Month: October 2003

A very helpful discussion from Richard Perle in February of this year. I think it shows how the way in which the anti-war media have been using the term “imminent” is a grotesque over-simplification:

Let me say a word about what you call the new strategy of preemption. There’s nothing new about preemption. If you know that you are about to be attacked, it is certainly sensible if you can act first and avoid that attack to do so. I don’t think anybody would dispute that. So then the question is how imminent must the attack be to justify the preemptive response. Here, we need to think more carefully about the concept of imminence. In 1981, the Israelis, after a long and, I gather, a heated cabinet debate, decided to destroy the reactor that Chirac had sent to Osirak, not because it was about to produce nuclear weapons. It wasn’t. It was about to produce plutonium and it was under IAEA safeguards so the Iraqis would have had to siphon off small, undetectable quantities of plutonium and it would have taken them time to build a nuclear weapon based on what they would get from the Osirak reactor. But, nevertheless, the Israelis decided to strike some years in advance of the production of the nuclear weapon that they were concerned about.

Now, why did they do that? They did it because the Iraqis were about to load fuel into the reactor and once they did so, they would not have had an opportunity to use an air strike without doing a lot of unintended damage around the facility, because radioactive material would have been released into the atmosphere. So from an Israeli point of view, what was imminent and what had to be acted against in a preemptive manner was not the ultimate emergence of the threat but an event that would lead inexorably to the ultimate emergence of the threat. They had to deal with a threshold that once crossed, they would no longer have the military option that could be effective at that moment. If we think of imminence in that sense, if we think of it as the thresholds that once crossed will so worsen our situation that we can’t allow those thresholds to be crossed, then you start looking at how far are they from achieving the means to do the thing that everyone would recognize we were justified in stopping at the moment that action was taken. In the case of Iraq, we’re talking about stopping the further development of nuclear weapons, we’re talking about new systems of delivery for the chemical and biological weapons Saddam already has, including systems with much longer range. What is imminent about Iraq and what may be imminent in some other situations requires you to look back and decide when a threat becomes unmanageable.

So the administration did not regard the Iraqi threat as “imminent” in the usual sense of that word. as the NSC document had it, “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats [America’s enemies and their pursuit of WMD] before they are fully formed.” That’s why Kay vindicates the Bushies. That’s why the opponents have to distort history so massively to get the spin they want. (For a full roster of how widely disseminated the lie was, click here. For the new anti-war meme, see this editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Now the spin is that Bush may not have said “imminent threat,” may even have disowned the phrase, but he implied it. Nice try, guys. Hat-tip: blogger Chad.)

Just an observation on the changing attitudes of a certain New York Times columnist. Here she is October 21, 2001:

John McCain called to try to talk me down. I put aside “Scourge,” the book I was reading about smallpox — “It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life” — and listened.
“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” the senator said in that soft, reassuring voice. “Every time I heard the guard’s key chain rattle when he came to my cell at an odd hour, I felt fear, but it didn’t incapacitate me.”
Easy for him to say. He’s a national hero who was tortured in Vietnam. I’m a spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli… I ran into my colleague Judy Miller, a bioterrorism expert, and asked if we should be worried about smallpox, camel pox and mouse pox.
“We should be worried for the next few years,” she said briskly, “and then we’ll be fine.”
The next few years?

And here she is recently, after the despised Bush administration has wacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan and disarmed Saddam of his infrastructure of deadly weapons:

[W]e know now that our first pre-emptive war was launched basically because Iraq had … a vial of Botox? Just about the scariest thing the weapons hunter David Kay could come up with was a vial of live botulinum, hidden in the home of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist. This has very dire implications for Beverly Hills and the East Side of Manhattan, areas awash in vials of Botox, the botulinum toxin that can either be turned into a deadly biological weapon or a pricey wrinkle smoother.

She sure has recovered, hasn’t she? You won’t find a better example of 9/11 amnesia than Ms Dowd, a self-described “spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli.” Didn’t take her long, did it?

No longer an oxymoron, after, ahem, a certain occurrence in a nearby state. All that war did was make things worse, didn’t it?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I think one of the big problems in France is that we are anti-American without knowing why. It’s just kind of a natural thing. I mean so many people I meet are anti-war, and they’ll just say that Bush is stupid and the Americans are awful imperialists. It’s just their typical answer, and they never think of why. That’s crazy. I think it’s because we’re all being brought up like that, especially at school. It’s incredible how we’re taught about America — they’re always explaining, for example in geography or history courses, how Americans are imperialistic.” – Sabine Herold, 22-year-old French dissident, in Reason.

