Month: April 2003

I was heartened to read Kanan Makiya’s latest missive in the New Republic. There are some memes in the liberal media I just don’t buy – i.e. all exiles are bad; Islam will destroy Iraqi democracy; we’ll be hated soon; we’re hated already, etc., etc. Kristof has absorbed, as usual, all the defeatist talking points, but at least he has conceded he got almost everything wrong last year. In contrast, here’s the money Makiya quote:

Garner was an enormous hit with the Iraqis present at the meeting. He wisely stayed very much in the background, judging that the key task at hand was having Iraqis speak to one another, rather than having them hear speeches from representatives of the U.S.-led coalition. When Garner did finally speak, it was to make a direct, honest, straight-from-the-heart appeal to the participants that won them over instantly. He said, simply, that his role was to support Iraqis in the reconstruction of their country, and that he plans on leaving as soon as Iraqis themselves find it appropriate. “He really means it,” a businessman from Mosul said to me after the conference. “This man is the genuine article.”

I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear. And if the U.N. is successfully kept at the margins, we can work this out.

SO BLAIR WAS RIGHT? Remember the furore over whether prime minister Tony Blair was lying when he claimed that two British POW’s had been executed by the Saddam regime? New evidence – in shallow graves – looks like it supports Blair. No proof yet – but this is a depressing find.

It appears that the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations no less is still repeating the lie. The Times of London reports that among the listed future quotations from the Iraq war, one is

from Lieutenant-General William Wallace, Commander of the US Army Fifth Corps: “The enemy we are fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed.”

Aaaarghhh.

NUTS ON CIRCUMCISION? A reader makes his case against mine. We only cut a few lines.

HOT DATE: Drudge and Camille. Philly. V. hot.

CHIRAC WARNED: From L’Express in Paris: “If Jacques Chirac persists in making the UN the field of his next battle, he has been duly warned by Washington.-It will be worthy, glorious and solitary, perhaps even moving.-But irrelevant.” Some of the French are beginning to understand their predicament. Alas, Le Figaro has just made Johny Apple look on the ball.

I was walking through my neighborhood the other day – in D.C.’s hyper-p.c. Adams Morgan – and I swear I’ve been seeing a few more anti-war posters since the war ended. The signs are perhaps expressions of some kind of rage at reality, especially a reality that has surely undermined some of the anti-Bush left’s cherished nostrums – that American military intervention is always evil, that nothing good can come from any Bush policy, that Iraqis will loathe being liberated, and so on. Some people on the left whom I respect have also gone off what can only be called the deep end. Michael Lind is sadly one. Paul Krugman is another. And now Harold Meyerson, the newish executive editor of the American Prospect joins the frothing fray. Meyerson has often been a thoughtful, lively writer of the left, and I was proud to run his often-provocative pieces at The New Republic. But his latest cover-story for his own magazine is just, well, er, you read it. It’s titled, “The Most Dangerous President Ever.” Ever. Worse than Nixon. Worse than the left’s previous nemesis, Reagan. Worse than Hoover. In fact, Meyerson can think of only one precedent as horrifying:

He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president – though not of the United States – whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis.

Yes, we’ve now sunk to another level of demonization, as Bush seems to be doing to the left what Clinton did to parts of the right: make them so nuts they cannot even think straight.

WHY? Yes, I can see why the left will disagree with Bush on certain issues: judicial restraint, tax cuts, a pro-active, rather than defensive, war on terror. I share concern about rising deficits, a weakening of the church-state divide, and fraying civil liberties. But the domestic record of Bush doesn’t begin to justify the hysterical opprobrium thrown at him. Some of it is the system working: the man has gotten precious few judges through the Senate (and some of his picks have been dreadful); his tax cuts have been mercifully restrained by more fiscally prudent Republicans; his (good) proposals to shore up social security are on hold; there will be no drilling in protected Alaska; his faith-based initiative has been watered down to almost nothing. Other signs of moderation come from choice: there has been a consolidation – not a reversal – of gay rights; in contrast to Bill Clinton, Bush has proposed a serious effort to fight AIDS globally; the repudiation of Trent Lott solidified the inclusive message of the Bush-led GOP; some of his environmental proposals have been downright green; and the two wars that this president has fought have been remarkable military successes, whose consequences are yet to be fully known. Moreover, Bush has had to cope with the gravest threat to this country’s security in its history and, since 9/11, has not seen another serious terrorist attack on American soil. He also inherited a post-bubble slump. And yet this is “the most dangerous president ever.” Again, I’m not saying that there isn’t a liberal case against this president. What I’m saying is that the level of animosity has now gone to truly unhinged levels. This, of course, is good news for Bush, who is busy turning his opponents into shriller versions of Ann Richards. But it’s bad news for Democrats and worse news for anyone who believes, as I do, that an intelligent opposition helps good government, rather than hinders it.

“France is like someone who’s been given a glimpse of the future, sees himself committing suicide, and resolves to spend his remaining days making it look like murder.” – Lileks, of course.

SARS is obviously a huge worry. But it still makes sense to recall that many more people have died of the flu recently than of SARS – and almost certainly will do in the coming months. But what does worry me is the possibility of a combined SARS and HIV epidemic across the developing world. People with weaker immune systems, as Luc Montagnier has just pointed out, are far more vulnerable to viruses like SARS. Healthy HIV-positive people in the West might do okay (fingers crossed), but the death-rates in Africa or Southeast Asia could surely soar from the double-whammy.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: This time for the headline writer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Their summary of Iraqi Christian sermons yesterday: “US occupation like crucifixion, Easter mass told.” Then, when you read the story you find something a little different:

“I told the faithful that Iraq lived through its passion in recent weeks with the American invasion,” said Father Butros Haddad, priest at the Church of the Virgin Mary in central Baghdad. “But it will be reborn like Christ was resurrected,” the cleric told hundreds of Chaldean Catholic faithful. “The resurrection comes always after the passion, joy comes back always after the pain.”

