Month: October 2003

Not exactly a surprise – but is this the first time that French-made munitions have been used in an attempt to murder a member of the U.S. government?

“It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” – from Notes on Nationalism. It’s a helpful quote when slogging through yet another left-liberal column on why we can’t win in Iraq.

KERRY ON THE BRITS: They’re part of a “fraudulent” coalition, according to the Senator from Massachusetts last night:

This president has done it wrong every step of the way. He promised that he would have a real coalition. He has a fraudulent coalition. He promised he would go through the United Nations and honor the inspections process. He did not. He promised he would go to war as a last resort, words that mean something to me as a veteran. He did not.

Some questions. How was the coalition “fraudulent”? Is going to the U.N., getting a resolution and trying extremely hard for a second resolution not going through the U.N.? Are twelve years of inspections not respecting the inspections process? Is John Kerry a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States?

“IMMINENT THREAT” WATCH: Wesley Clark used it at least twice last night. Grrr.

There were so few “anti-war” demonstrators in DC this weekend that I barely noticed any. I had one amusing exchange with a stereotypical aging hippie couple who were both wearing ‘Free Iraq” t-shirts. As I walked past them with the beagle, I pointed at their t-shirts and said, “We just did.” They scowled. The BBC did its best to pump up the demonstrations, of course:

The march was thought to be smaller than the mass demonstrations before and during the war. But the BBC’s Jon Leyne, who was at the Washington rally, said it was probably more in tune with the mood of Americans, who are increasingly concerned at the president’s policy in Iraq.

Notice the scientific reporting: the march “was thought” to be smaller than the pre-war ones (it was obviously not even in the same ball-park). And the rally – which was full of the usual anti-globalization Luddites and bitter anti-Semites – was “probably” in tune with American public opinion. They don’t even make stuff up with real confidence any more.

SO WHY CARE? So why bother with these extremists? Because it seems to me that the far left anti-war message, misguided before the war, is close to obscene today, and tells us something about what we’re up against. Before the war, these people claimed they weren’t pro-Saddam; they were just pro-peace. But now that the Iraqi people have the first chance in living memory to have a decent, pluralist and democratic country, these demonstrators want to abandon them to chaos, terror, civil war and a possible new dictatorship. The only connective thread in this movement is hatred of the United States. (Oh, and Israel. Some posters openly called for the eradication of the Jewish state.) They assail one of the biggest humanitarian efforts in recent history while Iranian Qaeda surrogates are busy locating synagogues in Britain for terrorist attacks; and while Iran itself may be preparing to become the nuclear-armed vanguard of Islamo-fascism. They march under these banners when polling suggests most Iraqis want to construct a viable democracy; and when even the New York Times concedes that Iraqis view their present as far preferable to their past. It’s now that we can see what really lay behind the activist core of the “peace movement”: not peace but hatred of the West; not democracy, but alliance with dictators, terrorists and Islamo-fascism. Here’s a prediction: the fledgling links now forged between left-wing anti-war campaigners and Islamo-fascism will get stronger in the years ahead. The anti-globalization far left has nowhere else to go. Fanatical political Islam provides them with an over-arching structure for the loathing of the West. Now that Marxism is dead and post-modernism has shown itself inept as a basis for a real political movement, Islam will fill the void.

I haven’t commented because I feel nothing but conflicted feelings about this case. From everything I’ve read, it seems extremely unlikely that Terri Schiavo will ever function as a human being again. She is alive entirely as a function of modern technology. Maintaining that life indefinitely seems to me a debatable goal. Certainly if I were in her shoes, I’d want to be allowed to die without the elaborate paraphernalia keeping my bodily functions intact. To my mind, that is not the same as killing someone. That said, I agree with Mickey Kaus that some of the elite reporting on this has been bizarrely one-sided (NPR wins the contest as usual!) and the motives of the husband are not clear-cut. If key family members divide, if there’s no living will, and if there’s some small chance of survival, I guess I’d have to favor keeping the feeding tube attached. But forgive me for not joining in the religious right’s euphoria at this result. There is a difference between the celebration and defense of life and its fetishization. I see no victory in this poor woman’s continued reliance on life-support for years and decades to come. This unlived life can be a trauma to everyone involved.

