Month: March 2003

Mike Kinsley is a brilliant and genuinely nice man. But he’s also deeply partisan. I can’t see any other reason for the obtuseness of his latest column. Herewith a brief fisking of its opener (Kinsley’s prose is in italics. Mine isn’t.):

How has an attack on the United States by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan led us to war against Iraq?

9/11 revealed how vulnerable the United States is to international Islamist terrorism. It revealed the absolute ruthlessness of the enemy. It also revealed the possibility of a nightmare chemical, biological or nuclear 9/11. For twelve years, the United States and others have been trying to get Saddam Hussein to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction. 9/11 made resolving that issue far more urgent, since there was a clear possibility that Saddam could deliver such weapons to some of his terrorist clients. So we decided to get serious about Saddam. How hard is that argument to grasp? The linkage was there from the very beginning. Yours truly even mentioned Iraq as a state sponsor of such terror the very week of September 11.

Why are nuclear weapons in Iraq worth a war but not nuclear weapons in North Korea?

Because Saddam doesn’t have them yet but Kim Jong Il does. When the enemy has the capacity to create nuclear Armageddon, it obviously raises the risks of military intervention. Again: I’d have thought for a person of Kinsley’s intellect, that rather elementary point would be a no-brainer.

For most skeptics about Gulf War II (including me), the Bush administration’s failure to answer these two questions sincerely or even plausibly, let alone convincingly, is central to our doubts.

Why, pray, is worrying about the risk of WMDs in the hands of terrorists obviously insincere or implausible? Why is believing that Saddam be disarmed not just unconvincing but implausible? This was Clinton’s policy. The Security Council affirmed it 15 – 0 not so long ago. Was the entire U.N. insincere? You could, of course, find these arguments unconvincing. You could believe Saddam has no WMDs. You could believe that he has them but won’t ever use them again, although he has in the past. You could argue that he has no links to international terrorism (against the mass of evidence available). But Kinsley’s not interested in those arguments. He’s interested in simply asserting that the president is a bad liar (that’s the more direct way of saying he hasn’t answered obvious questions about Iraq “sincerely or even plausibly”). That’s not an argument. It’s a cheap partisan shot.

This isn’t entirely reasonable. The battle could be worth joining even though George W. is unable to explain why.

Oh, please. The president has been plenty able to explain why; and plenty of people, including the prime minister of Great Britain, and a majority of Americans, agree with him. Why doesn’t Kinsley call Blair’s case insincere and implausible? It’s indistinguishable from Bush’s.

The 9/11 pretext may be phony without necessarily invalidating the whole exercise. As for Iraq versus North Korea, following the right policy in one place is better than following the wrong policy in both. There are worse things in this world than logical inconsistency. Furthermore, it is hard to dismiss the official reasons for this war as disingenuous without some theory about what the ulterior motive or unspoken war aim might be. George W. Bush is not taking the nation into war to avenge his father or as a “wag the dog” strategy to win re-election, as Bush’s more cynical opponents have charged. He deserves more credit than that. Nor is he planning to conquer and occupy Iraq in order to bring human rights to the Iraqi people or start a chain reaction of democracy throughout the Middle East, as he and his supporters have lately augmented the official war aims. He doesn’t deserve that much credit.

Funny, but from the beginning, the president has clearly and unmistakably portrayed this conflict as a battle between democracy and a new Islamist totalitarianism. And from the beginning – not “lately” – the president’s supporters have made pro-democracy arguments. Here, to take one example, is a quote that Kinsley didn’t hear – because presumably he wasn’t listening – from the president’s speech last June about the situation in Israel: “I have a hope for the people of Muslim countries … You have a rich culture, and you share the aspirations of men and women in every culture. Prosperity and freedom and dignity are not just American hopes, or Western hopes. They are universal, human hopes. And even in the violence and turmoil of the Middle East, America believes those hopes have the power to transform lives and nations.” So you see the president does indeed deserve some credit. And if he were a Democrat, Kinsley would not hesitate to give him some. As for the rest of Mike’s column – veering into Chomskyan territory about blood for oil – I leave its inconsistencies to the readers of Slate.

An old article well-worth revisiting, by the superb gay journalist, Paul Varnell. One punishment inflicted on a young homosexual by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority mafia was “to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects.” Meanwhile, some gay activists organize to protect a regime that executes homosexuals as a matter of course. Go figure.

