Year: 2003

I’m a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld. But really his outbursts are getting out of hand. What on earth was he thinking when he opined that it was “unclear” whether the coming war would be undertaken alongside the British? The U.S. is desperately trying to build support for a war against Saddam and Rumsfeld has inadvertently kicked the most solid ally in the teeth. He achieved many things at once: he emboldened the left-wing critics of the war in Britain, undermined Blair at a critical moment, and, in some British eyes, devalued the importance of the British military contribution. Rumsfeld later retracted the remarks, but the damage has been done. This is an extremely delicate diplomatic moment and Rumsfeld has all the subtlety and restraint of the new superbomb. He must simply understand the wisdom of shutting up at moments like this. And Bush must tell him.

I’m back to daily delivery of the New York Times, so I get to digest it all at once, uninterrupted, over coffee on the couch, on dead tree. The editorial page today gives us small snippets of an entire world view. Just a sprinkling herewith. Here’s Kristof on American response to terror:

When the White House looks at Iraq, all it sees is hidden weaponry. It never notices the seething complexities in which we are about to embed our young men and women.

I’ll leave aside the notion that complexities can somehow “seethe.” Does Kristof actually believe that no-one in the administration has given any thought to the problems of governing a post-Saddam Iraq? Notice he doesn’t say they are under-estimating the problem. He says they never notice it. Only a New York Times writer is smart enough to see that. Then here’s the economic expert, Krugman, on the looming deficit:

[R]ight now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 – make that 3, O.K., maybe 4 – percent of G.D.P.

I take Krugman’s broader point about the deficit, and agree with it. But why such contemptuous sloppiness? There’s a critical difference between 2 and 4 percent of GNP. Isn’t there? Or take the lead op-ed, dripping with condescension toward people whose faith leads them to see some divine providence in human affairs. But it also includes more simple untruths:

So the White House and its backers can safely predict that the unpleasantness [of this war] will be over in a few weeks, with low casualties on both sides.

When has the White House said this? The piece doesn’t substantiate it because it can’t. What I’m getting at is not the validity of critiques of the administration. Or even turning the Times into a partisan platform. What’s dismaying is the sheer reckless condescension of the rhetoric, the assumption of Timesian omniscience, the contempt – not just disagreement – with which they view an administration grappling with some of the most difficult issues any administration has had to grapple with in recent times. It’s ugly and it’s cheap. And it’s getting uglier and cheaper all the time.

“I am astonished that this story has generated so little comment. Does the U.S.A. actually need 12,000 illiterate African Muslims at this point in time? There are, of course, all sorts of taboos in play here–the immigration taboo, the Muslim taboo, the race taboo, so perhaps I should not be astonished. But can’t we at least talk about this? Presumably Americans, a humane and compassionate people, would like to have some kind of refugee policy: but is this the one we want? If there has been any large public debate about this, I missed it.” – John Derbyshire, National Review Online. From time to time, I get emails advising me to rename this award for right-wing hyperbole. And then Derb makes a statement like this. He wonders why Americans aren’t outraged at the fact that a group of Africans, persecuted for centuries, now have a chance of freedom in the new world. Derb, that’s the meaning of America. After all this time, do you still not get it?

My friend Michael Ledeen may be a little too gloomy about the future of Franco-American relations, but he’s right to note how this crisis is spawning some very old phenomena. It’s long been a dictum of “realist” foreign policy analysis that shortly after one great power arises, another just as surely emerges to counter-balance it. In the past, that has meant militarily – but it could also be expressed diplomatically. Since the end of the Cold War, realists have been waiting for this to happen, but couldn’t see how. China is still too militarily weak. Terrorist Islam operates on an asymmetrical level, but, as we saw in Afghanistan, it’s still vulnerable to conventional military superiority. But if combined with the diplomatic and economic clout of the fading Euro-Asian powers – France, Germany and Russia – it could still manage some kind of balance. That, perhaps, is what is happening now. But, of course, these old powers are riding a terrible tiger in Islamist terror, hoping it will eat them last, terrified it is actually in a stronger position to devour them first. The counter-balancing alliance is therefore real but also terribly fragile. Certainly far more fragile than the shared values and military power of the Anglosphere. I think we should think of this riveting period as a time when new alliances are being tested for future use. Some might work; others won’t. But that makes it all the more important to keep our nerve and make this war so successful it deters such potential hostile alliances from taking root.

