Month: October 2003

This just in from the AP:

New York-born writer and human rights activist Susan Sontag on Tuesday criticized U.S. President George W. Bush for not admitting that the U.S invasion in Iraq was wrong and that the Arab country is being driven into chaos.
“You can’t expect the government of President Bush to say, ‘We made a mistake by invading Iraq,'” said Sontag. “He (Bush) says they (the bombers) are just criminals, amateurs, they are enemies of the Iraqis, we (Americans) are friends of the Iraqis”.
“This type of propaganda is not going to change, and if they (the U.S. military) eventually leave Iraq, the message will always say: ‘We’ve won the war.'”

I think what Sontag is saying is that the murderers of the last week are actually the true friends of the Iraqis, and that the Americans are the enemy. I think what she is saying is that Saddam Hussein and his murdering goons are preferable to a democratic and pluralist Iraq. I think what she is saying is that she wants to see the United States defeated by Baathist terrorists. If you ever had any doubts where the far left is headed, listen to Sontag. Before long they will be forced to the logical conclusion of their current hatred of the U.S.: open support for Islamist terror.

There’s not much point in sugar-coating what happened. It was a great victory for the Baathists and international terror. If they can keep this up, the chances of a peaceful reconstruction in Iraq look more remote than they did last week. Why? Not because this was that sophisticated an attack, but because it was relatively unsophisticated. Not so much because the Baathists can win, but because they don’t have to. All they have to do is prevent the coalition from winning, which keeps Iraq in limbo, and tilts American public opinion against the war. I’m not an expert but obviously we need a more successful military strategy to defeat these insurgents. This might mean, as Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt argue in the Weekly Standard, more manpower and more intensity:

[A] real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq entails risks. It would concentrate forces in the Sunni regions that are the hot spots. Rather than reducing the U.S. presence, it might require putting an even greater American face on the war in those places. That could mean that, in the short term, the Pentagon might have to put on hold its plans to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to lessen the burden on the Army. The Marine Corps also might need to send fresh units back into Iraq.
A successful counterinsurgency campaign also would require American ground forces to carry out tasks and operations that today’s “transforming” military, which increasingly is trading manpower for precision firepower, finds hard to perform. As one Army colonel in Iraq recently said to a New York Times reporter: “We are not trained to fight a war like this. We’re training to fight an army face to face, to engage in direct combat, an enemy we can see.” But that’s not the kind of enemy we now face in Iraq.

It’s obviously an extremely difficult task. But we have no alternative. This is indeed the frontline in the war against terror and tyranny. And that war is still in its infancy.

THE MURDERERS’ ALLIES: Michael Totten notes that the main group behind the anti-war protests, ANSWER, is now openly supporting the Baathists, Islamists and Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. I said they were fascists before the war. Now we know they are.

Thanks for all your outraged emails. For the record, I think the benefit of the doubt in this case should go to keeping Schiavo nourished. But keeping a vegetative person nourished for decades in order to placate that person’s relatives – even when she has virtually no chance of reviving, and when her nearest kin opposes it – does not strike me as indisputably humane. And allowing someone to die a natural death is not the same as killing them. Here’s the Catholic Catechism on exactly that point:

Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘overzealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable and legitimate interests must always be respected.

The current papacy, in its extreme innovations with respect to the absolute primacy of life in all circumstances, strikes me as somewhat unbalanced. The message of Christ, after all, was that life begins in all its real glory after death. The extreme defense of keeping people on earth at all costs seems an odd priority for a Christian church. That is not to say that we should support euthanasia or abortion, but that we should also understand that for many people, death is not a catastrophe; it is a release. There is balance to be found here. But the Wojtila-adherents disagree. (More feedback on the Letters Page.)

WHAT ATTACK ADS? Will Saletan and Jake Weisberg helpfully debunk a Kerry-Gephardt meme that Howard Dean has gone negative in his latest ads. TNR’s blog also usefully debunks another piece of conventional campaign wisdom – based on a dubious Iowa poll.

