Year: 2003

Check out this cartoon in Le Monde. Nice timing, huh?

Here’s a translation of Howard Dean’s favorite song. It’s in Haitian creole (my bad). The full lyrics ( Marie Scala Louis, Andrew Madhere & Shamaha Richemond) are:

This is what the world was waiting for
Wyclef who came from the Fugees
Jeremie, Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Flatbush…

Jaspora doesn’t respect Jaspora (repeat 4 x)

Ever since I was little, I left Haiti
There’s some that went to Brooklyn there’s some that
went to Miami
Why do Jamaicans always say they are Jamaicans,
But Haitians are afraid to say they are Haitians?
Why? Are you scared to say your name is Samuel?
Why? Are you scared to say you’re with Israel?
Why? Every night you are sleeping with Jezebel!
You’re scared to say Haitian girls are beautiful!
Beautiful girls are beautiful…

I respect your name just like I respect the angel
Gabriel
Here, Diaspora men want to take you to hotels,
Start talking English, turning to playboy channel
They do not respect Israel.

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight we’re going to disarm
you

Diaspora ha ha o, put your hands up!
I am going to take them and throw them in prison
I will make them know who is Toussaint
I will make them know who is Dessalines
After, we will let them go and send them back to
Brooklyn
So he could go to his mother who is cooking in the
kitchen
His mom looked at him and said “Man, you’ve changed”
She said I changed because I am Haitian
They taught me a lesson, they put me in prison.

I see Diaspora women and Diaspora men
There are people who are not going to make it because
they will sleep with the fishes
They lost their knowledge just like a priest without
religion

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight were going to disarm you

Port-au-Prince do not respect Diaspora again
Men Flatbush do not respect Diaspora
Men Canada do not respect Diaspora
Men Miami do not respect Diaspora

Pa Kayos do not respect diaspora
Papa Djoume do not respect Diaspora
Refugees do not respect Diaspora
Men Florida do not respect Diaspora
Wrong things done are going to finish worse
If you disrespect native-born
Done wrong things are going to finish worse
Disrespect Haitians you will get hit…

Jaspora has to respect Jaspora
Jaspora has to respect Jaspora

Reads like a screed against assimilating Haitian immigrants to me; and theatens violence against those who assimilate a little too thoroughly. This is Howard Dean’s favorite song?

On this anniversary, the tritest thing to feel is mere grief. Not that grief isn’t justified. But grief is a natural response to unforeseen tragedy, to random events, to things beyond human control. And what happened two years ago today wasn’t merely tragedy. It was a conscious atrocity, an act of war. The free West was attacked by a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip. And the very forces that tried to destroy us then are still trying to destroy us – as that grotesque videotape yesterday only underlined. Any attempt to hide that fact, minimize it, gloss over it, or complicate it into vagueness is an insult to memory. In an attempt to recall the rage of that day, I went back to this blog’s second entry – at 9.46 pm on September 11, 2001 – to revisit the emotions that this massacre unleashed:

I have been unable to think of anything substantive to write today. It is almost as if the usual conventions of journalism and analysis should somehow remain mute in the face of such an event. How can one analyze what one hasn’t even begun to absorb? Numbness is part of the intent of these demons, I suppose. So here are some tentative reflections. It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away. We are reminded that history obviously hasn’t ended; that freedom is never secure; that previous generations aren’t the only ones to be called to defend the rare way of life that this country and a handful of others have achieved for a small fraction of world history. The boom is done with. Peace is over. The new war against the frenzied forces of what Nietzsche called ressentiment is just beginning. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society. This means we must be vigilant not to let our civil liberties collapse under the understandable desire for action. To surrender to that temptation is part of what these killers want. And the other small sliver of consolation is that the constant American temptation to withdraw from the world, entertained these past few years by many, will perhaps now be stifled. We cannot withdraw; we cannot ignore. We live in a world where technology and hatred accelerate in ever-faster cycles, and in which isolation is not an option. Evil is still here. It begets evil. When you look at the delighted faces of Palestinians cheering in the streets, we have to realize that there are cultures on this planet of such depravity that understanding them is never fully possible. And empathy for them at such a moment is obscene. But we can observe and remember. There is always a tension between civilization and barbarism, and the barbarians are now here. The task in front of us to somehow stay civilized while not shrinking from the face of extinguishing – by sheer force if necessary – the forces that would eclipse us.

War began that day. We didn’t choose it. But we are still waging it.

