Month: July 2003

“Your link to the hit piece from the Nation is beneath you. A couple points about “medical marijuana”: 1. It’s not a question of “states’ rights” to say that states can’t pass laws that are expressly contrary to federal laws — laws passed by Congress. There is such a thing as the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution. The members of Congress who voted for the law and so far have been unwilling to change it, are representing citizens from …… STATES. 2. Congress’ (not the Justice Department’s) prohibition on the manufacture, distribution, and dispensing of marijuana specifically states that it has no medicinal value — as the Supreme Court held a couple years ago. Maybe that is a flawed judgment, and it should be revisited. But there are 535 people in this country that have the authority to start that process, and so far none of them have. Let Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, or Diane Feinstein introduce legislation on the House and Senate calling for exempting medical marijuana from the federal law and have the matter debated. If the med-pot advocates are to be believed, there is a huge majority in the country that favor it, so let their elected representatives speak up and be heard. Until then, quit blaming the Justice Department for enforcing a law that is on the books, and has been enforced for decades in the same manner as it is being enforced now.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

LETTER FROM BAGHDAD: An email from a reader’s friend who, after twenty years, is back in Iraq. Youwon’tget this on the BBC, so here goes:

Baghdad is wonderful, despite the destruction and neglect, and the obvious presence of the new class that made its wealth through the oil for food programme, and the misery of the Iraqis. Nevertheless, there still remains an educated middle class which is completely aware of all that has happened and is still happening in Iraq. It is these people that make you want to stay and do something to the beloved country. I was made more than welcomed by this type of people, most of whom I had met for the first time in my life. In fact, they did every thing possible to make my life comfortable, for fear that I should otherwise leave them. One person described us (Iraqis from outside) very eloquently, he said that the body of Iraq was bleeding and in need for blood transfusion, and it was the Iraqis who are outside the country who have retained the good healthy blood, of the same blood type which will not be rejected by the body!!! Believe me, only those who support Saddam and want him back, will talk of us as outsiders and half Iraqis, and fight their way to make us leave. Good decent people are yearning to being part of the rest of the world and taking part in the 21st century and feel that they can only achieve that through us.
I have met with hundreds of people, especially women. I have helped form a women’s group named Iraqi Independent Women’s Group. Women have very clear fears, concerns and requirements, and are ready to fight their way into achieving their goals. I held 14 meetings in total with them, and there are many more to come. What surprised me most was the amount of tolerance that all Iraqis had. They respected each other’s thoughts and ideas like never before in Iraq, even when they disagreed. The only exception (of course) were Saddam’s boys and the Baathis, who would throw accusations right left and centre, in an attempt to protect themselves and their interests. No Baathi will ever admit to ever being a Baathi. They all claim that they were forced into it. Some Baathis have grown beards and pretend to be Islamists in order to fight against the occupation that has effected their status. These are the people who have been bombing the electricity and water supplies, and oil pipes. They are very dangerous and despised by all that I know. They do not want life to improve for Iraqis and are behind all the existing unrest, including the lack of law and order. Others are more opportunists, and try to infiltrate political movements. People know them one by one, and no one escapes unnoticed.
A lot of sincere hard work has to be done in Iraq, otherwise it might fall once more in the hands of the ignorant and the extremists. The real struggle today is not between Sunnis and Shias, nor Kurds and Arabs. It is between the secularists and centrists one side, and the religious extremists, part of whom are the Baathis who now wear clerical robes. This war, in my opinion, has to be fought now or else Iraq will be lost forever.
As for the occupation forces, whatever you might think of them and their performance so far, every one that I have met wants them to stay for the time being. Much worse will happen should they decide to pack and leave. I have been in a number of meetings with them and can tell you that their long term plans will turn Iraq into an economical and educational heaven, however, Iraq will play no role in the politics of the region. Their short term plans for keeping law and order in the country leaves much to be desired, however, I sincerely believe that things have and will continue to improve, slowly but surely.

Time to recommit to the task.

Mark Steyn nails it:

Intelligence is a hit-and-miss business. In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qaeda front proved to be untrue. Does that mean Clinton lied to us? I mean, apart from about Gennifer, Monica, and which part of the party of the first part’s enumerated parts came into contact with part of the party of the second part’s enumerated parts. Or was it just that the intelligence was lousy? The intel bureaucracy got the Sudanese aspirin factory wrong, failed to spot 9/11 coming, and insisted it was impossible for any American to penetrate bin Laden’s network, only to have Johnnie bin Joss-Stick from hippy-dippy Marin County on a self-discovery jaunt round the region stroll into the cave and be sharing the executive latrine with the A-list jihadi within 20 minutes.

