Month: July 2003

Another letter from a soldier who witnessed the Iraqi response to the deaths of Uday and Qusay:

“You may read many things about the recent deaths of Salaam’s two sons here in Iraq.- Let me tell you, as an eye witness, what occurred here in Baghdad.
About 2130 hours (9:30 p.m. for you civilians) last night, about six of us were huddled around a DVD player watching a movie.- Sustained, small arms gun fire was heard outside.- We all put on our flak vests and helmets, grabbed our weapons, and headed outside.- What we saw was amazing.
The entire down town Baghdad area skies was full of red and yellow tracer gun fire.- It looked like the 4th of July celebration we had all missed a few weeks ago.-
The use of weapons in this manner, for the Iraqis, is an expression of celebration.-
The level of this celebration was obviously intense for they had just heard the news that the two sons were dead and their reign of terror was over, for good.- The celebration lasted well into the night.
As mayor of this installation near the Baghdad International Airport, I employ about 18 local nationals to work on our electricity, plumbing and to do manual labor.- This morning, they were obviously tired from no sleep, but very happy, they had been celebrating all night.- They offered their supervisors extra locally made bread and several kinds of fruit, their way of saying thank you from them and their families.
In one short day, the atmosphere and attitude of those locals around us has changed, for the positive.
For those of you or your colleagues who still question why we are here, they should have the opportunity, like I have, to look into the eyes of a people who were truly repressed and now sense that their liberation is really at hand.-
In the last war, the U.S. let them down by not ousting the dictator. In this war, they did not trust us because their tormenters were still at large and they were not sure that the military would close the deal. Yesterday, the military proved that this liberation is for real.”
If you are asked why we are still here, yesterday’s action is the reason. We are still here because the mission that we started is not over, but it will be soon.- If you think our presence here is not warranted, you have the misfortune of not being able to see the faces of a liberated people. I have complained about our presence here, I am going to stop doing that now because last night gave me renewed hope that our actions are having a tangible affect on the lives the Iraqi people.- I am not naive enough to believe that the violence is over and that the resistance is dead. Instead, every American fighting in this country has seen with their own eyes the fruits of their sacrifice.- And for that, I am proud to be here.

And I’m proud to reprint the letter. The full text of the previous letter, blogged yesterday, can be found here.

LETTER FROM IRAQ II: Chief Wiggles lets another soldier in intelligence share his blog. It’s a fascinating cri de coeur, mainly against Western journalists and their attempt to undermine the liberation of Iraq:

I would recommend that the journalists who so perversely attempt to conceal and eradicate the knowledge of the good we have done examine their purposes for doing so, and weigh once again the awesome responsibility they have in crafting perceived reality for millions. Reality is often not what we wish it to be, and frequently contains elements we wish it did not, but where is the value in embracing a world of falsehood, however we prefer the lie? Now that the sword has done its job, it is time for the pen to convey, in brilliant ink unspoiled by the tainting hues of ignorance or malice, the ongoing work in its most objective truth, so that the deeds of history, good and ill, may be more fully judged, and the world we and our children shape be founded on pillars of truth.

He’s particularly incensed by a piece in the Times of London, decrying allied treatment of Iraqi prisoners:

His account of living conditions for prisoners was almost laughable. He attempted to paint a picture of misery and abuse through his description. You know what? He may have been right . . . but there are several hundred thousand Americans and allied soldiers living in the same conditions or worse that he cares absolutely nothing about. Spoken of are prisoners who are held in tents with temperatures reaching “up to 122 degrees” with no relief. There’s a reason why it’s 122 degrees inside the tent, and that’s because the outside ambient temperature is 131, and there are precisely the same temperatures in my tent, and every soldier’s tent in this country. I know well what it is to wake up in the morning lying in a pool of sweat that the taut material of my cot cannot absorb. There are soldiers even now who don’t have tents to provide shade, who are rationed two MREs a day, who preciously horde their allotment of water, trying to figure out how keep enough water in their bodies when anything they drink immediately sweats out. For well over two months at the camp here, latrines consisted of ditches with wooden planks and tubes half-buried in the sand for urinals.

Read the whole thing.

A new Zogby poll shows a clear majority in favor of equal marriage rights. If valid, that’s another big jump in support. Essentially, in ten years, we’ve managed to shift about twenty percent of the population from one side to the other. That’s an astonishing pace of change – and one reason the far right wants to stop the debate and enshrine their position in the constitution itself. Why? Because if they don’t shut down the debate now, they’re going to lose as soon as the next generation grows up. Why the sea-change in public opinion? Maybe it has something to do with this:

When New Jerseyans were asked whether they personally know someone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, 77 percent said yes and 23 percent said no. Four years ago, 57 percent responded yes in a similar Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll.