HITCH ON THE POPE: I laughed out loud several times reading Hitch’s latest. Money quote:

One wonders what it would take for the Vatican to condemn Saddam’s regime. Baathism consecrates an entire country to the worship of a single human being. Its dictator has mosques named after himself. I’m not the expert on piety, but isn’t there something blasphemous about this from an Islamic as well as a Christian viewpoint? I suppose if Saddam came out for partial-birth abortions or the ordination of women or the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle he might be hit with a condemnation of some sort.

He also homed in a wonderful piece of inanity from that most inane of creatures, Jimmy Carter: the term “substantially unilateral.” Why didn’t Howard Dean think of that?

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there’s no chance the U.S. might lose it. America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who’s too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves, while Saddam is even less deserving of victory than Bush.” – novelist Tom Robbins, Seattle Weekly.

CNN has it as its lead headline. Can Howell keep spinning for de Villepin indefinitely?

PRECEDENTS FOR JIMMY: Thanks for your many emails. Here are two that cover the bases of post-presidential meddling:

Jimmy Carter is, fittingly, in the company of two other presidential runts: John Tyler and Millard Fillmore. John Tyler actively favored secession and went on to serve in the congress of the Confederacy until he died in 1862. After inadvertently destroying his own party and leaving himself no vehicle for nomination, Fillmore, a notorious bigot, left office in 1853. He returned three years later and ran for president on the anti-anyone-but-white-Protestants platform of the Know-Nothings. Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, an angry mob, recalling Fillmore’s pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln machinations, surrounded Fillmore’s Buffalo, NY mansion and forced him to splatter the mansion exterior with black ink and to hang black crepe. (New York in those days resembled The Simpsons’ Springfield – angry mobs always at the ready and requiring little incitement.) Tyler and Fillmore are all but forgotten to history. I suspect the same fate awaits Mr. Carter.

Then there’s Teddy Roosevelt:

Before the Cold War/World War II, however, I can think of former President Teddy Roosevelt’s critiques of Wilson’s foreign policy decisions during the neutrality period (1914-1917). Roosevelt was much more to the right on the question of Germany’s attacks on our shipping and urged that Wilson use a firmer hand with the Germans. Wilson, not certain that he had the support of the entire country for war just yet, was not particularly interested in picking a fight just yet. Carter is not Roosevelt; TR was calling for firm action, not greater passivity. Still, the Wilson administration had a devil of a time placating TR’s supporters in Congress. After Wilson brought us into war in 1917, TR actually volunteered for form another unit like the Rough Riders. Wilson politely ignored this. Although it would be a massive public relations stunt, I can’t see Carter forming a brigade of human shields, however firm his convictions against Bush’s actions.

Carter as a human shield? Oh please, please.

EVEN PRETTIER IN PINK: Here’s an anti-Lysistrata chick-hawk. Who says you can’t make love and war?

FAIR-WEATHER HAWKS: The Mickster has a great post on all those Democratic hawks who have suddenly decided it’s getting far too nerve-wracking to stay in the game. So long, Josh! Been nice hanging for a while. That’s not to say I don’t respect Josh’s reasoning. Unlike others, he offers an actual alternative: keeping a quarter of a million troops in the Gulf for months, accepting Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons, and asking the French to help pay for it. But that alternative is so transparently pie-in-the-sky it’s hard to take it seriously.