WAGE WAR: When you remember this thoroughly, you might still want to argue and debate about the accuracy of WMD intelligence in Iraq or the merits of the post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan or the nuances of U.N. and U.S. control in post-Saddam Iraq. Those kinds of fights are what democracies relish and do well. And it’s equally true that anger is not an emotion that lasts. Human beings simply cannot live with that kind of fear or that kind of fury for very long. But we can still nurture what might be called the cold rage of reason: the calculated and calm recollection of what was done and what we can still do to prevent it again. And the key resolve I felt that day was not to let this act of war become in our minds an isolated occurrence, separate and apart from all the regimes that foster Islamo-fascism and seek to harm the West. In fighting back, we had to stop the defensiveness and ad hoc approach of the late twentieth century (both in the Clinton and early Bush administrations) and go on the offensive, tackle this nightmare at its roots, get our hands dirty, risk failure and aim for real success. That’s the difference between police work and war. That’s why the astonishingly humane wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just the beginning of a long attempt to bring the Middle East out of the dark ages. Some are now arguing that there is a dimmer light at the end of this tunnel. They’re wrong. We have accomplished a huge amount, both in weakening al Qaeda, destroying Saddam and bringing flickers of democracy and pluralism into a region long victimized by tyranny and theocracy. These are real achievements. They are the platform for the next phase: in building a free society in Iraq, toppling yet more tyranny in Iran, removing the Saudi dictatorship, and bringing some kind of settlement to Israel. We cannot disengage now. And standing still is to move backwards. Wars are dynamic; and we are in a war. Still. Two years later. With work to be done.

“Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war – a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway).” – Jonathan Schell, saying out loud what many on the Left believe, and have long believed. Good that some of them are finally being more honest about their loathing of the West.

MORE REVISIONISM: Here’s Harold Meyerson, another left-liberal who seems to have become unhinged by the Bush administration:

So much for American unilateralism. As our strategic doctrine of choice, unilateralism had a one-year run, from one Labor Day to the next. A year ago the administration announced we had both the right and the might to run the world free from the constraints of entangling alliances or multinational accords.

A year ago, in fact, the president went to the U.N. to bring that world body into a multilateral attempt to prevent terrorism. Does Meyerson remember nothing?

HOW THE FRENCH SEE 9/11: Another sick excuse for bashing the United States and free trade.

Thanks for your emails on the depressingly stale Fred Kaplan column in Slate. More to add. The notion that the Bushies were too arrogant – even though they went to the U.N. over Iraq and dealt multilaterally and with considerable patience in Afghanistan – comes down to something different. Some emailers said the Bush administration’s mistake was to have made up its mind on Iraq before going to the U.N. Quelle horreur! Think about what this argument entails. What it argues is that when war has been declared on a country, when it cdredibly believes it is at risk from the nexus of WMDs and terrorism, it can only act if its friends (and envious rivals) agree. If that’s Kaplan’s view, he should say so more formally: that the U.S. can only conduct foreign policy if the French are part of the actual deliberation process. You think Paris would do the same for Washington? Second, a large part of the pro-American sentiment in the immediate wake of 9/11 was emotional, shallow and phony. Check out the irrepressible Fouad Ajami in Foreign Policy. He’s particularly sharp about the most famous of all such sentiments: Le Monde’s headline “Nous Sommes Tous Americains”:

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde’s publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani’s column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its “cynicism”; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to “our American friends” and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani’s United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can’t, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one’s own schools; one can’t strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can’t denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can’t do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani’s sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.

Just a little reality check. The French today do little intellectually but constantly circle the drain of complete ressentiment. They have no other guiding political philosophy but envy and regret. The notion that they would ever engage in a U.S.-led campaign against global terror (when they are close to the tyrants that spawn such terror and dedicated to the immiseration of Israel) is a presposterous fantasy. Far from being criticized for not being sympathetic to such opportunists and frauds, the Bush administration should be congratulated for trying to deal with them honestly at all.

“Dean said he wouldn’t withdraw any of the American troops now in Iraq. But, he said it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq, and Bush should have focused his energies on building democracy in the Middle East instead.” And what does Dean think we’re trying to do in Iraq? Does he think democracy could have been built with Saddam in power? Jeez.

If there’s one truly pathetic anti-war line being peddled right now, it is that the Bush administration tragically “blew” the world-wide sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11. How did they DO this? By allegedly refusing allied support in Afghanistan and Iraq, sidelining the U.N., acting all “unilateral,” and … well, you’ve probably listened to enough NPR to finish the sentence. Fred Kaplan in Slate lays it on with a trowel this week. After European sympathy two years ago, he claims,

the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures – and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

Excuse me, but who exactly was excluded from helping us in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Does Kaplan believe that Chirac and Schroder were just desperate to help America win the war on terror in Iraq and that if we’d been so much nicer they would have come around? Puh-lease. They cared more about their own petty prestige than about supporting the U.S. after the atrocities of two years ago. But then it’s always America’s fault, isn’t it? Even when America has had war brought to its own cities and has the temerity to respond in kind. He goes on:

An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era-much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.

