Year: 2003

“For US citizens living overseas, President George W Bush’s unilateral ultimatum to Iraq makes us all ugly Americans. We were potential targets for terror and abuse, like our fellow citizens back home; now we are representatives of the world’s leading bully. Our flag, which stood for the hopes of humankind now stands for disdain for diplomacy in favor of military intimidation. As they say in the cartoons, ‘Thanks a lot, George, thanks a lot.’ It remains an incredible feat that the United States has forfeited all of the world’s goodwill it won after the September 11, 2001, attacks, barely 18 months ago, and legitimized the view that Bush, not Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden, not Kim Jong-il, is the greatest threat to world peace. It’s hard to imagine a term for a US attack on Iraq, as threatened by Bush, except for ‘terrorism’.” – Gary Lamoshi, Asia Times.

The more I look at it, the likelier it seems.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Listened this morning-to a report from NPR reporter Sylvia Poggioli on world reaction to the beginning of the war.- She quoted the official responses from the following countries only: France, Belgium, Russia, Greece. Apparently, Senator Daschle was not available…”

NO, TOM, IT’S ‘HIGH NOON’: Geitner Simmons has a movie analogy for the Bush-Blair posse.

BAND OF BROTHERS: Literally.

The one reason I think the footage of Saddam is not a taped-in-advance fake is that if you wanted to ensure people still believed you were posthumously alive, you’d look a little better prepared than Saddam looked. He had that KSM “I-Just-Woke-Up” look and those grandma glasses and bizarre notepad did not exactly inspire fear. If the intelligence was half-way reliable, a good gamble. Too bad it doesn’t seem to have paid off.

Worth keeping an eye on. From Baghdad itself, the vivid, real-time blog of a young Iraqi. Then at The New Republic, a daily war diary from Iraqi exile and dissident, Kanan Makiya.

RAINES WATCH: Now that the war has begun, you can rest assured that the New York Times will go into overdrive to discredit it. Today’s offering has the following headline: “Move to War Leaves Some Feeling Alienated.” In fact, the story is about liberals in California, a somewhat odd subject for a story the day hostilities begin. Readers are hereby asked to keep an eye out for the Times’ forthcoming attempts in news stories to broaden and focus on dissent at home.

As events now unfold swiftly and unpredictably, it’s worth, I think, taking a step back and reading books on our current predicament. One I’ve found particularly helpful is Bob Kagan’s “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.” The thesis of this slim tome is now quite familiar. What Kagan argues is that in the post-war period, the Western European powers, particularly Germany and France, have constructed a post-modern political settlement. By pooling sovereignty, substituting gradualist economic and social integration for warfare, and all but gutting their militaries, they have grown used to a certain way of dealing with international problems. They recoil from the use of force in almost any circumstances. And their military weakness has led them to try to wield their power through international institutions, like the U.N. and the E.U., that depend on soft rather than hard power. In contrast, after the Cold War, the U.S. has become militarily supreme, dominant in hard power in unprecedented fashion, as well as economically open and dynamic. Put these two trends together and add an intractable problem like Iraq and you have an almost predetermined clash: unavoidable, profound, and to be repeated.

AND TODAY’S DIVIDE: But what makes Kagan’s argument more than just smart is that he sees through this construct how the current international clash is therefore the result of deep tectonic changes, not of some burst of anti-Americanism, or the presidency of George W. Bush, or the alleged neocon cabal now running the country. He points out how under the Clinton administration, for example, the same deep tensions were evident in Bosnia and Kosovo (far less geo-strategically significant matters than Iraq). He notes that Clinton never envisaged actually implementing Kyoto and had deep qualms about the International Criminal Court. And these differences between Albright and Vedrine or Powell and de Villepin were not just philosophical; they reflected the natural interests of strong military powers and weak ones respectively. What 9/11 did was present a genuine international crisis of security in the context of this deep schism. I don’t see how it will be resolved – after Iraq or at any time in the near future. And until you’ve absorbed this dynamic, it seems to me that the blame game regarding individuals can get overblown. Of course, Kagan’s ultimate sympathies lie with the U.S., as do mine. But that’s not because it wouldn’t be lovely to live in paradise – but because at the edges of the Elysian fields are weeds and jungles, and someone has to police them. Europe’s paradise, in the last resort, is only possible because of U.S. power in the Second World War and the Cold War. So Europe should get out of the way of the police action or join in. We’re not policing the Belgians. We’re dealing with crazies like Kim Jong Il or Osama bin Laden. Neither is likely to join the euro any time soon.