This weekend was full of foreboding. How could it not be? I was lucky enough to be at a wonderful wedding, but even there, the talk was of whether this was another 1914. Were we about to cross a Rubicon that could escalate beyond our control? Could the president carry a divided country through the difficult military terrain ahead? Was a catastrophe in a major American city an inevitability? Would war against Iraq hasten it? But these questions, however worthy, are unanswerable. What is answerable to some degree is whether we have a real alternative to war. Not even Dominique de Villepin believes the current inspections regime can go on for ever. But we know something now that we didn’t know even a month ago. We know that even with the threat of imminent war, backed by 250,000 troops and a president who clearly threatens conflict with credibility, the inspections are not achieving meaningful disarmament. Saddam is that cool. Moreover, he is still upping the ante. He’s angling for lifting of sanctions. He’s dismissing concerns about weapons that are clearly illicit. He’s not even disarming at any serious pace the token missiles he has agreed to destroy. So even with maximum pressure, he’s playing for time. To be sure, we don’t have absolute maximum pressure. We have a divided security council, massive peace demos and papers like the New York Times already bailing on a united front. But even so, the pressure on the dictator must surely be intense. This much is certain: even if we could keep 250,000 troops in the region indefinitely, no future containment regime will ever be as effective as it is now, which is to say it isn’t effective at all. (Philip Bobbitt makes a related point in the New York Times today.) So our practical choice is either war very shortly or the long-term toleration of a free Saddam, able to buy weapons, buoyed by having stared down the U.N. once again. In other words, I think we’ve essentially tested the limits of international pressure on Saddam Hussein; and the results cannot guarantee security at any credible level for any reasonable length of time. What more do we need to know?

“The truth is: Bush’s diplomatic headaches have much less to do with his own poor diplomatic skills than with the simple fact that he is trying ambitious things. Rather than simply forestall crises, postpone them, avoid them or fob them off onto others, Bush is actually doing the hard thing. He’s calling for real democracy in the Middle East. He’s aiming to make the long-standing U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq a reality. He actually wants to defeat Islamist terrorism, rather than make excuses for tolerating its cancerous growth. And when this amount of power is fueled by this amount of conviction, of course the world is aroused and upset.” – more on this theme in my latest column, posted opposite.

Compare the reports in the London Times with the New York Times or the Washington Post (zilch) on the alleged undisclosed drone aircraft buried in the appendix to Hans Blix’s report to the U.N. last week. I don’t know what to make of it. It seems a big deal to me, although the NYT makes a bigger deal about cluster bombs. I’m not an arms inspector, so I’m not sure why this discrepancy in coverage exists.

Glenn Reynolds and Oxblog think I got a little excessive yesterday with my posting on the editorial of the New York Times. I’m not entirely sure why. Of course the Times’ editors are arguing what they genuinely believe is in the interests of the country – and they will continue to do so once the war has started. I never suggested otherwise. But I do think – and I’ve thought from the beginning of this conflict – that we will be extremely lucky not to experience a deep domestic divide in the context of wartime. By domestic war, I simply mean a deep domestic fight over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. That’s a wrenching experience I hope won’t happen. But in many ways, it already has. To take one simple example: has there ever been a case when a former president has actually publicly undermined a sitting president at a critical time in U.N. diplomacy, essentially advising critical foreign governments to balk at America’s requests on the eve of a war? If someone knows of a precedent for Jimmy Carter’s op-ed, please let me know.

“NOT AS MANY AS BUSH”: On a more minor front, I was walking the beagle on Saturday in my local D.C. park and stumbled across the pretty-in-pink “Women For Peace” demo. The demonization of the president was far more evident than any criticism of Saddam Hussein. In the few conversations I managed to have without losing my cool, I asked some of the demonstrators whether they were aware of how many people Saddam Hussein had killed in his short time on earth. “Not as many as Bush,” came one reply. “America is the true terrorist nation,” another opined. Now I am second to no-one in defending these people’s right to say whatever they believe, and it was a beautiful day for a feisty demonstration. But what can one make of the arguments one hears? Maybe it’s because I’m surrounded by these sentiments, but it’s hard not to wonder what these people will say or do once this particular phase of the war actually gets under way.

