Month: February 2003

“House of Commons Backs Blair on Iraq” – Associated Press.
“Britain’s Blair Suffers Parliament Revolt Over Iraq” – Reuters.

Two words: Al Sharpton. And what he bodes for the Democrats.

By far the most depressing aspect of the debate over war to disarm Saddam has been how it has swiftly adopted the contours of the culture war. There is a solid and passionate base among many blue-staters that opposes this war at least in part because they oppose George W. Bush. At some point in the last few months, in fact, being anti-war clearly became a defining cultural moniker for an entire sub-population. Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war. Worse in fact: there is very little argument or debate going on in these sub-populations, simply an assumption that war against Saddam is wrong, and that all right-thinking people agree about this. Obviously, the polls suggest that this sub-population is not a majority, but they are a powerful and increasingly angry minority. If the war hits snags, they will redouble their efforts to humiliate the president. I don’t think their anger will be abated if the war goes well either. They will merely find a new reason to hate Bush. But I do think that an opportunity exists for Bush to neutralize and even co-opt some of these people by his conduct in the post-war settlement. He must commit real resources, real troops, real money to reconstructing Iraq and to building the beginnings of democracy there. No friendly new dictator; no cut-and-run; no change of the subject. He has to show the essentially progressive nature of the war against Islamist terror and its state sponsors – not just for the security of the West but for the future of the Arab world. Rescinding some future tax cuts to help pay for this may well be prudent – and even popular. Bush can’t reverse the tide of hatred on the far left. But he can try and reach out to the many liberals in the center who would support a proactive foreign policy, if they believed it was about more than mere national interest. That’s the real opportunity ahead: a fusion of Bush’s instincts and Blair’s hopes. I pray the president grasps it.

There’s a connection. Which is why we shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that Islamism is some kind of legitimate religious faith: it’s a murderous, suicidal, death-worshipping totalitarianism, built around the structure of a religion. It is our times’ Nazism and Communism. Drawing on Western notions of revolutionary violence and mass murder, it has tied itself, as Francoism did, to the trappings of traditional faith. But even atheistic communism needed religious fervor to keep it afloat. A reader sends in this wonderful comment from Malcolm Muggeridge, who observed the religiosity of the Soviet murder-cult in its early days. It’s from 7 June 1933:

I often used to think, when I was in Russia, that the general attitude towards the G.P.U. must be like the general attitude in the Middle Ages towards the Powers of Darkness – quite irrational; quite unrelated to knowledge or experience of its manner of working; yet somehow understandable, somehow in keeping with the facts of the case. There is, mixed up with it all, a kind of mysticism. I turned up once in a back number of “Pravda” an obituary notice of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka and first head of the GPU, written by his successor. It described Dzerzhlnsky as a saint, an ascetic, a man who rose above petty bourgeois emotions like pity, or a respect for justice or for human life; a man of infinite industry; a rare spirit whose revolutionary passion was unearthly and uncontaminated.
The very prose of the obituary notice was lyrical. It had a rhythm like a religious chant. I thought, and still think, that I had found in it the quintessence of revolution and I hated this quintessence because it is a denial of everything that has been gained in the slow, painful progress of civilisation; because it was beastly, because it idealised and spiritualised evil because it glorified destruction and destruction and, going beneath the animal, beneath hate, beneath lust, beneath every kind of appetite, founded itself on impulses which though they have in the past sometimes been organised into, abominable, underground cults, have never before held sway over a hundred and sixty million people inhabiting a sixth of the world’s surface.

We face the same threat today – except this time, on the verge of being empowered with some of the most dangerous weapons known to man. And we face the same response in the West today as well: widespread denial, cowardice, prevarication, and beneath the surface among some on the far right and left, an actual attraction to the murderousness and evil of the enemy.

The Times (London), a conservative paper, nevertheless sees the wisdom of Tony Blair’s foreign policy in the last year:

Consider where Britain would be today if the Prime Minister had aligned himself with France and Germany. Consider the country’s position if Mr Blair had offered Washington sympathy but witheld real support. The United States would have toppled Saddam last Autumn. The UN Security Council, on which this country has a permanent seat, would have been rendered an impotent observer, once-warm political relations between America and Europe would have been plunged even further into the deep freeze and Nato would have been reduced from a military alliance of enduring value to a Cold War relic. It is hard to envisage, as Mr Blair was wise to appreciate, how any of this would have served Britain’s interests.

Exactly. Not so much a poodle, as, well, an independent ally.

No, I’m not hallucinating. But the person expressing such a view is, of course, an Iraqi exile and torture survivor. The majority of the Voice’s usual contributors are quite happy to keep Saddam in power.

BBC WATCH: Here comes the BBC, explicating and amplifying the anti-American views of one Robert Mugabe, with minimal context, and a puff piece on Michael Moore, with the odd assertion that his book “was shelved by publishers in the US at first. They only changed their minds after a protest by US librarians.” Huh? And, then, in a final flourish of chutzpah, the Beeb analyzes how biased to the right the American media are. All in a day’s work for the far-lefties running one of the world’s most influential media entity.

After months and months of prevarication, the New York Times finally gets the immensely complicated idea that U.N. Resolution 1441 might actually mean what it says.

MOORE’S NEW TRIUMPH: If you want the ultimate sign of how deep asinine anti-Americanism has become abroad, you can’t do much better than this.

A COP’S STORY: Watching his spouse die as a firefighter in the WTC on 9/11 changed one New York cop into a campaigner for marrriage rights.

The Washington Post gets the real story this morning:

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government … was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war. “You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not,” the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. “That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not.”