This BUSH LIED!!!!! schtick won’t stick, because it’s not true.

A British Islamic site now has a list of “the men in Tony’s life.” It means the Jews close to Blair: “This research is intended to highlight some of the names and demonstrates the network of influence that certain business leaders and millionaires (with a particular ideological view) hold within New Labour’.” Maybe the Observer will run the list next Sunday.

I linked recently to a piece just written by Richard Ingrams, where, in the pages of the liberal Observer, he said that he never read letters to the editor when their writers had Jewish last names. It turns out he has urged this before:

When people write to The Observer to complain about anti-Semitism (as happened recently), should they not be obliged by law to state whether or not they themselves are Jewish?

Ingrams was also responsible for one of the lowest responses to 9/11. Writing days later, his column was titled, “Who Will Damn Israel?” It included this passage:

Noticeable was the reluctance throughout the media to contemplate the Israeli factor – the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony, sustained by billions of American dollars and armed with American missiles, helicopters and tanks.
Such has been the pressure from the Israeli lobby in this country that many, even normally outspoken journalists, are reluctant even to refer to such matters. Nor would you find anywhere in last week’s coverage, any reference whatever to things I have mentioned here in recent issues of The Observer: the fact, for example, that Mr Blair’s adviser on the Middle East is an unelected, unknown Jewish businessman, Lord Levy, now installed in the Foreign Office; the fact that this same Lord Levy is the chief fundraiser for the Labour Party; unmentioned also would be the close business links with Israel of two of our most powerful press magnates, Rupert Murdoch and the newly ennobled owner of the Telegraph newspapers, Lord Conrad Black.

I think this is classic anti-Semitism: the need to blame the Jews for everything, the paranoid assertion that they operate at the highest levels of society and cannot be trusted; and so on. But the point is: this poison is published in a liberal newspaper. That’s how deep the problem is becoming in Europe.

The WSJ uncovers the national intelligence estimate of the uranium-Africa Saddam link. It’s clear; solid; still backed by the Brits. The more I read about this, the less there is to the critics’ hyper-ventilation and glib assertions of “lies” where no lies were spoken. The president and the prime minister should go on the offensive soon. Maybe Blair will in front of Congress.

This column captures something of my own dismay at European hostility to Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, hostility that has begun to morph into a more worrying loathing of market capitalism as a whole:

The issue was debated many times, but it took shape, for me, in the course of a lengthy and brilliant discourse on the future of the market economy, from a French speaker. While outlining thoughts on financial regulation that would have sat perfectly well on this page, he devoted one section of his speech to the “symbolism” of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre. It was of course, he said, an evil act, but the twin towers, as symbols of Western capitalism, had become an almost inevitable target for terrorists; their collapse had something of the Old Testament about it – the razing of a monument to untrammelled power. If we were to counter future threats, we should create different symbols – a form of capitalism that would be less divisive than the American version.
It slipped in so neatly, so rationally, that no one, not even the Americans, listening intently through their earphones, thought to challenge it. Indeed, it was only as I considered it afterwards that I realised what had been said. The implication, not openly stated, was that US economic power was, in itself, a justification for terrorism, that if it was not modified, then it might expect more of the same, and that Europe, if it was wise, should adopt a different model if it was to avoid similar attacks. No mention of 3,000 lives lost; no condemnation of the worst terrorist act of our age; instead, the unmistakable whiff of compromise hovering in the air.

Not compromise. Appeasement. And they are appeasing still. As the shock of that terrible day wears off, the cynics and the carpers will do everything to undermine the huge steps forward we have made since then. The reassertion of American will has provoked an inevitable backlash of resentment that is as much a background noise of the war we are now in as the mortar-fire of guerrilla Baathists in Iraq. And it must be exposed and opposed every bit as vehemently. It’s time to shake off the notion that this war is over or in abeyance. It is absolutely in full swing. And we have to fight back continuously – by arms and words – in case the carpers of defeat overwhelm the prospects for victory.

The Iranian thugocracy now concedes it murdered an Iranian-Canadian journalists by beating her into a brain haemorrhage. This strikes me as a huge deal. It will say a lot about the priorities of left-wing news organizations like ABC News if they cover this seriously. But they are too busy undermining the fledgling democracy in Iraq.