Once gays are seen for who we actually are, the opposition melts. A poll in Massachusetts found a similar result. Younger voters show even higher degrees of toleration. What’s interesting to me is that the level of support among independent voters is as high as 60 percent. Bush should be wary of endorsing a Federal Marriage Amendment that will signal to independents that he is a captive of the far right. Catholics are particularly supportive (next, as always, to Jews); and blacks remain the group most hostile to gay equality. No surprise there, either.

Given the breathless advance notice of Stanley Kurtz’s magnum opus on gay marriage (all the advance blurbs were penned by, er, Stanley Kurtz), I have to say that his cover-story in the Weekly Standard is notably thin. Kurtz wants to argue that advocates of gay marriage are really trying to destroy the institution, rather than join it, and that this is fueled by a far left agenda in the gay community. What Kurtz doesn’t acknowledge is that there has been a long debate among gays about marriage rights and those of us who took the conservative position, despite enormous pressure and vitriol from our peers, have largely won the argument. Bypassing our achievement in nudging the gay community toward the center and right, he then dredges up fringe activists on the left as representative of the same-sex marriage movement. Some of them, such as Ettelbrick and Polikoff, were the fiercest critics of gay marriage (and gay conservatives) in the past; now Kurtz enlists them as the meaning of our cause for marriage equality. This is like using Al Sharpton to criticize the agenda of the DLC. It’s guilt by absurd association.

MONOGAMY: Then he brings up again the polygamy argument. This is a slippery slope case, the only one you’ve got if the substantive case won’t hold up. Why would same-sex marriage lead to polygamy? Kurtz argues that both undermine monogamy as the marital norm. Huh? Surely polygamy – by allowing men lots of wives within marriage – makes fidelity a moot question. By removing the very structure of a two-person marriage, it makes the sacrifice of monogamy close to meaningless. Not so for two lesbians committed to each other for life. Nor – even more intensely – for two men. So polygamy defines monogamy down. But same-sex marriage brings a culture of monogamy to a previously marginalized population. Aren’t these two phenomena actually going in opposite directions? Kurtz’s answer is that gay men simply cannot be monogamous in marriage. The evidence? Well, we don’t have hard evidence for this because we don’t have gay marriages yet. I’d go further and say we won’t know the future impact of marriage on gay people until a full generation has grown up in the knowledge that such future relationships are possible. But can we make a guess? Kurtz locates a study by a “queer theorist” to make the case that gay men are beneath marriage. (Isn’t it strange how the far right and far left love to use each other?) What does the study find? That 82 percent of lesbians – indistinguishable from straight women and morethan straight men – believe in the monogamy-marriage link. (Remember that two-thirds of Vermont civil unions have been lesbian). What does the study say about men? It finds that “among married heterosexual men, 79 percent felt that marriage demanded monogamy, 50 percent of men in gay civil unions insisted on monogamy, while only 34 percent of gay men outside of civil unions affirmed monogamy.” (The missing category is what single straight men feel about monogamy. I bet it isn’t that different from single gay men.) But the inference here is obvious: getting into a civil union ratcheted up the monogamy quotient among gay men from 34 percent to 50 percent. Cause or effect? Hard to tell. But is it unreasonable to think that real marriage – with its far deeper social ramifications – would ratchet it up some more? Surely it would. Look, I think there’s a genuine worry about men and marriage, and I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that on average male-male marriages may have more adultery than straight marriages (and straight marriages may have more adultery than lesbian marriages). It’s fair to worry about that. But the shake-out of equal marriage rights would in all likelihood be a slight increase in monogamy in marriage as a whole (the impact of all those lesbians) and a strong trend toward fidelity among gay men, where none existed before. Why isn’t that a reasonable social gain for all of us? What Kurtz wants you to believe is that one percent of marriages will have more of an impact on the remaining 99 percent than the 99 percent will have on the one percent. Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense.

Check out this terrific and eloquent blog by one Norman Geras, a Marxist who rejects the blanket anti-Western orthodoxy now prevalent on the British and American left. Read this whole post. Money quote about the Left’s current predicament:

When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome – in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant – and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed – and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed – and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug – opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.

Yes. Their record is almost as bad as the Communists of the 1930s. Worse, actually. They cannot even point to another evil to justify their de facto support for tyranny.

