Year: 2003

What can account for Hans Blix’s burial of the serious news of a Saddamite drone aircraft capable of deploying chemical weapons on neighboring countries? At this point, I think we have to conclude that Blix is trying simply to stay relevant, to keep his job and extend his role – regardless of his stated mission to verify Iraq’s disarmament. Otherwise this would have been the headline item in his report to the United Nations. (One aside: why is this news not in the New York Times?) The drone could also presumably be used against American and British and Australian troops. Then we have the news that troops may also have to contend with loosely allied terrorist groups within Iraq. Now think about those two things. They prove that a) Saddam has no intention of disarming himself of chemical weapons and b) his regime is a harbor for terrorists. Both pieces of evidence further bolster the reason for war as soon as possible. In fact, I fear that France and Germany’s shenanigans – in allowing Sadam and our enemies to plan for months for war – may directly put Anglosphere troops at risk. This from people whom the New York Times still calls “allies.” If any of this transpires, if France or Germany can be seen to have been complicit in selling weapons that are ulitmately used against American troops, we will shortly not be feeling mere disappointment with our “allies.” We will be feeling rage. Maybe that’s why they want to avoid war so much. They fear what it will reveal. And the American anger it will unleash.

About that caption on a recent BBC piece – “the educated are mainly anti-war” – several readers have pointed out that the poll they relied on had no data on educational level at all. They just made that up to comport with their anti-American condescension. But the polls that do measure such things show nothing of the kind. Here’s how one reader put it:

Take a look at the actual Pew poll results, available as a PDF download here (click on the link “U.S. Needs More International Backing poll” — note the bias inherent in that title as well): If you scroll down to page six in the Acrobat document, you will see a breakdown of war support by various demographic classifications, including by education. The following numbers represent the percent who support military action: college degree, 58 percent; some college, 71 percent; high school degree or less, 71 percent. Only 33% of people with a college education oppose military action (opposition drops to 25% of less at lower levels of education). While the numbers do show that support for the war drops somewhat at higher education levels, they remain predominantly pro-war, and certainly do not support a contention that “the educated are mainly anti-war.” Indeed, even if you accept the presumption that only those with a college degree are “educated,” a very solid majority (58 percent) of this enlightened group support war with Iraq!

The BBC lefties don’t only spin, they lie!

Priceless as usual. Here’s one ideal Bush response to Terry Moran:

And while I agree that ordinary citizens have protested our government in foreign capitals, I’d ask you why American security should be determined by 26 year old Belgian college students, and I’d also note that these rallies have been organized by people who’d dance in the street if someone set off a tactical nuclear device in the lobby of the Monsanto corporate office. But more to the point, Terry, I’d ask: What went wrong in your education that you believe that the disapproval of China constitutes failure?

YOU ON THE PRESS CONFERENCE: Many of you don’t seem to think he looked exhausted:

He just seemed very, very sad that it must come to this. Very sad to have to admit that France and Germany are likely never going to be ‘allies’ of ours again. Forcing the vote will force their hands…they will reveal whether they are with us or the terrorists…then there will be a break. Bush seems full of regret that this break will happen. I think he’s disappointed in Putin, too, whom he trusted. But he didn’t seem defeated to me. Howard Fineman said it best. He was grim, somber, inexorable…he was Shane, the reluctant cowboy, strapping on a gun to protect his family. I didn’t think he looked tired…just terribly regretful and thoughtful.

Sure. But tired as well.

NO MORE SADDAMS: Far from being celebrated as a resister to American power, Saddam is getting less popular in that part of the world:

The latest issue of the Saudi-owned weekly magazine Al-Majalla reports that 500 Egyptians whose parents had named them Saddam have sought legal name changes in recent months. “I was among hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who went to work in Iraq before the (1990) invasion of Kuwait. We saw Saddam then as a leader who loves Arab nationalism and then I had my son and named him Saddam,” the magazine quoted the father of a 15-year-old as saying. “But we were surprised by his invasion of Kuwait and the destruction of Arab solidarity, and he is the one behind our division now and the war that threatens the Iraqi people.”

Imagine how they’ll feel about him once he’s found hanging from a lamp-post in Tikrit.

