Year: 2003

Stunning article in the Times of London today. Eight leaders of European countries call for unity between Europe and America in dealing with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They are: José Marxeda Aznar, of Spain, José Manuel Durão Barroso, of Portugal, Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, Britain’s Tony Blair, Václav Havel, of the Czech Republic, Peter Medgyessy, of Hungary, Leszek Miller, of Poland, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, of Denmark. Their average economic growth last year was more than twice that of France and Germany. And they see the real issues involved:

We in Europe have a relationship with the United States which has stood the test of time. Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and far-sightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the United States we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The transatlantic relationship must not become a casualty of the current Iraqi regime’s persistent attempts to threaten world security.

And they are in no illusions about what we have to do now:

The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is a threat of incalculable consequences. It is one at which all of us should feel concerned. Resolution 1441 is Saddam Hussein’s last chance to disarm using peaceful means. The opportunity to avoid greater confrontation rests with him.

Let’s not get too huffy about Europe. Much of it is far closer to the U.S. position than the tired and increasingly narcissistic powers in Berlin and Paris. Schroder, remember, has brought his party to historic lows in the polls. Chirac is president mainly because he was the only alternative to fascism. The center of gravity in Europe is indeed shifting. And Washington’s clarity in the war on terror is one reason.

BLAIR’S LATEST: He’s usually not that comfortable in the House of Commons, but I loved the following exchange between Blair and a backbench heckler yesterday:

When a Labour MP shouted “Who’s next?” at him, he retorted that after Iraq, “yes, through the UN we have to confront North Korea about its nuclear programme.” Another MP barked “Where does it stop?” bringing the response: “We stop when the threat to our country is fully and properly dealt with.”

A lion in winter.

REPORTING FROM LA-LA LAND: Each time I hear some reporter telling us what the average Iraqi on the street is thinking, I look for the obligatory context that the interviewee can only say pro-Saddam things or face being murdered. Yet so many times, especially on television, when a host asks a reporter in Baghdad on the “mood” there, we get the pretense that somehow freedom of thought is possible. The Washington Post’s latest is another classic:

At the Al-Zahawi teahouse in Baghdad’s old quarter, a ramshackle building where men gab over games of backgammon and dominoes, a trio of retired teachers who heard excerpts of Bush’s address this morning said they were unconvinced by his arguments. “He claims we have all of these weapons,” said Atta Ahmed, 65, a potbellied former math instructor. “Why doesn’t he show the evidence?”

C’mon. Let’s have some basic honesty here, can we?

THE FRENCH AND EMPIRE: This picture is worth framing.

Reading Jake Tapper’s breezy and highly skeptical view of last night’s SOTU, I stopped in my tracks at the following item:

Bush was only repeating here what the Iraqis themselves have said, according to press reports. According to a Kuwaiti newspaper story from last summer, in a June 2002 meeting among Hussein, his two sons and other members of his inner circle of advisors, Ali Hasan al-Majid, a Saddam cousin who possesses a diabolical expertise in chemical warfare, asked “has the time not come to take the fight to their own homes in America? They wanted this to be a war on all fronts, so let it be a war on all fronts and using all weapons and means.” Another referred to Iraqis becoming “human bombs in the thousands, willing to blow up America in particular,” and yet another suggested that “If bin Laden truly did carry out the September attacks as they claim, then as Allah is my witness, we will prove to them that what happened in September is a picnic compared to the wrath of Saddam Hussein.”

Jeez. Which Kuwaiti Bob Woodward unearthed that anecdote? If true, why isn’t it common knowledge?

“Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: “I must have war.” He then had it.” – John Pilger, the Daily Mirror.

I’ve been thinking in the few minutes before I sat down to write how to temper my admiration for the speech I just heard. So to get it out of the way: the domestic ambitions of this president strike me as immensely expensive and clearly liable to sadddle us with at least another decade of deficit spending. But then I found myself – an unabashed small government supporter – putting some of those concerns aside. Why? Because Bush is tapping into American ambition again, which is no small achievement. And because his domestic concerns seem to me motivated by a decency and a compassion I cannot but respect. As someone with HIV, I listened to his words about AIDS and found my throat catching. This is a Republican president, and yet he sees the extraordinary pain and anguish and death that this disease has caused and is still causing. He made me question again my more pragmatic concerns about the feasibility of HIV treatment and prevention in Africa and shamed me into realizing I should be far more optimistic in the attempt to tackle this issue. And when he spoke about addiction – a problem I also see all around me – I also felt a genuineness in his words that surprised me. I shouldn’t be surprised, of course. Bush was an addict. And he came thisclose to saying it. But this aspect of the drug problem is one too many have either spoken about glibly or not spoken about at all. If we cannot end the idiotic “drug-war”, we can at least expand treatment and care for the addicted. I was also gratified and relieved by his proactive moves on the environment. A pro-growth, technologically-driven environmentalism should be a central plank of modern conservatism. Bush went some way toward establishing that. He needs to do more. But there was something else here – the glimmers of a real core of compassionate conservatism. By mentioning the lonely elderly, or the AIDS orphan, and calling on us to get involved person by person, I felt morally led by a president in ways that I cannot recall in my lifetime. I was particularly struck by the president’s defense of the newly or prematurely born, and their right to be treated with dignity and compassion rather than with brutality. So sue me for being moved. I was.