That’s some brinkmanship. But I think it also happens to be true. The second U.N. resolution is irrelevant to whether a war actually takes place. It is therefore a gamble Bush cannot completely lose (whatever diplomatic and popular damage it does would be more than undone by a successful war). But it’s a resolution the Security Council (and France and Germany) can easily lose. If the resolution is defeated, but war ensues, Bush will take a small hit at home, a huge hit abroad (still, how much worse could it get?) – but, precisely because of these things, an even bigger domestic gain if the war is successful. Bush will be seen as someone who did all he could to win over the U.N., but in the end, did what he believed was right. He will emerge principled and triumphant. Ditto Blair, especially if a liberated Iraq reveals untold horrors, human rights abuses and French arms contracts. Machiavelli’s dictum applies powerfully now: all that matters is that Bush win the war. If he does, this conflict will be deemed to have been just and justified. That’s why calling the French bluff is especially important – particularly if it isn’t a bluff.

FRANCE’S PREDICAMENT: France, to my mind, has the most at stake. A failed resolution followed by war would mean the end of the United Nations as a credible world body, which, in turn, is largely the source of French global influence. The French certainly don’t have any serious global military power – and even the EU is beginning to wriggle out of their grasp. If an Iraq war is successful, the orneriness of the pro-American Eastern European countries will only increase, handing more leverage to Britain, Spain and Italy in a 25-nation EU. At this point, I’d say the main real pressure – despite what seems evident on the surface – is therefore on France (and to a lesser extent, Germany). They will wield their maximum power at the next Security Council vote. But the moment the vote is over, their fate will rest entirely on how well the U.S. and U.K. armed forces do in the Iraqi desert. I’m beginning to think Saddam knows this reality as well. Perhaps he has already assumed that war is inevitable and that there’s nothing he can do to stop it. That’s why he’s is indicating he won’t give up the al Samoud missiles to help his German and French allies win in the security council. He’ll need those missiles for more urgent tasks in a couple of weeks. His gambit now is therefore to do as much damage to his enemy as possible before his inevitable demise. That means diplomatic damage, by coaxing the anti-Americans, France and Germany, out of their post-cold-war closet, wrecking the U.N., and splitting NATO and the EU. And no doubt it will also mean the deployment of whatever chemical and biological weapons he may have – against allied soldiers and the “Zionist entity.” If I were the French president, I would therefore use Saddam’s refusal to destroy the al Samoud missile, if it occurs and isn’t just another ploy, as a way to climb down. Chirac’s point has been made. And then the war will happen. Whether Chirac likes it or not.

“I’ve discovered an immediate practical use for a small portion of my emergency supply of Duct Tape. I’ve placed 2 strips at the bottom of my Television screen – covering the lower 6″ or so, blocking out the annoying scroll and other supposedly ‘vital’ information (logo, time, stock quotes, terror alert status, etc…) they cram into that portion of the screen. Being a news/political junkie, my TV is tuned to Fox News, CNN or MSNBC about 90 percent of the time, so it works out well.” – more invaluable advice from readers on the Letters Page. Plus: a glowing BBC miniseries on the Rosenbergs and the pan-Pacific penis festival. No Harvard professors allowed.

THE ABYSSINIA PRECEDENT: A wonderful piece by my old editor, Bill Deedes, on how the Western powers, stymied by – yes! – France, bungled Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia. Deedes was alive and kicking as a journalist at the time and remembers it all vividly. Money quote:

The crisis in 1935 came closest to where we are now after October 4, when Mussolini launched his attack on Abyssinia. Britain’s eagerness to set in motion the machinery of the League against Italy ran into immediate difficulties with France. Pierre Laval, the French foreign minister, was unwilling to antagonise Mussolini. The sticking point was the likelihood of action by the League, involving sanctions strong enough to thwart Mussolini, precipitating war. Though never a strong believer in the principle of sanctions, Eden believed that on this occasion they would be effective. He wanted the League to apply sanctions – including oil sanctions – to bring Mussolini to the negotiating table. Without the co-operation of France, this became a farce. When I passed through the Suez Canal in 1935 en route for Abyssinia, Mussolini’s ships were drawing all the oil they wanted. Financial backing for Italy, I was told, came from the Banque de France. When I came back a few months later, the same conditions prevailed.

Appeasing Mussolini and Hitler wasn’t in France’s long-term interests then either. Plus ca change …

POSEUR ALERT: “Quoting passionately from the Irish Poet, W.B Yeats, President Mbeki insisted that NAM must ensure that the ‘centre must hold and position itself in word and deed as the enemies of anarchy.’ The President urged NAM to act to neutralise the deadly impact of the tide hungry for human blood, which seeks to celebrate a victory defined as the prevalence of an ephemereal [sic] peace whose parent is the fear of death. The usage of the word ‘tide’ was quite ephemeral at this Summit in the sense that, a week ago, President Mbeki had shaped his State of the Nation Address on the 14th February 2003 on the theme, the ‘tide has turned.’ The conscious correlation between the State of the Nation Address of President Mbeki on Valentine’s Day and the concluding statement in his opening speech at NAM, calling for NAM to ‘express the message of dialogue, peace and a better life for all human beings,’ was indicative of consistency in both South Africa’s domestic policies and its foreign policy in its quest for a better life for all human beings.” – the metaphors of president Thabo Mbeki.

“At the end of the 3rd quarter in the “Is the NYT biased bowl?”, let’s review some relevant stats:

Score: Sullivan, Kaus et al: 52, NYT: 3
1st downs: Sullivan, et al: 28, NYT: 1
Passing Yards: Sullivan, et al: 320, NYT: 15
Rushing Yards: Sullivan, et al: 225, NYT: -5

So yes, while it may be true that the 4th quarter belongs to you, Mr. Raines, the rest of the world has turned the game off. It’s over.”