Man, he looked and sounded exhausted. The spin is that he was trying to look calm and reassuring. I just thought he looked wiped. There were moments when he almost seemed catatonic with fatigue. I gleaned a couple of things: he actually believes that intelligence evidence of Saddam’s deliberate and continued defiance of the U.N. could sway the Security Council. You have to admire his faith in the sincerity of his opponents. Alas, it’s pretty clear by now that the French, Germans and Russians simply don’t care if Saddam is flouting the U.N. They just don’t want American military power exercized in the region – ever again. I doubt if they had videotape of Saddam making anthrax in his bathrobe that they’d agree to enforce their own resolution. I still think forcing a vote is the right thing to do, even if we lose badly. After these past few weeks, watching the extraordinary duplicity and blindness of several Security Council members, I’ve reluctantly come to the verge of hoping that this crisis helps destroy the United Nations as a credible international body. And I don’t think it would harm Bush badly on the home front. His position that it is his duty to protect Americans is a good and solid one. No one will dismiss that argument – especially if we find horrors inside Iraq. I also noticed Bush’s emphasis on a “just” post-Saddam regime, which is not the same as instant democracy. We’ll have to keep the pressure up on that one. All in all, though, this press conference struck me as a mistake. He looked drained, wan, exhausted from this interminable diplomatic process. He seemed defeated to me – and the U.N. has effectively defeated him and protected Saddam. But not for too much longer.

It’s long. It’s brilliant. It’s Camille! At several thousand words.

THE END OF ARAB TOTALITARIANISM? Must read piece fron Amir Taheri in the Jersualem Post: learned, contextual, inspiring. (Alas, registration required.)

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION: I loved this BBC caption about American opinion on the war against Saddam: “The educated are mainly anti-war.” You can’t make this stuff up.

“By invoking regime change as the goal of American policy in early 2002 and repeated public and private statements that the US would eliminate Saddam, the US led with its chin. While I support the goal, the Administration made its belatedly accepted errand of UN backing of the war much more difficult. Most of the world saw, correctly, that the US intended to act regardless of the UN membership’s opinion. This reinforced the already popular view that the Bush Admin was “unilateralist” and fed a sense disingenousness over the invocation of disarmament. If the Administration really did decide in the summer of 2002 to go the UN, that was a mistake. If the Administration knew from the outset that it would go to the UN, its public diplomacy was fatally flawed. In that sense, I think it can be argued that the Administration has clumsily pursued a goal that is in the security interests of the US and the whole world. Wouldn’t it have been better to make publicly the cheesy argument that the UN is a crucial arbiter of international conflict and that the US valued the views and contributions from other nations as it did in 1991? What’s the harm in realpolitik. Yes, it would piss off the ideologues, but this is to damn important to let ideological rigidity get in the way.” – more neoliberal criticism of the president on Iraq on the Letters Page.

Mike Kinsley is a brilliant and genuinely nice man. But he’s also deeply partisan. I can’t see any other reason for the obtuseness of his latest column. Herewith a brief fisking of its opener (Kinsley’s prose is in italics. Mine isn’t.):

How has an attack on the United States by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan led us to war against Iraq?

9/11 revealed how vulnerable the United States is to international Islamist terrorism. It revealed the absolute ruthlessness of the enemy. It also revealed the possibility of a nightmare chemical, biological or nuclear 9/11. For twelve years, the United States and others have been trying to get Saddam Hussein to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction. 9/11 made resolving that issue far more urgent, since there was a clear possibility that Saddam could deliver such weapons to some of his terrorist clients. So we decided to get serious about Saddam. How hard is that argument to grasp? The linkage was there from the very beginning. Yours truly even mentioned Iraq as a state sponsor of such terror the very week of September 11.

Why are nuclear weapons in Iraq worth a war but not nuclear weapons in North Korea?

Because Saddam doesn’t have them yet but Kim Jong Il does. When the enemy has the capacity to create nuclear Armageddon, it obviously raises the risks of military intervention. Again: I’d have thought for a person of Kinsley’s intellect, that rather elementary point would be a no-brainer.

For most skeptics about Gulf War II (including me), the Bush administration’s failure to answer these two questions sincerely or even plausibly, let alone convincingly, is central to our doubts.

Why, pray, is worrying about the risk of WMDs in the hands of terrorists obviously insincere or implausible? Why is believing that Saddam be disarmed not just unconvincing but implausible? This was Clinton’s policy. The Security Council affirmed it 15 – 0 not so long ago. Was the entire U.N. insincere? You could, of course, find these arguments unconvincing. You could believe Saddam has no WMDs. You could believe that he has them but won’t ever use them again, although he has in the past. You could argue that he has no links to international terrorism (against the mass of evidence available). But Kinsley’s not interested in those arguments. He’s interested in simply asserting that the president is a bad liar (that’s the more direct way of saying he hasn’t answered obvious questions about Iraq “sincerely or even plausibly”). That’s not an argument. It’s a cheap partisan shot.