The economy may do for 43 what it failed to do for 41: re-elect a Bush.

AZNAR RISES: The Spanish premier recovers from his stance on the Iraq war. Just as Schroder sinks. Hehe.

“IGNORING” AFGHANISTAN: Another batch of Qaeda terrorists killed near the Pakistan border. The long, hard slog continues …

“Fear breeds hatred, and Bush’s policies create a lot of both. U.S. citizens like Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi disappear into the night, never to be heard from again. A concentration camp rises at Guantánamo. Stasi-like spies tap our phones and read our mail; thanks to the ironically-named Patriot Act, these thugs don’t even need a warrant. As individual rights are trampled, corporate profits are sacrosanct. An aggressive, expansionist military invades other nations “preemptively” to eliminate the threat of non-existent weapons, and American troops die to enrich a company that buys off the Vice President.” – Ted Rall, proud Bush-hater.

THE WEEKLY FISK: I take on Clark and Kerry in Sunday’s depressing Democratic debate.

An emailer makes a point that had already occurred to me. The Schiavo case is one in which the religious right are attacking the rights of traditional marriage:

There is an aspect of the case, however, that I have not seen discussed. It seems to me that in attacking the husband’s decision, the religious right has also attacked one of the key aspects of marriage. Part of marriage is that our spouse is supposed to be able to speak for us in medical and other areas when we are not able. It is one of the rights that gay and lesbian couples so justly demand. Clearly, if there were indications of wrong doing or illegal activities the spouse could and should be challenged, but there ares are no such indications in this case that I know of. It does not appear that she created a legal document giving someone other than her husband the power to make these decisions. Where is the outrage from the religious right on this attack on marriage?

I guess the answer is that life trumps marriage. But their complete insouciance toward Schiavo’s husband’s rights is telling, I think. Their defense of heterosexual marriage is far more connected to their loathing of homosexuality than with their concern for marriage as such. It’s essentially a negative, exclusionary impulse at heart. That’s why they’re not proposing a Constitutional Amendment to ban divorce, or forbid civil marriage.

The alliance that John Kerry decried last night was very close to the alliance that landed at Normandy. Was that coalition fraudulent?

It’s all part of a new wave in the culture wars in which conservative ideas are making real headway. From Fox to blogs to Cartman, it’s a phenomenon, according to Brian Anderson in the new City Journal. It’s a long, complex piece, but here’s one money-quote:

Talk to right-leaning college students, and it’s clear that Sullivan is onto something. Arizona State undergrad Eric Spratling says the definition fits him and his Republican pals perfectly. “The label is really about rejecting the image of conservatives as uptight squares-crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors-and also happen to be conservative, or at least libertarian.” Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht says most of his young Bush-supporter friends “absolutely cherish” South Park-style comedy “for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all spheres of life.” It just so happens, he adds, “that most hypocrisy and stupidity take place within the liberal camp.”

Further supporting Sullivan’s contention, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice-a “punk-rock-capitalist” entertainment corporation that publishes the hipster bible Vice magazine, produces CDs and films, runs clothing stores, and claims (plausibly) to have been “deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10 years”-spots “a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake of the ‘greater good.'” Especially on military matters, McInnes believes, many twenty-somethings are disgusted with the Left. The knee-jerk Left’s days “are numbered,” McInnes tells The American Conservative. “They are slowly but surely being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn’t afraid to embrace conservatism.”

But not the humorless, puritanical conservatism of the religious right.

The Washington Post’s ombudsman offers a verdict on Tina Brown’s first column: “This precious, egocentric piece was about the worst and most irrelevant thing I’ve read in my three years on the job.” He added that he was “embarassed for the paper and also for the Web site.” Hey, I’m sure Sally loved it.

This new wave of terrorist violence only underscores how the war is unfinished. It makes it all the more important that we find and kill Saddam Hussein; and that we aim more lethally at the Islamist forces that are desperate to prevent democracy of any kind coming to the Arab world. This is no reason to retreat. It’s reason to intensify. These people are testing our will. We have to test their survival skills.