. The children are now and always have been secondary to this instinct for self-preservation. Besides, the Vatican would argue, zero-tolerance doesn’t do full justice to the variety of incidents involved. But there is an area where the church is moving toward zero-tolerance: not against those who rape and molest children, but against any gay priest, celibate or otherwise. The word is that the Vatican is slowly moving toward a massive purge of gay people, people who for centuries have served the church diligently, faithfully and well. The Vatican cares not whether these priests or would-be priests are chaste, whether they love and serve God, whether they are brilliant preachers, or compassionate pastors. They’re gay and therefore they must go. My heart breaks. To see a church I love enact a policy so devoid of even the slightest humanity and fairness – in order to deflect attention from its own terrible responsibility for permitting the abuse of the young – is just a soul-destroying experience. The people who told me I was a fool to stay in the church, to trust in its better nature, the people who have long viewed the Church as quite simply the enemy of gay people – I’m afraid they may have been right all along. I find myself, in the face of this inhumanity, unable to go to mass any more. I haven’t left the church in my head or my soul. But I can’t go right now. It’s too painful. I just pray the purge won’t actually happen. What else can I do?

AGAINST KRUGMAN’S CLASS WAR: “The importance of incentives to innovate comes up in evaluating Krugman’s comparions between the U.S. and countries like Canada and Sweden. Comparing the bottom decile in America to the bottom decile in Sweden is interesting, but fundamentally it cannot tell us what would happen if public policy in America took a hint from the Scandinavians. That’s because America–more accurately, the existence of an enormous, relatively free marketplace for new products–has been responsible for much of the innovation that has made living standards elsewhere so high. The median Swede might lose some of her wealth and longevity if it weren’t for America’s big-winner system producing new computers, software, pharmeceuticals, and other technology that make an hour of work buy a lot more stuff today than it did, say, in 1970. Even if some of those gains come from the minds of non-Americans, we have to ask how many of them we would have seen if it hadn’t been possible to sell beneficial new products in such a great big market.” – more on Krugman’s desire to punish talent, why I’m no Orwell, why Jeb Bush will win in Florida, and the emergence of “Dildo Republicans.” All on the best Letters Page on the web.

HEADS UP: I’ll be on the road mid-week, speaking on the Catholic crisis at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, on Wednesday at 1 pm. On Thursday night, I’ll be in New York City, on a panel on Orwell at New York University at 7 pm. My fellow panelists are Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer and Vivian Gornick. You’re all welcome, natch.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLINTON: I agree with every word Max Boot writes here. No, it’s not some kind of anti-Clinton obsession. It’s a vital and important part of understanding our world to understand how we came to be in this awful predicament – in a world war with no apparent end in sight and much horror still to come. It’s my judgment that president Bill Clinton’s policies – not his person or his private life or anything else – but his policies left the world a far more dangerous place than when he took office. History will judge him brutally for what he has done to damage world peace. He may have meant well; but we must live with the consequences.

AND THANKS: Another record: 245,000 unique visits last week. We might break a million this month.

Here’s an idea. Maybe OxBlog could do it. Someone out there in blogland should take a look at Ann Coulter’s recent columns and Maureen Dowd’s. Using strict criteria – personal smears, rhetorical hyperbole, unprovable accusations of ill-will, bigotry (towards a class or race or group of people), unsubstantiated claims, and so on, see how the two stack up. It’s not worth criticizing Dowd any more. She’s beyond criticism. But it would be interesting to see how the prize columnist at the Times compares with a writer now deemed beyond the pale by large sections of the media. One your marks, get set … I’ll link to the best.

KRUGMAN’S CLASS HATRED: Wow. Barely a single original thought in Paul Krugman’s Times magazine cover-story, a piece that reads like Howell Raines just ordered it into what was once a pretty independent place. Growing inequality in America? Whodathunk it? For anyone wanting an intelligent liberal attempt to deal with this issue and actually come up with some honest solutions, go read Mickey Kaus’s superb, “The End of Equality.” It was written over a decade ago. It’s still fresher than Krugman’s rant.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: “In his years out of office, [former president Jimmy Carter] has avidly pursued the mission of what he calls ‘waging peace.’ He had some successes in trying to resolve a dispute between Ethiopia and the Eritrean rebels, negotiating a four-month cease-fire in Bosnia and brokering a deal between longtime enemies Sudan and Uganda.
But at times he has also encountered stiff criticism. In 1994, a few weeks before North Korean President Kim Il Sung died, he invited Carter to visit Pyongyang in an effort to calm tensions with South Korea and the United States over his nuclear weapons program. That meeting led to a thaw in Pyongyang’s relationship with Washington although former President Bill Clinton at first rejected the overture and the State Department, never appreciative of outside help, viewed the Carter visit as meddling. Eventually, Clinton wised up and tried to pursue Carter’s approach.’ – Helen Thomas, October 17. Thomas now has a clear lead.