Year: 2003

A majority now support the war.

BLAIR’S NEW CONFIDENCE: Good piece in the Times of London about Blair’s new self-confidence and maturity. Is it what happens when a man loses his father? Money quote:

The other man who is feeling the force of Mr Blair’s new-found assurance is Gordon Brown. The Chancellor used to rely on his ability to squish his kid brother, the Prime Minister. He dominated Mr Blair intellectually and played psychological games with him, such as avoiding meetings or refusing to tell him the contents of his Budgets until the last minute. This dynamic is changing. When the Prime Minister wanted to fix a meeting with the Chancellor some weeks ago, Mr Brown tried to make him come to the Treasury (where the Chancellor sits on a chair much higher than that of his guest, who is immediately cast in the role of supplicant). “No, you come over here,” barked Mr Blair down the phone. “I’m the f***ing Prime Minister!”

Yes, he f***ing well is.

MY CHAGRIN: An emailer writes:

Thursday you said: “I’m chagrined at my own optimism in this regard.” Don’t be. You’re immersed in the war and you’re going through the same changes as the soldiers. Everyone has to be optimistic at the outset. If a soldier ever saw a vision of what lay ahead of him, he’d never get off the boat. And then learn that war is not title bout that ends with a knockout or a bell at 15 rounds. It is an endurance contest in which the healthiest attitude is to prepare for everything but expect nothing. It ends when it ends. That’s what Mr. Bush was trying to tell us this morning. If you have time, you might read Gleaves Whitney’s piece in today’s National Review Online. In his e-mail, Ms. Whitney’s son in Kuwait writes: “Everyone finds ways to deal with the fear, pain, and suffering. I too have found a way. My life is not back in Michigan. It is here, now.” I had that same moment during the 1968 Tet Offensive. My father described having it sometime after St. Lo, as he recovered from his wounds; my grandfather, somewhere on the Mexican border chasing Pancho Villa, with World War I still ahead of him. What counts is the moment: This is what happened today; these things are likely to happen tomorrow. (And if they don’t happen, something else will.) That’s not much of a philosophy to live by, but then war isn’t life. Quite the opposite. Hope this helps.

Yes, it does.

There is something truly creepy about the unanimity on France right now, where Saddam Hussein’s war crimes and terror are far les worrisome than those “murderers,” Bush and Sharon. French intellectual Pascal Bruckner nailed it in an interview with Le Figaro this week. It’s translated by blogger, Cinderellabloggerfeller. Money quote:

I am not “pro-war” but “anti-Saddam Hussein”. If we had been able to overthrow the latter by peaceful means I would have been overjoyed. But all the pacifists wanted to do was to attack Bush, whom they called “that scabby, mangy [dog]” in order to avoid ever incriminating Saddam Hussein. We have just gone through several weeks of almost Soviet anti-interventionist unanimity, in which the internal French debate over Iraq has consisted in maintaining, throughout the media, that war is the supreme evil. All the French moral and intellectual authorities thought they were obliged to speak up and assure the prince [i.e. Chirac] that he was right to oppose Washington’s war machine. In this affair, it’s the “nice” left […] which has set the tone. But to end up where? To propose, as the only solution for Iraqi misery, the reintroduction of the status quo. Pacifism is an old French passion. It can be picturesque and derisory. What can you say, on the other hand, when “anti-war” protesters chant, without causing a scandal, the slogan “Bush, Sharon, murderers!” but forbid themselves mentioning the name of Saddam Hussein even occasionally. All these young people have begun to speak “Le Pen’s text” without knowing it, it’s this which has prompted me to put the stakes of the Iraqi conflict in terms which are the opposite of the consensus within France.

We sometimes forget what happened in the last French election. And how it’s still driving French policy today.

Reading the news the last couple days, three quotes struck me. They’re unrelated, but they all vividly highlight different aspects of the war. I loved the statement yesterday by the soldier quoted in the New York Times, trying to smoke a cigarette in a sandstorm. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to embrace the suck.” It’s a military expression – and a great one. Embrace the suck. (No snickering in the back there, please.) Then there was this today in the NYT (John Burns has singlehandedly got me reading it again):

Colonel Saylor added: “They come, they keep coming. They get up and they come.” “This isn’t the varsity,” he added. “Is this going to stop us? No, not on a bad day.”

I guess these guys have nowhere else to turn. But it may also be true that some of us have again under-estimated something: the power of a totalitarian cult over its enforcers. The guys fighting us are the equivalent of the SS. We’re invading a milder version of Nazi Germany – only after eleven years of relative peace. These guys have barely been softened up at all. Why did conservative hawks like me not believe our own rhetoric about the horrors of totalitarianism? The point about such systems, as Orwell showed, is not just their brittleness and evil, but their success in indoctrinating and marshalling the shock troops. I’m chagrined at my own optimism in this regard. I should not have been surprised by the ferocity of the elite’s defense of itself. The final quote that leaped out of me was from Bush and Blair. Actaully, not a quote, a pronoun:

Both Bush and Blair addressed the lack of support among many traditional allies in war. “There are many people on our side, there are those that oppose us,” Blair acknowledged. But he also said, “I have no doubt that we are doing the right thing, I have no doubt that our cause is just.” Bush insisted, “We have plenty of Western allies. We can give you a list.”

“We have plenty of Western allies.” But isn’t Britain a Western ally? Bush’s pronoun simply bespeaks a fact: that Britain and America are being soldered together by the soldiering together. Just as in the Second World War, this bond is getting deeper the rougher the waters. Events often create a politics more than anyone’s lone decision. I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a new world alignment. The Anglosphere is getting entrenched.