Blah blah blah. Does Kaplan mean that the administration didn’t bend over backwards to win the support of, say, Pakistan? That it rejected peace-keepers and troops from many nations to help police Afghanistan? That it spurned British, Australian, Polish, Spanish, Italian support – militarily and diplomatically – in order to go it alone?

COME OFF IT: To put it bluntly, Kaplan’s piece amounts to a series of wild stretches and utter fabrications. The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight. And militarily speaking, there wasn’t much the Big Europeans could have done anyway. Kaplan claims the Prague NATO summit wasn’t deferent enough to the allies; and the U.S. should not have been so determined to go to war against Iraq. But he surely knows that deference to Germany and France would have meant one thing: no war. He surely knows that it was the French who scuttled any chance for a compromise on Iraq in the last days at the U.N. He knows that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to bring the U.N. around. So how can he say the following:

Over the past couple of weeks, as the fighting persists in Baghdad, as the Taliban attempts a comeback in Afghanistan, as Saddam and Osama Bin Laden remain on the prowl-in short, as the light glows dimmer, the tunnel stretches longer, the budget piles higher, and the desert-swamp gets deeper-President Bush seems to have realized he took a wrong turn back at the 9/11 junction. He has been persuaded to go back to the much-loathed United Nations, for assistance and legitimacy… He has extended his hand a bit late in the game.

Almost a year ago this week, the president extended his hand to the U.N. Or doesn’t that count? It makes you wish that the Bush of Kaplan’s fevered imagination had simply ignored the U.N., gone into Iraq a few months after Afghanistan, given Saddam much less chance to prepare, and our rivals in Europe less of a chance to keep the terror-masters informed. At least then Bush would have deserved some of this now fashionable obloquy. But no good strategy goes un-attacked, does it? A useful lesson, this, about some foreign policy liberals. Ignore them: they’ll attack you. Do what they want: they’ll attack you anyway. If it means a grotesque distortion of history, so be it.

After over 32 separate entries and even more links in a single day over fourteen hours, Glenn Reynolds announces at 9.20 pm: “Sorry for the light blogging.” I think that’s a cry for help.
UPDATE: Between writing and posting this item, Glenn has added four more posts. Intervention, anyone?

BLAMING THE LAITY: Well, they tried blaming the homos. Now Cardinal Dulles goes after even alcoholics and gossips:

The immoral behavior of Catholics, both lay and clergy, is a cause of scandal and defections. Under this heading I would include not only sexual abuse of minors, which has been so extensively publicized in recent years, but sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, alcoholism, the use and marketing of drugs, domestic violence, defamation, and financial scandals such as falsification of records and embezzlement. The morality of Catholics all too often sinks below the standards commonly observed by Protestants and unbelievers.

Anything to distract from the real scandal, I guess. Dulles’ proposals for reform of the Church amount entirely to greater obedience to Rome, subservience to ecclesiastical authority, maintenance of the existing structures, and penance from the laity. I.e. more power for him. Funny how that happens, doesn’t it?

The left-wing gay groups and Stonewall Democrats are doing what they can to highlight the Terminator’s use of the word “fag” in the past to paint him as a bigot. He’s obviously nothing of the kind. The man was comfortable with gay men long before the culture was; he backs civil unions; he’s loathed by the anti-gay religious right. Matt Welch nails it pretty convincingly here.

REPUBLICANS FOR DEAN: Extreme rhetoric, maybe, but legit. One Dennis Sanders runs the site. He’s so far out there he’s barely a Republican, but, hey, I’m for a big tent, aren’t I? Still, what’s a Republican doing writing for TomPaine.com?

CONASON ON SULLIVAN: He errs, alas. Are you as tired as I am of these hysterical partisan screeds? Given the best-seller lists, I guess I’m the exception rather than the rule.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “To me the real lesson of September 11 is something that came out almost immediately – that the reason our airport security failed was because it was oriented toward detecting dangerous objects rather than dangerous people. Muhammad Atta and company were able to pierce our defenses because they had no “weapons”. But they didn’t need any – THEY were the weapons. Now apply that lesson to the broader world. Possession of dangerous objects (WMD’s) by Iraq was not what made Iraq dangerous – a lot of countries have WMD’s. What made Iraq dangerous was the dangerous person – Saddam Hussein – who ruled it. Saddam had definitely possessed WMD’s in the past, had definitely used them in the past, had attacked his neighbors without provocation in the past, was implacably hostile to the U.S., and friendly to terrorists and terrorism in general. Some evidence (inconclusive) indicated he might have a relationship with al-Qaeda. But most of these Middle Eastern terrorist groups have common or compatible goals, and formal and informal channels of communication. Saddam didn’t need to be tied directly and irrefutably to al-Qaeda to make him dangerous to the U.S.”