A “peace” protestor chains himself to the headquarters of a local charity, mistaking it for a federal building:

Police officers used heavy-duty bolt cutters to free Mason. “He asked for help because he didn’t have the key,” Olympia police Cmdr. Steve Nelson said… Mason, who identified himself to a photographer, said he had looked up the Department of Energy in the phone book. The phone book, under the Department of Energy, lists a Bonneville Power Administration Office at 924 Capitol Way S.

No, this isn’t from the Onion.

JOHN BURNS ON IRAQ: Here’s the great New York Times’ reporter’s comments on PBS last night:

Iraqis have suffered beyond, I think, the common understanding of the United States from the repression of the past 30 years here. And many, many Iraqis are telling us now, not always in the whispers he have heard in the past but now in quite candid conversations, that they are waiting for America to come and bring them liberty. It’s very hard though for anybody to understand this. It can only be understood in terms of the depth of the repression here. It has to be said that this not universal of course… All I can tell you is that as every reporter who has come over here will attest to this, there is the most extraordinary experience of the last few days has been a sudden breaking of the ice here, with people in every corner of life coming forward to tell us that they understand what America is about in this. They are very, very fearful of course of the bombing, of damage to Iraq’s infrastructure. They are very concerned about the kind of governance, the American military governance, that they will come under afterward. Can I just say that there is also no doubt – no doubt – that there are many, many Iraqis who see what is about to happen here as the moment of liberation.

As Donald Luskin notes, it’s good to see this fine reporter unconstrained by the New York Times’ attempt to spin this war against the United States.

THE TIMES ON ALTERMAN: The Rainesians get the dean of Berkeley Journalism School, a contributor to the Nation, Salon, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, to endorse a book endorsing the notion that there’s no liberal bias in the media. And they don’t even seem to notice the irony.

In some ways, worse than the anti-war left. Good for David Frum and Jonah Goldberg for finally unleashing the assault on these rancid haters.

Great news from the Times of London: mass defections from the military, and the flight of one of Saddam’s top advisers.

Here’s an email that cheered me:

As a gay man, it took no effort for me to detest the collectivist ideology of the theocratic thugs of the far Right. But it was quite a while before I began to see something that I had long been feeling: that the victimist egalitopians of the Left are just as much in the thug category. You only need to cross them to find out that Noam Chomsky and Pat Robertson are twins. I live in San Francisco. My mildest dissents from the party line have most often been met with a two-pronged response: “You are far too intelligent to consider such a thing” and “Is something going wrong in your emotional life?”. I am in fact far too intelligent not to notice the combined condescension and abdication of thought therein expressed. And my emotional life is indeed in difficulty: Muslim terrorists want to destroy the civilization that makes my very existence possible and they blew a hole in my home town.
I come from a strong Catholic background, was a lifelong Democrat and I am a 60’s boomer. So appeals to “Justice and Peace” seemed to me only the Natural Form of Righteousness. Now I see that what is lacking there, and in almost all the Left, is “Freedom”. I have watched with increasing dismay as most of the idiots and the savants of the Left have lined up against President Bush’s response to 9/11. Not that his strategy is unassailable and without risk (what, in this world, could be?). But the smug and self-satisfied contempt with which they respond, especially to him as a person, has pulled the mask off. (Apparently cultural sensitivity does not extend to Texans and the maligned standard of IQ suddenly is back in vogue). None of them show anything near such a feeling for the Islamist thugs who slaughtered 3000 of their countrymen and women in a single morning.
I am afraid that my generation learned too well to love their enemies without ever learning how to stop hating their fathers. So that now, hatred of the father takes the form of love of the enemy. And inside all that is a toxic self-hatred that appalls me.

Maybe out of this horror, some new kind of Western self-understanding will emerge.

Hope springs up at Salon:

Today, the political counterculture and the antiwar movement in the West often seem to be one and the same. Instead of fighting fascists or other genocidal tyrants as it might have during the Spanish Civil War or World War II or even during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s, the modern left fights war; because the United States is the world’s most significant military agent, and because it has so often used military power to support anti-democratic governments, the left understandably fights the United States. Such opposition to war is reflexive, and too often outweighs its outrage on behalf of the oppressed.

That’s why today’s American left is the most important ally of some of the most depicable dictators and mass-murderers in the world. I guess the Cold War trained them well.