This isn’t entirely reasonable. The battle could be worth joining even though George W. is unable to explain why.

Oh, please. The president has been plenty able to explain why; and plenty of people, including the prime minister of Great Britain, and a majority of Americans, agree with him. Why doesn’t Kinsley call Blair’s case insincere and implausible? It’s indistinguishable from Bush’s.

The 9/11 pretext may be phony without necessarily invalidating the whole exercise. As for Iraq versus North Korea, following the right policy in one place is better than following the wrong policy in both. There are worse things in this world than logical inconsistency. Furthermore, it is hard to dismiss the official reasons for this war as disingenuous without some theory about what the ulterior motive or unspoken war aim might be. George W. Bush is not taking the nation into war to avenge his father or as a “wag the dog” strategy to win re-election, as Bush’s more cynical opponents have charged. He deserves more credit than that. Nor is he planning to conquer and occupy Iraq in order to bring human rights to the Iraqi people or start a chain reaction of democracy throughout the Middle East, as he and his supporters have lately augmented the official war aims. He doesn’t deserve that much credit.

Funny, but from the beginning, the president has clearly and unmistakably portrayed this conflict as a battle between democracy and a new Islamist totalitarianism. And from the beginning – not “lately” – the president’s supporters have made pro-democracy arguments. Here, to take one example, is a quote that Kinsley didn’t hear – because presumably he wasn’t listening – from the president’s speech last June about the situation in Israel: “I have a hope for the people of Muslim countries … You have a rich culture, and you share the aspirations of men and women in every culture. Prosperity and freedom and dignity are not just American hopes, or Western hopes. They are universal, human hopes. And even in the violence and turmoil of the Middle East, America believes those hopes have the power to transform lives and nations.” So you see the president does indeed deserve some credit. And if he were a Democrat, Kinsley would not hesitate to give him some. As for the rest of Mike’s column – veering into Chomskyan territory about blood for oil – I leave its inconsistencies to the readers of Slate.

An old article well-worth revisiting, by the superb gay journalist, Paul Varnell. One punishment inflicted on a young homosexual by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority mafia was “to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects.” Meanwhile, some gay activists organize to protect a regime that executes homosexuals as a matter of course. Go figure.

Yes, there actually is a group that goes by that name. They’d be more accurate calling themselves, “Turkeys For Thanksgiving.” Maybe they haven’t seen stories like this one. Like many Arab mobocracies, the Palestinian Authority, so beloved of the hyper-tolerant Europeans, is viciously homophobic – to the point of imprisonment and execution and the habitual response of tyrannies to gay people – accusing them of treachery. Yet the gay left continues to appease and make excuses for these thugs. Why? Is their hatred of America that deep? Or are they that stupid?

WHAT CONSERVATIVE MEDIA?: My latest take on the latest media myth.

Two British papers – the Guardian and the Times – are reporting that Britain may attempt to produce a different version of proposed Resolution 1442 than the simple one now envisaged. 1442 would actually delay war for yet another two weeks – until March 30 – with a clear deadline for complete Iraqi disarmament. Blair hopes, it is alleged, to win over a few waverers on the Security Council to get a majority. It’s also argued that the Turkish balk has delayed the military timetable, so the extra two weeks don’t amount to much. The problem with this approach is that it presumes reasonableness on the part of the Franco-German-Russian axis. But what Saddam has shown – rather brilliantly – is that even the slightest concession from Baghdad is enough for the appeasers to claim that the “inspections” are “working” (even though 1441 doesn’t stipulate that the inspections should have any effect except verifying Saddam’s complete and immediate disarmament). There is in principle nothing to stop this process from going on for ever. De Villepin has claimed that inspections cannot go on for ever, but has never proposed an end-date, or even a simple criterion by which one could measure whether they had failed. The truth is, I fear, that France, Russia and Germany simply want to keep Saddam in power and to humiliate the United States in order to build their own relationship with the Arab satrapies and pursue their own priorities in the region. If that’s their game, no compromise will satisfy them, whatever the British think. So let them veto.