SPINNING “QUAGMIRE”: The media war to undermine our vital mission in Iraq continues. What else did you expect from ABC News? The NYT uses Vietnam-word again. Meanwhile, David Adesnik deconstructs a Washington Post poll to show how a newspaper can spin any data to get the headline it wants.

HEADS UP: This coming Saturday evening at 8 pm, I’ll be giving a short talk and taking questions at the Fine Arts Work Center in the center of Provincetown. If you’re in the vicinity, by all means drop by. It’s open to all. If you want diversity of opinion, come the next night as well, when my fellow Provincetowner, Norman Mailer, will be doing the same thing, at the same time.

No one should under-estimate the scale of the task still in front of us. But the media coverage of the situation in Iraq, directed by many who opposed the war, has now gone way overboard in hostility. Richard Cohen’s moronic notion today that the occupation is a “catastrophe” is an absurd exaggeration. Channel 4 News and the Spectator in Britain just commissioned the first half-way reliable poll of what Iraqis now think. The results are both sobering and encouraging:

By almost three-to-one, Baghdadians expect life in one year’s time to be better (43 per cent) rather than worse (16 per cent) in one year’s time than it was before the war. Looking five years ahead, optimists outnumber pessimists by five to one (54-11 per cent). By then, most people hope that the occupation will be over; but, despite the criticisms, fears and acute day-to-day problems, only 13 per cent want the Americans and British troops to leave immediately. As many as 76 per cent want them to stay for the time being – with a majority, 56 per cent, wanting them to remain for at least 12 months.

There’s still plenty of time to make this work – and to transform Western prospects in the Middle East for a generation. That promise remains. Bush needs to ignore the nay-sayers and focus on the task at hand.

A deeply depressing appointment reveals how completely draconian the Bush administration is on the issue of recreational drugs. Once again, states’ rights appear to mean nothing to some social conservatives who want to control what people do in private with their own bodies.

BLAMING THE VICTIMS: Why is it important for Eric Alterman that the extraordinary evidence of rising French anti-Semitism should be dismissed, and, if anything, blamed on the Jews? Here’s Alterman’s take on a bracing piece in the Washington Post about anti-semitism in France:

Memo to Everyone: In discussing “French anti-Semitism,” take a moment to notice that it is almost entirely a phenomenon of that nation’s North African and Arab immigrant community, not of the traditional (mildly anti-Semitic) French. There is no surge in French anti-Semitism at all and it is probably at a historical low ebb among French men and women. It is certainly not a phenomenon of the French Left. This piece points out: “Most of the perpetrators are not the ultra-rightists and neo-Nazis who once were responsible for anti-Semitic acts, but young North African Arabs of the banlieues, the distant blue-collar suburbs where Muslims and Jews live and work in close proximity.” And if it’s a really big concern of yours, by the way, the best way to ameliorate it would be for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. The occupation is obviously its primary source.

To describe fanatical anti-Semitism among many Arabs today as a function of the occupation of the West Bank is blind enough. To deny the widespread hostility to Israel and to Jews among the French elites, to ignore the way in which the French authorities have turned a blind eye to such fanaticism, to talk as if such anti-Semitism is at a low ebb (with no evidence whatsoever) and to pin the blame for it on Ariel Sharon is truly disgusting. It’s even more disgusting since Alterman’s thesis is that French anti-Americanism is entirely a response to the Bush administration. How long before he cites attacks on Jewish cemeteries or synagogues as George W. Bush’s fault?

Jerking off a lot helps your prostate ward off cancer. Once again, “natural law” is shown by modern science to be, er, unnatural. Will that leave today’s theocons rushing to debunk their Aristotelian science? I doubt it. I just wish more of them were consistent and coupled their hostility to consensual sex with a broad campaign against masturbation. But that would reveal just how extreme they are, wouldn’t it?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “No one ever judged the outcome of a war by the quality of the intelligence going in. If you look at where we are today and compare it to where we were on the day the Clinton Administration left office: we’ve removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan; we’ve removed from power Saddam Hussein; we’re removing our troops from Saudi Arabia; we’ve established new bases in the Gulf in stable, small countries; Jordan is secure; Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon are acquiescent and very quiet; and there’s a revolution under way in Iran. I’ve named every country between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean. This is the most dangerous, hostile region in the world — and it has been remarkably changed. And I should add there’s also a peace process in the Middle East. …. What’s important [in terms of history] is how has the foreign policy of this Administration changed a region dramatically, remarkably…” – Charles Krauthammer, “Inside Washington,” July 12, 2003.