THE CONSERVATIVE CLOSET: “With respect to your comment, ‘imagine being a right-of-center student at his school’: well, imagine working there, or at any other academic institution in the Bay area. I teach at Stanford, which is supposed to be more conservative – when I accepted a position here I was razzed by my liberal friends for my new proximity to that vortex of neocon evil, the Hoover Institution – but here, as everywhere else in the Bay (and academia in general), there is a hegemony of leftist ideology that permits no dissent.
I keep my opinions to myself (I do have an instinct for self-preservation) and can ‘pass for liberal,’ which means that I get to hear how academics really feel about the role they think conservative ideas ought to play in public discourse (none). Their public line is that they are committed to untrammeled free expression and don’t know what all this fuss about ‘political correctness’ is about — it’s all a plot of Fox News to delegitimize public dissent. Their private stance is that, since the Bush administration is ‘evil’ (I have heard this exact characterization many times) it doesn’t matter how one treats the enemy and his ideas; it’s a battle of good against evil, after all. It is taken for granted that any sign of conservative politics will ruin a professor’s career. If you get an interview, you will not get hired; if you are hired, you will not get tenure. My colleagues will casually allude to this fact, but it does not trouble them unduly. After all, no-one they know is a conservative.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Some of you have wondered whether Ed Asner was joking when he said he wanted to play Stalin, and regarded the mass-murderer and tyrant as misunderstood. Nuh-huh. The guy really does have a soft spot for Stalinism.

UNIONS VERSUS KIDS: It’s an old story, but this new twist is truly depressing.

FRC RESPONDS: The Family Research Council, a lobby group for the religious right, has answered the questions I posed in my WSJ piece last week. I’m grateful for their candor. The bottom line is that they oppose any civil benefits for gay couples of any kind. That’s why their FMA not only bans same-sex marriage but also bans any benefits for gay couples, whether through legislative or judicial means, whether in the form of “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions.” Their positive policy on homosexual citizens is that gays should simply stop being homosexual. That’s it – straight out of the 1950s. The question is whether there are any social conservatives prepared to take a less absolutist position. Still silence from almost all of them. No enemies to the right, as usual.

A worthwhile piece in the Boston Globe yesterday on how gay Catholics are struggling with a Church hierarchy that has declared war on gay lives and, especially, gay loves and relationships. Since the summer, I haven’t written about this much, because it felt increasingly inappropriate to bring such deeply private issues into the public arena. But like many others, this past year has been a watershed for me. The combination of the cover-up of sexual abuse and the extremity of the language used against gay people by the Vatican has made it impossible for me to go back inside a church. I do believe that something is rotten in the heart of the hierarchy, that it is bound up in sexual panic and a conflicted homosexual subculture that is a deep part of the Catholic Church. Until that is dealt with, until a new dynamic of hope and honesty replaces denial and authoritarianism, I cannot go on. Am I still a Catholic? I don’t think I can call myself such publicly any more. Privately, I think I always will be in some place in my heart. But I cannot enable the vicious cycle of failure and scapegoating that now animates what amounts to the leadership. And I do not believe, as David Brooks seems to, that the legacy of this pope can be fairly judged without taking into acccount the devastation to Catholicism that has occurred in the West under his watch. He has presided over a collapse in the Church’s home-base in Europe, and, I believe, has precipitated the death-throes of the Church in America. No doubt many believe that this is the price for fidelity to the Church’s medieval sexual ethics. I beg to differ.

BAATHIST BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Fine story on the separation of conjoined twins. Even more successful attempt at not mentioning where these Muslim children were saved. (Hint: in the bowels of the Great Satan.)

“Just now I am reading ‘The Constitution of the United States; Its Sources and Application’ by Thomas James Norton, first published in 1922, this edition from the early 50s. The author takes the Constitution virtually line by line and explains what is in it, why it’s there, and how its provisions have been interpreted by the courts. About the Full Faith and Credit clause, he notes this (p. 156):

Full faith and credit was held by the Supreme Court of the United States (1903) not to have been denied by the courts of Massachusetts in permitting the first wife of a man, rather than the second, to administer his estate upon his death, as the law of Massachusetts made invalid in the State a divorce which he went to South Dakota to procure. Full faith and credit did not require that a decree of divorce granted in South Dakota should be respected and made operative against the public policy of Massachusetts.