Yes, there actually is a group that goes by that name. They’d be more accurate calling themselves, “Turkeys For Thanksgiving.” Maybe they haven’t seen stories like this one. Like many Arab mobocracies, the Palestinian Authority, so beloved of the hyper-tolerant Europeans, is viciously homophobic – to the point of imprisonment and execution and the habitual response of tyrannies to gay people – accusing them of treachery. Yet the gay left continues to appease and make excuses for these thugs. Why? Is their hatred of America that deep? Or are they that stupid?

WHAT CONSERVATIVE MEDIA?: My latest take on the latest media myth.

Two British papers – the Guardian and the Times – are reporting that Britain may attempt to produce a different version of proposed Resolution 1442 than the simple one now envisaged. 1442 would actually delay war for yet another two weeks – until March 30 – with a clear deadline for complete Iraqi disarmament. Blair hopes, it is alleged, to win over a few waverers on the Security Council to get a majority. It’s also argued that the Turkish balk has delayed the military timetable, so the extra two weeks don’t amount to much. The problem with this approach is that it presumes reasonableness on the part of the Franco-German-Russian axis. But what Saddam has shown – rather brilliantly – is that even the slightest concession from Baghdad is enough for the appeasers to claim that the “inspections” are “working” (even though 1441 doesn’t stipulate that the inspections should have any effect except verifying Saddam’s complete and immediate disarmament). There is in principle nothing to stop this process from going on for ever. De Villepin has claimed that inspections cannot go on for ever, but has never proposed an end-date, or even a simple criterion by which one could measure whether they had failed. The truth is, I fear, that France, Russia and Germany simply want to keep Saddam in power and to humiliate the United States in order to build their own relationship with the Arab satrapies and pursue their own priorities in the region. If that’s their game, no compromise will satisfy them, whatever the British think. So let them veto.

In particular, the Euro-axis is alarmed at the consequences of a successful Iraq war on the broader Middle East. They are dismayed at the prospect of Israel being strengthened strategically, as they pointed out today in their press conference. They are terrified of Arab and Islamist militancy and are instinctually reluctant to confront rather than appease it. And they are equally concerned about the damage a war without U.N. support would do to their diplomatic leverage in the U.N. No new formula will change any of this. If I’m right, then the current neo-lib whining about the Bush team’s alleged incompetence is partisan hooey. Josh Marshall and Fred Kaplan, who both support a war, nevertheless complain about alleged Bush administration “incompetence.” It seems to me that both have to give some real reasons as to what the Bushies did wrong. They pursued a text-book U.N. strategy. The secured a tortuous U.N. Resolution which was passed unanimously. They won the Congressional vote easily. I’m unaware of any obvious military failings. If the impasse is because of the irredentist opposition of Germans to war under any conditions, then it’s not Bush’s fault. If it’s because of a French desire to stymie American power, then it’s hard to see what Bush could have done to stop this. If the French refuse to enforce a resolution they signed, why is that a sign of incompetence on the part of the Bush administration? My own view is that the diplomatic mess we’re in is a function of world reality – and would be the same whatever administration was in charge. The Clinton administration avoided such a crisis because they avoided serious action to solve the problem. Personally, I’d rather have a crisis because we’re doing something than a non-crisis that leads to still greater danger in the future.

Better than the New York Times’.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Chirac can have his mouth full of jam, his lips can be dripping with the stuff, his fingers covered with it, the pot can be standing open in front of him. And when you ask him if he eats jam, he’ll say: ‘Me? Never, Monsieur le president!'” – former French president Valery Giscard D’Estaing.

A REAL PEACE MOVEMENT: Here’s one I’d be happy to join.

Yes, this was the 1953 obit. (Thanks to NRO’s Corner.) Always useful to see how the Times dealt with murderous dictators then. Some things never change.

The Onion gets it about right.

“The situation we’re in right now [with regards to Iraq] looks something like this: Imagine you’ve got a sick child in serious need of medical attention. You could take him to the hospital yourself but it’s hours away over some difficult roads. You decide to bring in the pros. You call an ambulance, hand over your sick child over to them, and tell them to be careful! Now fast-forward a few hours. They’re almost to the hospital. But a few problems have cropped up along the way. Before hitting the road, the ambulance driver went and downed a quick six-pack. He scraped up half a dozen cars getting out of the liquor store parking lot. On the way to the hospital – in a mix of drunkenness and zeal – he’s already hit two cars and four pedestrians. Now they’re being chased by cops from two different counties. And there’s a lynch mob on their trail looking for revenge for the trashed cars and mowed-down relatives.” – Josh Marshall, likening the Bush administration to drunk-drivers, The Hill.

Gregg Easterbrook – how does he do it? – outlines the likely military scenarios in the battle for Baghdad. Like Easterbrook, I’m worried that we’re too complacent about an easy victory.