Year: 2003

I thoroughly enjoyed this take on British attitudes to all things American (including Bush) at a blog I hadn’t read before: BritishSpin. Money quote:

Mr Bush seems to very much enjoy bombing people and making with the wrath and the vengeance. This offends our sense of fair play.
A clarification here, the vaunted sense of British fair play means fair play just for the British. When ruling the world, we were entirely justified in sending gun ships up Chinese rivers to support the opium trade and would have very miffed if some Yankee upstart had been going around shouting “no blood for dope” at Disraeli. Burger-scoffing surrender baboons in the war against yellowism, John Bull would have said. Jingoism? We invented it.
Mr Bush on the other hand seems to believe in fair play just for the Americans, which is very disturbing and amoral.

No blood for dope? Now there’s a quandary for the anti-globalizers.

The consciences of Europe have decided to end asylum for people from Iraq. The reason? “At the time and in the near future political persecution in Iraq can be ruled out.” Fair enough. And, of course, the end of that persecution was resisted tooth and nail by the German government.

We’ve been informed that at 10 am today, the Massachusetts Supreme Court (SJC) will release its historic decision on equal marriage rights. Odd that I’m in Massachusetts, at Williams College, right now.

PBS WATCH: An emailer writes:

I heard this last night on Marketplace and was stunned (although at this point, I shouldn’t be). PBS’ business-oriented show did a story on how the British feel about Bush’s visit. The two politicians they spoke to: George Galloway and Ken Livingstone. No mention was made of Galloway’s past, his expulsion from the Labour Party, his taking money from Saddam, nothing. He was just a member of parliament. Speaking to the mayor of London might have been appropriate, but they never mentioned his quotes calling Bush the greatest danger to the planet. It was a disgusting attempt to present bias as fact.

Disgusting, but for NPR, entirely unsurprising. Quoting Galloway, without mentioning that he was on the take from Saddam and has been expelled from the Labour Party, is beyond belief.

Here’s the Pentagon’s response to the leaked Feith memo:

News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate… The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.

So none of this has been confirmed. But neither has it been denied. Aren’t leaks like this exactly what newspapers love to publish – even when they haven’t been confirmed? This is raw data, guys! So why the silence? I remain alternately perplexed and not surprised at all.

At 57 percent, and rising slightly, this president, it’s important to remember, is strikingly popular for a mid-termer after two bad economic years and a difficult war. I’m bullish on the war (we can win if we want to); less bullish about the long-term economy (all that government and personal debt can’t go on for ever); but primarily impressed with this guy’s political strength. The one disturbing thing about this poll is that 64 percent say the casualty rate in this war is “unacceptable.” It’s a good thing that we are sensitive to such tragedy. It’s real and awful. At the same time, wars kill soldiers. To have invaded and occupied a country of 26 million, defended by the remnants of a brutal dictatorship with nothing to lose, and to have lost between 300 and 400 soldiers is, by historical standards, astonishing. If this is “unacceptable,” then we are moving into a situation in which any war is unacceptable. Which is, of course, what the bad guys out there want.

The decayed consciences in London today do not represent most Brits. I’m heartened by this poll in the Guardian. 62 percent of Brits agree that the U.S. is “generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world.” Even better:

The ICM poll also uncovers a surge in pro-war sentiment in the past two months as suicide bombers have stepped up their attacks on western targets and troops in Iraq. Opposition to the war has slumped by 12 points since September to only 41% of all voters. At the same time those who believe the war was justified has jumped 9 points to 47% of voters.

Combined with Bush’s upward poll numbers (see below), I think this is evidence that people do indeed understand what we’re fighting, they see the difference between a country saving another one from chaos and dictatorship and the alleged “evil empire” the Euro-left so despises. The Brits haven’t lost their minds. Majorities also welcomed Bush’s visit. There’s only so much, I suppose, that the BBC can do to poison minds. They did it in the 1930s. Churchill still came through. So will the Brits in the new century. I believe it in my heart. (My own defense of the president as he arrives in London can now be read opposite).