So the pain of war was necessary for the rebirth of a nation. Slightly different gloss, don’t you think?

THE WAR IN BRITISH JOURNALISM: The pro-war papers stood still in circulation. The tabloid anti-war paper, the Daily Mirror, went into free-fall. Even Robert Fisk’s former promoter concedes Fisk had a “pretty dreadful war.”

There seems to be a real power struggle among the Palestinians. The golden rule is that if Arafat opposes any change, it’s worth supporting the change. Without Bush’s firm stand, no change – and therefore no prospect for a real peace – would have happened. Ditto Syria, which seems to be getting the message of the Three Week War. There’s a dynamic here, and one that surely should challenge conventional views of what a “just war” is. Would a peaceful ouster of Saddam have been possible? I think we now know that war was the only way. Was the war fought with an attempt to minimize civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure? Yes, on an historic scale. Is the outcome in Iraq more just than what preceded it? Without a doubt. Will the war prod the rest of the region toward more positive change? It certainly looks possible. Yes, war is awful. But 21st century warfare has now demonstrated its capacity to flummox centuries of “just war” theologians and philosophers. We need a new debate – because the terms of the last one have just become extinct.

UNBOUND: What the war means for America’s future. Empire? Not in the DNA. But something much more promising beckons. My take – now a week old – posted opposite.

I know I’m not out on a limb here, but John F. Burns’ reporting for the New York Times from Iraq is up there with the greatest. What he was able to do was to report factually, carefully, objectively, while still giving the Saddamite police state no quarter. He saw what tyranny does to people, and his obviously deep love of human freedom enabled him to get at deeper truths than so many others did. Now we find that he was targeted by Saddam and lived in fear of his life in the final days of the war:

At midnight on April 1, without warning, a group of men led by Mr. Muthanna, identifying themselves as intelligence agents, broke into my room at the Palestine Hotel. The men, in suits and ties, at least one with a holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known “for a long time” that I was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, that I was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to “cooperate” would lead to more serious consequences. “For you, it will be the end,” Mr. Muthanna said. “Where we will take you, you will not return.”

Burns, mercifully, endured till the end, decried by one Iraqi Information Ministry official as “the most dangerous man in Iraq.” Not quite. But truth is always a danger to tyrants. And Burns carried it high. Kudos to him and, yes, to Howell Raines, for giving him the prominence and space he so richly deserves.

THE MEANING OF FAMILY: Sometimes a picture says it all.

I’ll never forget my once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Michael Oakeshott. I’d written most of my doctoral dissertation on the great man’s work by the time I actually met him so you can imagine the pressure of the day and the anticipation. He didn’t disappoint me but I think I disappointed him. At one point he asked me what I was intending to do after graduate school. “I think I’ll be a journalist,” I said. “Oh dear,” he replied, his pixie-smile suddenly collapsing. “I’ve always thought that the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder.” Can you imagine what he’d say about blogging? It was indeed wonderful for the nerves to spend a few days without the newspaper or the internet. I took in a fabulous trip to Austin, a riveting “Richard III” at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater (if you want to see good Shakespeare, it’s far better to live in D.C. than in provincial New York City), and then, last night, the deliriously delicious “A Mighty Wind.” (Conspiracy theorists will be thrilled to know that I went with Ken Adelman, James Taranto and Richard Miniter to R3. We all took notes. What a master propagandist that Shakespeare fellow was. And of course Henry Tudor won in a cakewalk.)

BUT I DIGRESS…: Still, I now know, after catching up a bit, that plenty of non-U.S. companies will have a share in Iraqi reconstruction, that, among other pro-environment decisions, the Bush administration has proposed some of the greenest diesel fuel standards in history, and that the New York Times continues to bleed talent in the wake of the Raines reign of terror. So pretty much what you’d expect, no?

Two small items from last week. As this blog recently lamented, the BBC has just produced a dramatic series designed to defend and glamorize the famous Communist spy ring that infiltrated M.I.6 during the Cold War. One astute analyst of the script has described it as little more than “KGB propaganda.” Stalin, Saddam … idealists and patriots all. Then there was the classic BBC description of the looting that occurred after the liberation of Baghdad. The news organization pronounced that Iraqis were now living in “more fear than they have ever known.” The Blair government protested the coverage.

Not a mobster, Just a priceless, British obit.

THE BEEB APOLOGIZES: From Private Eye (Britain’s Onion), an apology from the BBC:

In the light of recent events, we now accept – albeit with a very bad grace – that the coalition forces seem for the time being to have got away with it, and that large numbers of Iraqis, though clearly paid by the CIA to do so, may have appeared to be not entirely displeased at the downfall of a regime which, whatever its faults, did at least for 30 years guarantee the stability of a potentially explosive mix of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, who will now undoubtedly plunge the whole region into a state of chaos which will threaten the peace of the world.
Whilst apologising for any confusion to which our reports may have given rise (and allowing for the fact that they could be broadcast only under monitoring restrictions imposed by the Iraqi authorities), we now realise that the only hope for future peace is for the hated Bush/Blair imperialist aggressors to be replaced at once by a French-led UN force of Russian troops of the type who were so successful in bringing peace to the Muslims of Groszny.

Yep, that just about sums it up, doesn’t it?