“This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end.” – Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, in early April, according to an associate.

BUSH’S EMPHASIS: A subtle change at the Urban League, unless I’m reading too much into it:

“You see, a free, democratic, peaceful Iraq will not threaten America or our friends with weapons. A free Iraq will not be a training ground for terrorists or funnel money to terrorists or provide weapons to terrorists who would willingly use them to strike our country. A free Iraq will not destabilize the Middle East. A free Iraq can set a hopeful example to the entire region and lead other nations to choose freedom.”

It seems to me that this argument should be more front and center in Bush’s rhetoric. He needs to remind people of the global context of the Iraq war, the need to go on the offensive against terrorism, and trumpet the decision of this administration to tackle the deeper Middle East issue that fuels terrorism – despotism. This positive message is a critical complement to the negative one of self-defense. More, please.

Of course he thinks the BBC is innocent of all charges. But this passage is simply wacko: “The BBC apparently has evidence, including a tape, that Dr. Kelly made the key allegations it reported. Moreover, Dr. Kelly was, in fact, in a position to know what he claimed. More information may emerge as a judicial inquiry proceeds, but at this point the BBC seems largely in the clear, while the government looks like a villain.” You read the British press and see if you get that impression. The only committee looking into the matter has backed the government. Gilligan is refusing to have his testimony to Parliament released. Kelly said to Parliament that he could not have been the source for the BBC’s allegation. Yes, some people are backing the Beeb. But the notion that the BBC isn’t severely on the ropes over this is a delusion. But this is Krugman of course. Did we expect a fair account? Then there’s this assertion: “What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that’s all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.” Or he could get re-elected in a landslide. Keep hoping for a recession, Paul. It’s your best hope.

Another soldier’s letter:

Hey Mom and Dad,
I just wanted to write y’all some notes and things about my birthday in Iraq. Feel free to share this with anyone that will listen or read.
Some thoughts on my birthday, 18 JUL 03, in Baghdad, Iraq:
Sitting here at 0500hrs on the 19th of JULY trying to wipe the sweat and sleep from my eyes, I am listening to a cassette tape sent to me for my birthday from my parents and family. I get a swell of pride in my heart knowing that their lives are free and seem to be continuing in a free and democratic USA! It also reminds me of home and the love of comfort that is associated with my nest, Shreveport. I revel in the thought of my memories of home and the ease of life in the United States. It makes me want to work harder and longer here in Iraq, because I know that our work has tangible results in the free lives of my family and country. I know that the hardship endured by my myself, my men, my battalion, and this Army are not in vain.
Our work is not done here. The talking heads on television seem to spew words in rapid fire like they know what is going on here in Iraq. They seem to think that we are done and that it is time to go home; hell, we think the same thing….only about wanting to go home. We are homesick and want to see our families and loved ones, but not at the expense of an incomplete mission. There is an old saying in the Army that you are only as good as your last mission. This is true in everything that we do. I know that a completely free and democratic Iraq may not be in place by the time that I leave, but it will be significantly under way before I am re-deployed. I see things here, on a daily basis, that hurt the human heart. I see poverty, crime, terrorism, murder, frustration, anger, and stupidity. However, I see the hope in the eyes of many Iraqi’s, a new hope for a chance to govern themselves in a new way of life. I think that they are on the cusp of a new adventure…
I also want you all to know that there are times here when we are laughin’ at each other too. We have funny things that happen. I can remember standing in a land fill in southern Iraq where we began one of our attacks, and watching my guys so tired from lack of sleep…. literally fall on the ground, with their gear on, on top of each other. I then watched “my boys” swat flies for each other, guard each other, share water with each other, offer food for those that did not have any chow, express their disdain for the trash heap that was our home, all the while ready to do battle and if necessary die for each other. I saw with my own eyes the actual creation of the closeness and bond that historians write about in times of war amongst fighting men. I was both laughing and awe-struck at the absurdity of watching this sleeping, swatting, eating, cussing, and loving pile of men who where given to me to care for. I could feel the burden of responsibility for them while at the same time my deep love for each and every one of them… To tell you the truth, living and working inside of this circle of brotherhood gives one the true sense of safety, even in an Iraqi landfill littered with trash, feces, dead animals, sewage, mortar fire, machine gun fire, and flies.

We’re lucky to be defended by young men like this one.

SYRIA SWEATS: Hezbollah is getting the message from Washington.