Surprise! But the senator’s campaign to help prevent and treat HIV in Africa cannot be gainsaid. It’s God’s work; and Santorum deserves real credit. One blemish: none of those people in Africa with HIV or AIDS is legally allowed even to enter the U.S. under our current immigration laws. Almost uniquely among Western countries, we are saying to the world that millions of Africans and others are unwelcome here because they have HIV. Leading African AIDS experts cannot even come to conferences here, if they’re HIV-positive. In fact, vast tracts of the continent are now banished from America. That’s a terrible signal to send when a critical element in the prevention and treatment effort in Africa must be to get rid of the stigma of HIV. Isn’t it counter-productive to say one thing and act, in our immigration laws, as if the stigma is justified?

DOWD AWARD NOMINEE: This one goes to Noam Chomsky. On the dust-jacket of his latest book, he has the quote: “Arguably the most important intellectual alive” – The New York Times. The full unDowdified quote … well, Oliver Kamm has the details. It’s a beaut.

And supports his fellow Catholics – the gay ones – in the hour of their need. He also happens to be the publisher of the National Catholic Reporter.

TO THE CROWDS IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE: A simple, haltingly English message from a man who can speak it more powerfully than I can:

I was counting days and hours waiting to see an end to that regime, just like all those who suffered the cruelty of that brutal regime…
Through out these decades I lost trust in the world governments and international committees.
Terms like (human rights, democracy and liberty..etc.) became hollow and meaningless and those who keep repeating these words are liars..liars..liars.
I hated the U.N and the security council and Russia and France and Germany and the arab nations and the islamic conference.
I’ve hated George Gallawy and all those marched in the millionic demonstrations against the war. It is I who was oppressed and I don’t want any one to talk on behalf of me,
I, who was eager to see rockets falling on Saddam’s nest to set me free, and it is I who desired to die gentlemen, because it’s more merciful than humiliation as it puts an end to my suffer, while humiliation lives with me reminding me every moment that I couldn’t defend myself against those who ill-treated me…..
Believe me, we were living in the “kingdom of horror”.
Please tell me how could the world that claims to be civilized let Saddam launch chemical weapons on his own un-armed people?
Shame..
Can anyone tell me why the world let Saddam remain and stood against America’s will to topple him? … You all owe the Iraqi people an apology.

And today, these “anti-war” protestors campaign not against Assad or Saddam or bin Laden, but against the man who liberated these beleaguered, terrorized people. The demonstrators sicken, appall and horrify me. Whatever your views on the war, the mass graves surely made frenzied opposition moot. These useful idiots have come undone.

So now the “anti-globalization” fringes are actually contributing money to the Baathist cause. Why not raise money for al Qaeda while you’re at it? Yes, these people are on the extreme. But the alliance between the anti-globalization left and Islamo-fascism is a natural one. It will grow and deepen. They share a hatred of Western freedom, a deep anti-Semitism and implacable hostility to capitalism. The alliance is as predictable as, oh, say that between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

What to make of the Weekly Standard’s publication of a leaked memo from neocon Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, to the Senate Intelligence Committee? Well, I’m not someone used to reading classified CIA documents and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. But reading Stephen Hayes’ summary of the document, I have to say this strikes me as a Big Deal. So far, the liberal media outlets seem to have ignored this, and it didn’t help that the Weekly Standard’s website was down for a while. Anti-war reporter Walter Pincus, in the Washington Post, has this mention of the memo:

Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith’s Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

But reading Hayes’ summary, you find plenty of CIA analysis of various bits of information, and assessments of varying reliability. Maybe the analysis isn’t thorough or skeptical enough for Pincus but it sure exists – and seems to baldly contradict Pincus’ piece. I don’t trust Pincus anyway. He’s about as reliable as David Sanger at the NYT: two anti-war partisans who have regularly spun their journalism to criticize the administration’s conduct of the war. His Sunday story is based on notes from Anthony Cordesman – and flagged as the number one story on AOL. Why isn’t the CIA’s own analysis as valid? I guess it wouldn’t buttress Pincus’ agenda. So let’s get other skeptics to show us why the data presented is faulty. Marshall? Pollack? Klein? Hersh? Until then …