Month: October 2003

Here’s another version of the case for optimism in Iraq. And, on the scene, a great new blog is gathering steam, called “Healing in Iraq.” There’s a very helpful discussion of what exactly American casualties are being caused by:

[T]his resistance the Americans are facing is not ascribed to one group. There are already about 20 of them we hear about daily. Jaish Mohammad, Saraya Al-Faruq, Saraya Al-Jihad, Kataib Al-Hussein, Kataib Ali, Ashab Alrayat Alsud, Ashab Alrayat Albidh,…etc. Notice the similarity of some of the names with Palestinian militant groups, they have obviously took it upon themselves to make Iraq another Palestine.
And of course we have fingerprints of Al-Qaeda: The Jordanian Embassy and the UN compound bombings, and lately Baghdad Hotel’s attack. So it’s an unpleasant mix we’re dealing with here.
One thing is certain. The attacks are less frequent than say two months ago. The attacks lately have been harming more Iraqis than Americans. Mortar shells in Ba’quba three weeks ago took 12 innocent lives at a grocery market. A bomb planted beside the sidewalk in Adhamiya exploded when a bus stopped next to it killing 7 people. This has made people very bitter and critical whenever they hear about attacks. More and more people are informing against others they know involved with attacks. Large numbers of Arab infiltrators have been arrested. Of course they came from Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Then there’s this fascinating account of a bombing the guy witnessed:

One afternoon I had just got back from work and was going to change my clothes when suddenly *BOOM* The windows shattered all around me in pieces, there was a smell of something like gunpowder. I looked out but there was dust everywhere. I remembered that my brother was outside. I carefully opened the door, and to my surprise found 4 American soldiers in our garden, they were knocking on my grandmother’s house door, I worriedly asked them what happened. They told me to stay away. I offered to open the door for them, which I did. They entered and went upstairs all the way to the roof, I stood in the hall with one of them who informed me that a bomb exploded behind their humvee just in front of the house, no one was hurt. They were suspecting someone attacked them from this house. The others came down, apologized to me and my grandmother (who didn’t understand what was going on anyway) then left the house.
I went out to find a crater in front of the house. My god that was close. By a miracle nobody in the street was hurt. The idiots who planted that bomb were dumb enough to put it inside a sewers drainage which absorbed the shock of the blast. The only damage was the sound it made. Most of our windows were shattered.
After a while the soldiers left the place. Suddenly a reporter and a cameraman from Al-Arabiyah station appeared, they were so fast. I crossed the street to take a look. They were talking to some bearded guy who I hadn’t seen before in the neighbourhood. He was enthusiastically talking about the humvee that flew in the air, and the 4 injured soldiers. I didn’t see any of that. I was bewildered. Someone next to me told me that nothing like that happened at all. My brother and a couple of friends of his started to chant in front of the camera: LIAR, LIAR,… Everyone laughed at this, but the bearded guy started to swear by Allah. Someone pointed out that the bearded guy wasn’t even in the area when the bomb exploded. Uh oh, I thought, he seemed to know about it before it happened. The cameraman violently shoved my brother and his friend aside telling them to shut up. I stepped forward and gave him a push from behind. He almost fell over. I warned him that the camera he was holding would be in a thousand pieces if he dared touch my brother again. He backed up. A neighbour of ours hollered them to come and see the damage in their house. They refused to do so and left.
In the evening, Al-Arabiyah reported the following: 3 Americans badly injured and one Jeep damaged at …. in Baghdad. They showed the bearded guy talking and edited the rest of it.
That’s the way media in present day Iraq works.

And not just in Iraq, buddy. You should listen to NPR sometimes.

“You know, a-lot of-our guys in-Iraq carry around pieces of-the World Trade Center. The chattering classes are talking about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. These guys are under no-illusions. It’s-all part of-the same war.” – Richard Perle, in a worthwhile interview in the Jersualem Post. My favorite aphorism: “Syria is a terrorist organization.”

THE RUSSIAN GAMBIT: With Iraqi oil in the, er, distant pipeline, and the Russian markets beginning to pop, maybe Dubya’s grand energy strategy isn’t looking so foolish after all.