Yes, their record of appeasing dictators goes back a long way:

A July 23 editorial in London’s Daily Telegraph points out that “BBC journalism exhibits the same ‘agenda-setting’ mentality… The BBC’s bias against the war led it into grotesque distortion of reality.” History repeats itself. Winston Churchill’s access to the radio broadcasting state monopoly in the 1930s was blocked by John Reith, the BBC director, who was an admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini. Radio broadcasting was then the only way Churchill could reach the masses and inform Britons about the growing Nazi threat. But Reith was an appeaser, like Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Reith wrote in his diary that the Nazis “would clean things up,” and about Churchill: “I absolutely hate him.”

Churchill, as always, had the right enemies. But the best broadside against the old BBC that I have ever read was an essay in the Cambridge Review, if memory serves, by, yes, Michael Oakeshott. I’ve tried to get it republished, but apparently it’s copyrighted somewhere.

EVEN THE BLIND… : … have to pay the BBC tax. But they get a $40 rebate! I’m not making this up.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Maureen feels very strongly that she clarified the Bush quote. I appreciate your taking the trouble to write, and I’ll ask Maureen if there’s anything else she wants to say about the matter.”- Gail Collins, laying down the law on misquotation at the New York Times.

A reader reminds me of what the Catechism says about marriage in the Catholic Church. It’s only half about procreation, however the theocons are now trying to spin it:

Can a Catholic marriage ceremony take place if the couple knows conclusively that they can not conceive?

The short answer is, Yes. Marriage has a two-fold purpose: the unity of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. Even when the latter purpose is not physically possible, the former purpose is still possible and the perpetual, faithful, and exclusive love of the spouses is a great joy and a sacramental sign of God’s love for the world.

Any other defects which may result in the inability to have children, such as simple sterility or infertility, do not pose an obstacle to Christian marriage. Such unions are as much the cause of sacramental joy as any other.

Here, the Church specifically rebutts the notion that procreation is the sole point of marriage. The “union of the spouses” is equally important. So why not in civil law?

SELF-PARODY WATCH: “The Friday NY Post had a front-page story on the fellow who killed a NY city councilman at city hall. “HIV and failure fueled his rage,” said the subhead. This brought the letter-writers out in force. Today’s Post publishes a number of letters from outraged readers protesting that HIV has nothing to do with “fueling rage.” Well, not directly, perhaps. However, the drugs usually given to control HIV make you listless and depressed, and it is common to counter these effects by giving testosterone injections. These shots in turn have a number of side effects, including bursts of fierce anger. Body-builders and other steroid users call this “‘roid rage.” Whether this particular guy was getting this particular treatment I do not know; but the fact that he was HIV positive is not irrelevant to his having killed a man in (apparently) rage. I don’t think that justifies the wording of the Post subhead, which would be justified only if they knew the guy was on steroids as part of his HIV treatment, a thing not mentioned in the story. Still, his having HIV is not irrelevant, as the protestors claim.” – John Derbyshire, National Review Online.

“Your reaction to the NR editorial on gay marriage reminded me of something I have often thought about those arguments. Some social conservatives try very hard to come up with reasons for opposing gay marriage WITHOUT implying any moral disapproval of homosexuality; but that has always struck me as madness. You can’t, in making a law, simply concentrate on social consequences and ignore whether the law is fair to the people involved. You can see this whenever somebody who defends a gay marriage ban on procreation grounds responds to the suggestion of outlawing marriage for the infertile. It might be an interesting idea as far as stabilizing marriages, encouraging traditional families, etc., but it is so obviously, monstrously unfair to innocent people that it is never seriously considered. Why don’t homosexuals get that consideration?

Similarly, I remember a defender of gay marriage (I don’t remember who, and I’m going to maul this quote, but the sense of it is right) responding to an argument about higher levels of homosexual infidelity by saying “Why not allow just lesbians (who are on average much more faithful) to marry?” I don’t think he got an answer, but there is an obvious one: to allow marriage to lesbians and not gay men would be absurdly inconsistent and unfair: no one really believes that one type of homosexual relationship is more reprehensible than another (as far as I know), and to draw such a vital distinction between them for the sake of the general well-being of society is an idea that would seem deeply wrong to most sensible people. But, if we don’t condemn homosexuality in general as a sin, there is the same problem with allowing marriage to heterosexuals and not homosexuals. I don’t think it’s possible to ignore that unfairness without believing that gays somehow deserve it, or at least that their interests deserve less consideration.” That nails it, I think. Has it ever occurred to the editors of National Review that gay citizens deserve fairness?