KENNEDY, REVIVED: And then the extraordinary transition to foreign affairs. It was a brilliant rhetorical flourish to begin so quietly, almost intimately, and then to build resolve out of compassion. He laid out the distinctions between the various despotisms in the axis of evil, calmly, clearly and persuasively. He did not strike me as in any sense eager for war. But the case against Saddam is so overwhelming, so morally right, so strategically essential that the need for war, if necessary, was, to my mind, irrefutable. So too was the attempt to show that, in these terrifying and bewildering times, we can still control our own destiny. I respect those who worry about the unintended consequences of a war with Iraq. I understand those who are concerned about the precedent of a pre-emptive strike. I admire those who want clear empirical data before the grave decision of war. But it seemed to me that the president effectively answered each of those worries. He should have mentioned the allies who are already on board – the Brits and Italians and Australians and Spaniards. But if his goal was to show resilience, patience and a moral grasp of America’s current responsibility, then he accomplished it. In many ways, this was a Kennedy-like speech, a speech a Democratic president could have made, if the Democratic Party hadn’t fallen into such moral and strategic confusion. Self-confident, convinced, as he should be, of the benign nature of America’s role in the world, ambitious, and warm, it was a tour de force of big government conservatism, mixed with Cold War liberalism.

“THAT THAT DAY NEVER COMES”: My highlights? When Bush directly addressed the poor people of Iraq, he destroyed the media cant that mistakes a butcher for a people. When he declared of the evil men of al Qaeda, that “one by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice,” his message must have rung in the ears of those still longing, as I am, for the perpetrators of 9/11 to be captured or killed. But his best passage was when he outlined the irrefutable logic that connects 9/11 with Saddam:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

That’s it, in a nutshell. It is not paranoid to fear this. It is responsible. And it is the president’s job to be responsible. He seemed to me to show the calm of someone with real faith – both in the justice of his cause and America’s ability to see it through. Everything else is minor compared to this. Everything.

“As one of those W.-hating liberals/Leftists for whom you seem to have so much contempt, but also as someone who acknowledges that the “He’s a moron” argument “is not one of reasoned opposition,” I want to offer my take on why the liberal/Left hates W. so much. Pretty simply, he was the guy whom we hated in high school: rich, blandly good-looking, unstudious, and popular. We resented that while we were the ones doing all the studying and music-making and painting, he was the one who got to go to the cool parties and who got the good-looking girls. We consoled ourselves with the thought that someday the scales would balance. Now he’s been elected president, just about the most symbolically resonant position in the world, and it’s hard not to take his election, and his popularity, as a national rejection of the choices we made to be good girls and boys. As it turns out, the rich, blandly good-looking, unstudious, popular kid still gets to go to the cool parties (and his wife is kinda hot too).” – well that’s one candid view from an emailer. For more feedback, check out the Letters Page today: a new batch from the smartest readers on the web.

The gamble to take the issue of Iraq’s violation of the 1991 truce to the U.N. was always going to be a tricky one. Secretary of State Colin Powell was critical to that strategy (and has always been far closer to the president’s own goals in this endeavor than much of the media wants to believe). I supported it at the time, but had my doubts. I have to say that after yesterday’s Blix report, I’m more impressed than ever by the strategy. Blix’s report is a devastating blow to those who still hold out hope that appeasing Saddam or attempting to contain him diplomatically will solve the problem we face. The critical elements of the report are: that Saddam’s December 7 dossier was riddled with unacountable gaps and omissions; that there are tons of unaccounted for VX gas, anthrax, 6500 missing chemically-armed bombs, SCUD missiles, and the like; that Saddam has neither shown what happened to these weapons and chemicals nor has he publicly destroyed them; that no Iraqi scientists have been granted immunity in order to talk to UN inspectors alone and without fear of retribution; and that documents related to uranium enrichment have been found in scientists’ private homes, suggesting a policy of deliberate concealment of critical documents related to chemical and biological weapons. Any one of these is a material breach of U.N. Resolution 1441. All of them represent a hole the size of a tank in the credibility of Saddam. What we have seen is the most minimal cooperation – just enough to confuse useful idiots in the West – in the attempt to disarm. But, in Blix’s words,

Paragraph 9 of resolution 1441 (2002) states that this cooperation shall be “active”. It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of “catch as catch can”. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items.

Nothing the U.S. or the U.K. could say could be as damning as this report. It’s a slam-dunk.