Reports from yesterday afternoon’s Supreme Court oral arguments seemed to have gone well for those arguing against the criminalization of private, consensual sex. Here’s the most thorough – and occasionally funny – account I can find – Dahlia Lithwick’s account in Slate. I have to say that reading Antonin Scalia’s brusque and bizarre interjections is a surreal experience. For my own part, here’s an essay I wrote for The New Republic on the history and morality of sodomy laws. It’s not a short piece, clocking in at around 6,000 words. Money paragraph:

As a simple empirical matter, we are all sodomites now, but only homosexuals bear the burden of the legal and social stigma. Some studies have found that some 90 to 95 percent of heterosexual couples engage in oral sex in their relationships; similar numbers use contraception; a smaller but still significant number practise anal sex. We don’t talk about this much because we respect the privacy of intimacy, as we should. The morality of sex in today’s America and Western Europe is rightly one in which few public moral judgments are made of any sexual experiences that are private, adult and consensual. Within these parameters, non-procreative sex is simply the norm. But to say they’re the norm is perhaps too defensive. The norm is also, many have come to understand, a social, personal and moral good.

The case in front of the court is about the right to privacy, equal protection and so on. The case I make is something related but more fundamental. I try to argue that sodomy – i.e. non-procreative sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual – should not merely be defended negatively. It needs to be defended positively. It can indeed be an absolute moral good. I may persuade you. I may not. But I hope you’ll at least engage my take on some of the most basic questions related to this subject.

Whom to believe? The Washington Post has a good and long analysis today of what the war so far teaches us about the future. There are two scenarios – a sudden collapse of the regime after some more pounding from the air and some successful skirmishing on the ground; or a more protracted affair in which we wait for more troops, keep Baghdad surrounded, deal with guerrilla warfare in the South, and then engage in brutal urban warfare for the remainder. The first is still possible and would make this war amazingly successful. But you’d have to be more of an optimist than I am to believe it’s the more likely. So this regime, this despicable regime, is not over yet. Our own over-confidence may have contributed to a reversal in the expectations game; and perhaps the “months long” line now being peddled by some is designed put the expectations game into reverse. But a failure of expectations is not a failure of war. And this past week’s emotional gyrations might even, if we’re lucky, prompt Saddam to make mistakes. He might listen to the BBC and think he’s winning. He won’t. But his over-confidence – I don’t know how else to interpret sending thousands of Republican Guard soldiers into the exposed desert – could help.

KEEP ON HAMMERING: If the war is more protracted, that makes the home front much more important. The propaganda organs against this war will fight hard to weaken American resolve. They are Saddam’s only real hope – that Americans will tire of casualties, lose confidence, and make some sort of deal with the devil. With this president, that won’t happen. But heaven knows, the anti-war right and left will do all they can to derail a war they so fiercely opposed. They will use even the slightest civilian casualties, however tiny in relative terms, into an hysterical campaign to foment regional unrest and sap morale at home. We have to counter and challenge their every argument. And the White House needs to be clearer now than ever, as Safire points out this morning, that we intend to win no matter what, and that winning means unconditional surrender of the regime. We have to reiterate tirelessly that we are morally in the right; that a regime that is sending its own troops into battle at the point of a gun deserves to die; that a gangster’s mob cannot and will not be allowed to terrorize a country and a region for much longer. And at some point, if Saddam’s terror mob doesn’t crack, we have to live with the higher numbers of civilian and military casualties that a less squeamish battle to destroy it might require. We’re not at that point yet – far from it. We’re actually still within reach of an amazingly casualty-free victory. But if it comes, and I deeply hope it doesn’t, we must simply aim at victory. If we have to live without a perfect scenario – regime collapse, infrastructure intact, civilians spared to an historically unprecedented degree – we have to.

A classic simple summarizing sentence. No political or military context. Just post-bombing pro-Saddam propaganda:

Britain and the US are now seen by ordinary Iraqis as having made victims of those they say they want to liberate.

Just incredible.

Heaven knows what’s happening around the small city of Najaf. There are reports of allied losses, as well as crazed fighting from Saddam loyalists:

Despite the American foothold on the eastern side of the Euphrates, Iraqi forces continued to attack in what soldiers described as futile, almost fanatical assaults against M1-A1 tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles.

When you’re cornered, this is how you fight. But it is also reminiscent of al Qaeda and other Islamist fanatics. The virus has spread far and wide.

Assails the anti-war spin of the Beeb’s own coverage. In a leaked memo, Paul Adams blasts his own editors:

On Monday, [Adams] wrote from US Central Command in Qatar: “I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering significant casualties. This is simply NOT TRUE. Nor is it true to say, as the same intro stated, that coalition forces are fighting guerrillas. It may be guerrilla warfare, but they are not guerrillas.”
Adams memo was fired off to TV news head Roger Mosey, Radio news boss Stephen Mitchell and other Beeb chiefs. It adds stunning weight to allegations that BBC coverage on all its networks is biased against the war. In one blast, he storms: “Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving small victories at a very high price? The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected.”
The BBC has come under attack for describing the loss of two soldiers as “the worst possible news” for the armed forces.

It makes Katie Couric look benign. Of course, some of this is due to the hyped expectations for the war which the administration didn’t do enough in advance to quell. But that doesn’t explain all of it.

Some letters to the Times – from former Labour party officials.

My harping on this theme is not simply media criticism. It’s war analysis. Remember one of the key elements, we’re finding out, in this battle is the willingness of the Iraqi people to stand up to the Saddamite remnants. That willingness depends, in part, on their confidence that the allies are making progress. What the BBC is able to do, by broadcasting directly to these people, is to keep the Iraqi people’s morale as far down as possible, thereby helping to make the war more bloody, thereby helping discredit it in retrospect. If you assume that almost all these reporters and editors are anti-war, this BBC strategy makes sense. They’re a military player. And they are objectively pro-Saddam.