In other words, for a full century the law has held that in such intimate matters as family, marriage, and divorce, in contrast to, for example, business debts or public contracts, no state may use full faith and credit to impose its beliefs and policies on another. Those who promote the FMA should be asked to explain themselves in light of this fact.” Actually, divorces might in some circumstances be held to be binding across state borders. But marriages? Never. The whole premise of the Federal Marriage Amendment – that the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution mandates that marriage in one state be applicable in every other state – is a lie. But they keep on telling it.

An emailer lays it out:

You wrote: ” Even when 45 percent of California’s voters didn’t pick a replacement candidate (because they voted “no” on the recall), Arnold Schwarzenegger’s votes this time were 3.7 million from the remaining 55 percent, compared to Davis’ 3.5 million from 100 percent of the electorate last year. In a conventional race, Schwarzenegger would have buried Davis.”
This is incorrect. Those who voted no on recall could still pick a replacement candidate. Indeed, this was the entire rationale of Cruz Bustamante’s candidacy. For evidence that this was the case, here are the vote totals on Question 1 and Question 2.
Note that the number of voters who voted on Question 2 is approx. 90%-95% (tough to tell precisely w/o adding up all the minor candidates) of the number of voters who voted on Question 1.

My bad. I really need to avoid all math questions. I keep screwing them up.

Matthew Hoy has the goods on Senator Jay Rockefeller’s amazing incoherence on the “imminent threat.” We may just have turned this lying meme around.

One interesting thing to note in the New York Times’ editorial yesterday on WMDs in Iraq. They didn’t re-use the “imminent threat” meme. It’s gone. Instead, they described the threat described by the White House as “extraordinary.” That’s a stretch too. But at least it isn’t a complete fabrication. Tony Snow also helped by grilling Jay Rockefeller yesterday and got him to concede that Bush specifically disavowed the notion that the threat from Saddam was “imminent.” A reader’s comb-through of the entire White House archives for speeches, press releases and so on doesn’t come up with a single administration use of the term “imminent”. That’s not proof that the White House never used the term, but it’s pretty good evidence that it wasn’t the administration boilerplate that the press is now trying to imply. I have found one use of the term “imminent” from Richard Perle. But he’s not a formal administrtaion official; and he has been a hothead at times.

THE REAL ISSUE: Am I being ridiculously semantic here? I don’t think so. Here’s why: If the administration had genuinely described the threat as “imminent”, then there wouldn’t have even been much of a debate. Of course we are entitled to defend ourselves against imminent attack. The debate rather was over what kind of threat could justify a war. The White House argued that it was a grave and growing threat, that it was unknowable, that we’d under-estimated Saddam before and that after 9/11, the balance of judgment had to shift to greater vigilance. Technically speaking, none of this was necessary because of Saddam’s flagrant violation of U.N. Resolution 1441 (which, by the way, also did not describe Saddam’s threat as “imminent”). The point was less that we knew the threat was imminent, but that we couldn’t know for sure that it wasn’t. I’d argue that this complex argument is completely upheld by what the Kay report has found so far: a clear, underground system for a biological and chemical weapons capacity, with the possibility of actual weapons yet to be discovered. It may be that the threat turns out to be less than feared. The question then becomes: given that we could not have known for sure at the time, should the president have risked waiting or tolerating Saddam? Would another delay have removed the doubt? Hindsight is easy. But real decisions have to be made without it. If the Democratic candidates want to argue that they would have taken the risk and allowed Saddam to stay in power, then they need to say so clearly. Howard Dean already has. He would have left Saddam in place and hoped that the nightmare of terrorists with Saddam-provided WMDS wouldn’t take place. After 9/11, I consider that an act of gross irresponsibility. But some do not. Let’s debate that, shall we? It’s still the critical question in the coming campaign: whom do you to trust to protect us?

The German Booksellers’ Association have their own Sontag Award. And it’s just gone to Susan Sontag! The Association views Sontag as a lone dissident in an “arrogant super-power.” The writer who described the mass murderers of 9/11 as braver than allied pilots is hailed by the German literary elites as having an “exceptional sense of morality and immorality.” Her main triumph: standing up to the “hegemonic response” to 9/11. 9/11? Who remembers that any more? Surely not the Germans. (Hat-tip: Eamonn.)

LEFTIES AND TYRANTS: “I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood. And to this day, I don’t think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin, so I guess my answer would have to be Joe Stalin.” – actor, Ed Asner, responding to the question, “If you had the chance to play the biographical story of a historical figure you respected most over your lifetime, who would it be?”