WITCOVER WON’T BUDGE: He stands by his use of the term “imminent threat.”

I guess it doesn’t surprise me that Tony Blair had to be hospitalized over the weekend with an irregular heartbeat. It would be difficult to think of anyone who has had a tougher political year. But even in the best of times, our major politicians lead punishing lives. The endless travel, the constant stress, the collapse of privacy: all these are terrible for the health. Is there some way we can tell these guys to take it easier? Far from believing, as some seem to, that president Bush’s predilection for long vacations at his ranch, attendance to sleep, and regular exercise, are forms of worrying idleness, I’d say his regimen shows an extremely shrewd understanding of what it now takes to be a public figure. Blair should take note.

TNR’s editors pen a statement that strikes the right note, I’d say. Mickey is razor-sharp as always.

A classic limo-lib comment from Joan Didion, former prose master, now, sadly, another generational scold:

Salon: When you remember your mother, more than 50 years ago, saying that California was too regulated, too taxed and too expensive, isn’t that exactly the same emotion that led to the recall?

Didion: Exactly. That’s what people thought in 1978 when they voted for Prop. 13. I mean, I was amazed this time. I hadn’t been out there for a while and I really hadn’t gauged the depth of the anger. I didn’t think all the people who had signed the petitions would show up at the polls. I just thought they were walking through the parking lot on the way to the car and they thought they could send a message. It was amazing to me that the actual recall happened. Somehow I thought there would be a separation between signing the petition and actually voting.
I mean, the car tax. I did not know what the car tax was. I had never heard of the car tax. Finally someone explained to me: It’s the vehicle registration fee! It’s just so insignificant.

Well, at least she recognizes her cocoon. But a big hike in a car tax is, for most people, not exactly “insignificant.” On a $30,000 car, the difference is between $195 before the hike and $600 after. On cheaper cars, the tax doubled as well. When you have to fork this out, on most wages, it hurts.

“I think 9/11 gave this generation an identity, and its identity is potentially fascist. My skin crawls when I think of the first week after 9/11. I was looking out of the window and there were people marching down the street carrying flags. It reminded me of spontaneous, angry Nazis and I thought, ‘Oh, man, we are in a lot of trouble’. There’s a whole bunch of people who have flags hanging from their cars and who are mistaking fascism for patriotism.” – Rickie Lee Jones, in the Guardian. Later in the interview, she is asked whether she would consider murdering the president, a new theme of sorts in the Guardian. “I guess the question is, would I kill anyone? And the answer is, no. But would I feel sorry if someone killed him? No, I wouldn’t. It would depend on who killed him, I guess.”

“I find it sad that you value your homosexuality more than your Catholic faith. You write that you “cannot participate” in the Church any longer, which I take to mean you are forsaking the sacraments. You are staging a spiritual hunger strike, starving yourself of the grace that you need to save your soul. This is tragic, and I pray that time will soothe your anger and change your mind. I believe that your rage is a symptom of a deep realization that Catholic teaching may be right about homosexuality, and that the Church and Christ embrace you nonetheless. We all have our crosses to bear, and I hope that you will not stumble under yours.
As for your slam at the Church and the parish that dismissed a pair of homosexuals from the choir, stop whining! The parish tolerated both of them for many years, and they repaid that tolerance by publicly defying Church teaching in a mockery of a marriage ceremony, a sort of Canadian charade that the Church has expressly condemned. And it turns out that both of them are not just innocent choir singers, but outspoken advocates of desecrating the institution and sacrament of marriage.
I find it instructive that the New York Times, which had barred your writing for many months, decided to restore you to the newspaper’s bigoted graces, to accommodate your anti-Catholic homily.”

“You’ve articulated the conclusion I came to about 3 years ago, and it’s that same conclusion that I wrestle with every day since. I’m considering sending it to my parents, since they ask me so frequently and unintentionally patronizingly, “Couldn’t you just go to mass?” No. Because there is no such thing as “JUST going to mass.” It’s the swell of hatred, fear, disbelief, and violent solitude that makes “going to mass” the exercise in emotional upheaval I now must avoid. The avoidance is not laziness (for I still feel those emotions strongly, just not so viciously like I do in church), but rather the understanding and perspective I now have that maintaining my sanity and my joy is a very important task if I at all want to live in gratitude to my Creator.”