SCHRODER SINKS: His anti-Americanism isn’t working any more. Yay! And Britain’s Tory leader may not be leader by the end of this week.

Frank Rich’s column, which argues that the Bush administration – shock! horror! – tries to massage the news coverage is titled, “Why Are We Back In Vietnam?” In the last paragraph, we find that, in Rich’s view, “[a]t the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not remotely a Vietnam.” If you find similar examples of headlines declaring things that the body of the piece denies, please send them in.

STALIN IN THE 1930S: No one knew what was going on? That’s the New York Times’ recent excuse for Western communists in the 1930s. Here’s what Churchill had to say in 1924: “Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.”

A NEW IRAQ BLOG: From a U.S. soldier with bad spelling. But it’s interesting, nonetheless. His depressing thought:

For so many years America has always cut and run when its soldiers die, pathetic weak leaders we have. Despite many many resistance cells and fedayeen cells that get uncovered and arrested or killed, which we find these cells all the time, despite all the successes (you never hear about in the news) we’ve had in cracking down on these guys, they still manage to hit us. We can make this Iraq a great place, but it is going to take patience and time, and sadly, the American people I dont believe have the will to do it, we aren’t the great generation like in WW2, it makes me sick.

He shouldn’t be so downhearted. This president isn’t so easily cowed. And the media isn’t so insulated from criticism any more.

From a Democratic congresswoman.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: Check out the rhetoric of Katrina vanden Heuvel on a variety of president Bush’s policies or nominations. The title says it all: “Bush’s Assaults on Women – Updated.” Assaults? Does vanden Heuvel think it helps women who have been actually assaulted to have their plight equated with some controversial (or not-so-controversial) policy decisions?

ANOTHER WAR MEMO: Geitner Simmons wonders what would be made of it today.

“For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues – the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home – now hinge on America’s efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians – in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others – are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States – a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian.” – Victor Davis Hanson, on a roll.

Get your Ann Coulter doll now. And a few pins.

Two oddities leaped out at me this morning, reading the (much improved) New York Times. The first was the Machiavellian assertion that Donald Rumsfeld leaked his own memo. here’s the editorial:

Mr. Rumsfeld is a canny player who knows exactly what he is doing when he drafts internal memos and makes them public.

This would be big news. So what evidence does the NYT have for it? The original leak was to USA Today. Does the NYT know something about USA Today’s source? Or is this just made up? Then there was this nugget in Alessandra Stanley’s review of the pro-Stalin BBC miniseries romanticizing the treachery of various British Communist spies in the 1930s and after:

The script barely mentions what was really happening in Stalin’s Soviet Union at that time. (The one heads-up: the K.G.B. handler Otto is recalled to Moscow and lets Philby know it is a death sentence.) But given the fact that during the purges of the 1930’s neither they nor almost anyone else in the West really knew, or wanted to know, it is perhaps understandable.

This is absurd. Several honest reporters revealed the extent of Stalin’s butchery at the time; Walter Duranty knew about it but lied; the brilliant Cambridge traitors have no excuse whatever for supporting totalitarian despotism when it was right in front of their eyes. Stanley also has a throw-away line that awareness of the horrors of mass starvation, gulags and millions of deaths is somehow a function of mere “neocon indignation,” and that fashion now countenances anti-anti-Stalin nostalgia. The glibness is sickening. Can you imagine a New York Times reviewer being so sanguine about a movie that romanticized spies for Nazi Germany? Or explained horror at the Holocaust as a function of “neocon indignation”? How about human indignation? How about human horror?

Nelson Ascher takes on Tony Judt.