WHAT NOW? So the question now is: what do we do about it? The U.N. promised severe consquences if Iraq didn’t comply with active cooperation. The last chance has been missed. Should the West give Saddam a really really last chance? I think we should. But purely for the demonstration that we have absolutely no desire to go to war as such, but only to protect the West and the Middle East from Saddam’s menace. That means no more than a few weeks, and only enough time to ensure we have the best conditions in which to wage what will be a hazardous war. That should be the message of the president tomorrow night. He can’t win over the haters; but he absolutely can win over those who believe the U.S. can and must uphold some element of order in the world, especially with regard to weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and terror. And if he can produce more evidence of Saddam’s violation of the U.N.’s demands without violating critical intelligence, then he should. He doesn’t need to morally or logically. And he shouldn’t produce it as the critical proof. We have that already in Blix’s report. But he can use it to add rhetorical strength to the strategy he is pursuing. The issue, in Colin Powell’s eloquent expression, “is not how much more time the inspectors need to search in the dark. It is how much more time Iraq should be given to turn on the lights.” A few weeks at most. And then we will turn on the lights, and the world will retroactively judge this war as one of the most justified the West has ever waged.

Here’s a sentence from Hans Blix’s measured and, to my mind, impressive report to the Security Council:

I might further mention that inspectors have found at another site a laboratory quantity of thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor.

Here’s how the U.N. itself characterizes thiodiglycol. It is described as part of a group of

chemicals that have little or no use except as chemical warfare agents or for the development, production or acquisition of chemical weapons, or which have been used by Iraq as essential precursors for chemical weapons and are, therefore, prohibited to Iraq, save under the procedure for special exceptions provided for in paragraph 32 of the Plan.

No such exception has been granted for thiodiglycol. Here’s the relevant direction for Iraq under the terms of the 1991 truce:

Iraq shall not retain, use, transfer, develop, produce, store, import or otherwise acquire these chemicals. Should Iraq require any chemical specified in list B of annex II, it shall submit a request to the Special Commission specifying precisely the chemical and the quantities required, the site or facility where it is to be used and the purpose of its use. The Special Commission will examine and decide on the request and establish the special arrangements it considers consistent with resolution 687 (1991).

This is yet another clear violation of the terms of the 1991 truce, and a violation of Resolution 1441. I’m indebted to blogger Paul Miller for catching it. People keep asking for a “smoking gun.” We’re close to haveing a small arsenal of them.

David Remnick makes the sane liberal case for taking Saddam’s threat seriously in the New Yorker. And Fareed Zakaria waxes optimistic in Newsweek. They both make excellent points. Fareed avoids the condescension toward Bush. (But then if Remnick didn’t condescend to Bush, his readers probably wouldn’t even begin to listen.)

MTV AGAINST THE WAR: Yep, in Germany, they’re running PSAs from pop-stars in defense of Saddam. Moby, whose music I love, is particularly dumb. But why is MTV adopting a controversial political stand under the slogan “War Is Not The Answer”? Isn’t it even supposed to pretend to be neutral?

I’m a blue-stater. Actually, living in DC and Provincetown makes me navy blue. The people in this small town who have even considered favoring war against Iraq are tiny in number. My friends in similar enclaves say they know of no-one, no-one, who favors war. College-educated yuppies are among the worst. Why? For some, it’s a genuine position, based on thinking through the options. But I keep hearing the discussion end with the invocation of Bush. “He’s a moron.” “How could anyone intelligent support anything such a person advocates?” The position is not one of reasoned opposition. It’s one of complete contempt for anything to do with this administration. Others are noticing the same thing. Here are two emails:

I was discussing the threat Iraq poses and the possibility of war with my uncle. He’s a fairly reasonable guy, he’s middle of the road on most political issues. But recently he’s been prone to making outlandish and vicious attacks on the president and “Bush’s War”. So after an hour of arguing, I asked my uncle point-blank: “Would you have a problem with this president and his policies and the war in Iraq if his name was George Smith and not George Bush, son of a president and former oil tycoon?” His answer: “Probably not.” I’d be willing to bet my uncle isn’t the only person who thinks like this.

That’s my impression too. Then there is a simple hatred of Bush among some educated Americans that still occasionally takes me aback. Again here’s an email:

Since breezy theories are all the rage among the punditocracy these days (your slap at the “intelligentsia” is amusing, given that almost all political and media elites throw themselves at Bush’s feet) try this on for size: Those who support Bush, who cram their theories to fit a man of his stature, are simply afraid to admit to any flaw in him because it will bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. So you invent a jut-jawed man of action, determined and resolute with a clear vision of world harmony. But the whispering in your head won’t stop: he’s a vile and craven little momma’s boy, a snooty insider trader and coward who deserted his National Guard post while the great unwashed were still dying in Vietnam, and who rushed off to save his candy ass on September 11 and invented a lie about Air Force one being a target while the great unwashed were once again dying under the rubble. But you’re too damned afraid to admit it. Sick of it? Too bad.

My hunch is that there’s nothing Bush can do about this. But the more successful he is as a president, the worse it will get. Payback, in part, I suppose, for conservative demonization of Clinton. And just as self-destructive for the haters.

No one takes her seriously. Here’s why. My take on celebs and politics; what works and what doesn’t; from Arnold to Sheryl.