ANGER AND FRIVOLITY: And what was with the pink? Are we going to have color-coordinated demos now? I gleaned that the pinkness was some sort of feminist statement – but isn’t the association of women with pretty and inoffensive colors the opposite of a feminist statement? And then a friend forwarded me a first hand reported email from the march. Get a load of this:

Everybody assembled at Malcolm X Park and then marched down 16th street to the White House. I marched with a contingent of local anarchist friends who had formed up the “F.A.G. Bloc.” I spent most of the march carrying one end of a banner that read: “FISTS ARE 4 FUCKING, NOT FOR FIGHTING.” We also had signs that read “MASTURBATE FOR PEACE” and my favorite, “TIT CLAMPS NOT WAR CAMPS.” We were joined at points by the radical cheerleader bloc … If we’re going to have rallies and marches like this, I think this style is the way to go. ;-)

What does one say about this – except that some part of our culture doesn’t even begin to know how to grapple with grave matters of peace and war, life and death?

Finally, after weeks of tortued, incoherent, meandering opportunism, the editors of the New York Times have come to their finger-in-the wind conclusion. No war against Saddam. Here’s their reasoning:

[A] far larger and more aggressive inspection program, backed by a firm and united Security Council, could keep a permanent lid on Iraq’s weapons program. By adding hundreds of additional inspectors, using the threat of force to give them a free hand and maintaining the option of attacking Iraq if it tries to shake free of a smothering inspection program, the United States could obtain much of what it was originally hoping to achieve. Mr. Hussein would now be likely to accept such an intrusive U.N. operation. Had Mr. Bush managed the showdown with Iraq in a more measured manner, he would now be in a position to rally the U.N. behind that bigger, tougher inspection program, declare victory and take most of the troops home.

Let’s unpack that paean to wishful thinking. At bottom, the Times editors believe Hans Blix rather than Colin Powell. They believe that what Saddam is doing – dismantling a few al Samoud missiles – is real progress. They believe the inspections are working in getting Saddam to disarm his chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons. And they think that a few hundred more inspectors would finish him off. Well, not quite. They think the threat of force is also a necessary complement to the U.N.’s almighty suasive power.

SHEER ESCAPISM: How does recent history come to bear on this argument? Saddam has given up a couple dozen already declared al Samoud missiles under threat from 250,000 allied troops. The Times wants us to believe that after the United States has taken “most of the troops home,” Saddam will then do everything else we need to keep us and the region secure. Huh? If anything, the reverse will surely happen. As the Times itself reports, Saddam has already interpreted the divisions on the Security Council as an opportunity to demand that economic sanctions be lifted. In other words, even with a quarter million troops breathing down his neck, and war potentially days away, Saddam is confidently demanding a global reward for the minuscule disarmament he has fitfully done. What is the likelihood that after we withdraw most of our troops, he would then do what he has refused to do so far? I’d say: zero. Yet that’s the essential logic of the Times’ editorial. Surely they are not so divorced from reality as to actually believe that. Or do they think that Dominique de Villepin is so intimidating a figure that in conjunction with a few hundred Swedes and Finns, Saddam will buckle?

THE HOME FRONT: The Times also fails to answer an accompanying basic question: do we then retain the sanctions? I see no rationale behind this editorial – except fear of American isolation and what the Times calls the need for a “strong international body to keep the peace and defuse tension.” Somehow, the Times believes that the U.N. will be strengthened by a tyrant observing U.N. Resolution 1441 being abandoned. And such a policy does mean that. 1441 demanded immediate and complete disarmament. Not a new process of years of U.N. “policing” – effectively using the United Nations as a legitimizer of Saddam’s regime, just as it became a legitimizer of Milosevic’s genocide in the Balkans. What, after all, is the difference between this and the 1990s? Nothing. But somehow we all knew it would come to this, didn’t we? The Times has been campaigning for appeasement of Saddam for over a year. The hawkish pirouettes in between were diversions. What this editorial is really about is the first shot in the coming domestic war – to undermine this military campaign once it begins, to bring down this administration, and to advocate the long-term delegation of American power to an internationalist contraption whose record has been to facilitate inaction and tyranny. The Times, in campaigning against war, has actually fired the opening shot in the coming domestic war. Hostilities have begun.