It would be hard to beat David Brooks’ excellent summary of the different factions among the Democrats when it came to fulfilling this country’s responsibilities to the people of Iraq. But the New York Times editors ask the right questions today:

The candidates also need to tell Americans where they stand on the larger issue of preventive war. The prewar intelligence failures in Iraq and the failure, so far, to find threatening unconventional weapons strike at the basic premises of Mr. Bush’s alarmingly novel strategic doctrines. What alternative ideas do the Democratic contenders have for handling threats like North Korean, and possibly Iranian, nuclear weapons programs and for dealing with countries that give aid and sanctuary to international terrorist groups? And what would they do to keep Afghanistan, the scene of America’s first post-9/11 war, from falling back into chaos with a revived Taliban?
It is in the nature of modern campaigns to offer sound bites rather than substance. But voters have a right to ask for more and to press the Democratic candidates to present real alternatives to Mr. Bush’s policies in Iraq and beyond.

This applies also to the post-war debate about the pre-war. It is relatively easy to criticize the Iraq war, the intelligence behind it, and the post-war reconstruction. It’s another thing to say what you would have done instead. Memories are astonishingly short, but the notion that 9/11 did not and should not have impacted our entire defense doctrines is absurd. How we pro-actively tackle the problem of Islamist terrorism, and the morass of the Middle East from which it comes, is an urgent question. So far, very few of the Democratic leaders (with the honorable exceptions of Lieberman and Gephardt) seem to be prepared to risk a real answer rather than simply another partisan critique. As the election approaches, the need for a credible response to the threats we still face will have to be provided. Or not.

BLANK SLATE RE-WIPED: More evidence of the profound impact of our biological hard-wiring when it comes to gender and sexual identity. And yes, that goes for homosexuality as well. It is every bit as natural as heterosexuality.

I’m glad I posted Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in full. As some readers have impressed on me, it’s more interesting than the display of bigotry. It suggests that a leading Muslim sees exactly the problem with the Muslim world – its inability to adapt, its insulation from intellectual discourse, even religious discourse, its isolation from modernity and science. Through the hate and bile, this is actually somewhat encouraging, no? It suggests that some people are finally grappling with reality. One of the as-yet unexplored dimensions of the Iraq liberation is that Iraq’s long-deferred entry into the global market, the new porousness of its media, and the dynamism of its emerging market will all help expose the backwardness of other Islamic states. And that might indeed spur the move toward reform, which is our only long-term hope in the fight against Islamist terror. It may well already be occurring in Iran. These things take time. They require patience. In the short term, as Bush is discovering, they might lead to political costs. But they are infinitely better than the status quo ante, or than most of the alternatives.

“INSTANT THOUGHT”: I should really respond to Leon Wieseltier’s diatribe against blogging, voiced in the Los Angeles Times. Here’s what he said about his colleague, Gregg Easterbrook. He ascribed Gregg’s mistake as something due to

the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.

Hubris? I think it would be hubris if one believed that somehow blogging is a superior form of writing to all others, or somehow revealing of the truth in ways that other writing isn’t. But I know of no bloggers who would argue that. It’s a different way of writing, one that acknowledges that it is imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. In that sense, it makes far fewer claims than, say, a lengthy essay published in the literary press. But, by acknowledging its limitations, it is also, I’d argue, sometimes more honest than other forms of writing, in which the writer pretends to finality, to studied perfection, to considered and re-considered nuance or argument, when he is often winging it nonetheless. Someone can say nothing in 10,000 words; and someone can also say something in ten. It simply depends on the quality of the writing. The truth is: every written word is provisional. The question is one of degree. But there is nothing less “serious” about a blogged idea just because it is blogged and not produced after fifteen edits by Cambridge University Press. As the philosopher once said, everything is true as long as it is never taken to be more than it is. Blogging is now a part of literature. And it deserves to be understood rather than simply dismissed. (By the way, there’s now an online petition to defend Easterbrook here.)