Month: March 2004

I’m mystified by NRO’s Corner discussion of my alleged objection to federalism – or my fair-weather federalism, as it were. But both paleocon, Kathryn Lopez, and Jonah Goldberg, conflate two entirely separate issues. I am horrified that the commissioners of Rhea County Tennessee don’t just want to ban gay marriage – as is their right – but actually want to ban the existence of gay people from their county. Now it strikes me that even the writers at National Review would draw the line at the physical expulsion of a group of people for simply being who they are. There are basic constitutional limits to federalism, after all. This would not be news if Rhea County had just passed a law banning marriage rights for gays. It’s news because Rhea County has endorsed the elimination of gay citizens. If Jonah Goldberg is unworried about such a move against a minority, I suggest he re-read some history. His own minority faced very similar threats in the past. I also notice that neither Jonah nor Lopez can bring themselves actually to criticize the bigots in Rhea County. But ask yourself: if a county voted that Jews should no longer be allowed to live within its boundaries, and a leading commissioner said, “”We need to keep them out of here,” do you think Jonah Goldberg would merely say that such commissioners were merely “getting a bit carried away”? The inability to see what is going on here is gob-smackingly obtuse.

FEDERALISM AND ME: As to the federalism argument: obviously I believe that the right to marry is a basic constitutional right that no government can or should deny under the Constitution as it stands. Interestingly, so does National Review. Otherwise, they would not be so keen to amend the constitution to prevent such equal protection from ever taking place. But that is the prerogative of the Supreme Court of the United States at some point in the distant future. Such a decision is not inevitable; it isn’t even likely in the foreseeable future. If Bush is re-elected, we’re likely to get a far-rightist or two on the Court, someone who will ensure that gays are never protected by the Constitution. Until such time, I’m happy to let federalism work. It may be that the experiment of civil marriage rights for gays will prove a terrible failure, that within a few years, as Stanley Kurtz has predicted, heterosexual marriage will fall apart, straights will stop having children, and civilization will disintegrate. Or not. There’s nothing to stop the social right from pushing for a constitutional amendment under such circumstances – or even in response to a future Supreme Court decision. So why now? Why before civil marriage for gays is legal anywhere in the U.S.? The answer is that the right doesn’t want gay marriage in any state under any circumstances for any period of time. They are the true anti-federalists. They don’t even support something like the Hatch amendment that would make the issue procedural rather than substantive and leave the issue of gay marriage on the table for states to decide. Why? Because they know they’re losing. They know that within a generation, majorities will emerge to support equal protection for gay couples. They have to prevent the next generation from ever having a say; and they have to prevent gay people from ever believing that they are truly equal, truly worthy of dignity and truly citizens of the United States. That’s why I’m a federalist; and they emphatically are not.

One group announces it will cease operations in Spain to reward Spanish voters for striking a blow against “the axis of Crusader evil.” There’s a catch, of course. Here’s part of the statement: “Because of this [electoral] decision, the leadership has decided to stop all operations within the Spanish territories… until we know the intentions of the new government that has promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. And we repeat this to all the brigades present in European lands: stop all operations.” They’ve learned something, haven’t they? And if Zapatero doesn’t withdraw from Iraq, Spain will be targeted again.

The far right strikes again in Tennessee:

Rhea County commissioners unanimously voted to ask state lawmakers to introduce legislation amending Tennessee’s criminal code so the county can charge-homosexuals-with crimes against nature. “We need to keep them out of here,” said Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the motion. County Attorney Gary Fritts also was asked by Fugate to find the best way to enact a local law banning homosexuals from living in Rhea County.

Don’t hold your breath for any establishment fundamentalists to rebuke them. So much attention has been paid to the handful of places that have advanced gay civil rights in the last few months that the tidal wave of anti-gay legislation being proposed and passed across the nation – pioneered by Republicans – barely merits notice. One state – just one – has moved toward establishing equality in marriage for gays. Thirty-eight have banned it outright. A few have re-written their constitutions to ensure inequality for gay citizens. Virginia, to take one example, is in the midst of a full-scale anti-gay legislative pogrom – banning gay marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships and attempting to revivify the sodomy laws. The Bush administration, for its part, has now come out of its own closet. It’s in the forefront of attacks on gays, with Karl Rove leading the brigades, urging activists to keep up the pressure on writing anti-gay discrimination into the constitution itself. During the internal debate on the constitutional amendment, gay Republicans were shut out completely. The administration is also busily reneging on its promise not to roll back federal protections for gay government employees. No one can spin this attack on gay employees as a response to “judicial activism.” It’s pure animus, directed and supported by the fundamentalist right. I have to say that I have been culpably naive about this administration on this issue. They led me to believe they weren’t hostile to gay people, that they would not use anti-gay sentiment to gain votes, that they would not roll back very basic protections for gay federal employees. I was lied to. We were all lied to. But now we know.

“God forbid that such crimes should be visited on our shores, but we must be prepared for what the security services deem a probability rather than a possibility. We are renowned as a phlegmatic people, but we are not forgiving to those who let the side down, whether at home or abroad. If such an attack were to take place here, the question would inevitably be whether our support for America’s war against Iraq had made it more likely. The prime minister in particular will now ruminate on this. If ever there was a case of an individual driving the nation into a war then it was him. People will inevitably link his personal crusade to any failure to forestall terrorist outrages. Thus the stakes for him have increased alarmingly.” – Peter Kilfoyle, former Blair minister, all but hoping for Blair’s downfall, in the Guardian.

THE KURDS IN SYRIA: Something is obviously afoot. Why is this not front-page news? Check out these photographs on FreeArabForum as well (keep scrolling down).

A DITTY FOR ZAPATERO:

MINSTREL: [singing]
Brave Zapatero ran away,
Bravely ran away, away.
When danger reared its ugly head,
he bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Zapatero turned about
And gallantly, he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Zapatero.

With apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

MoveOn’s ad attacking Donald Rumsfeld is not entirely fair. Rumsfeld never said that the threat from Iraq was imminent, or immediate, but that he could not know for sure. Nevertheless, this ad strikes me as a strong one, because it taps into general public skepticism about the honesty of their governments. That skepticism is a healthy instinct in a democracy, and it has, alas, been given new force by the WMD intelligence errors and the inability of the administration to face up to them squarely. Exactly that kind of skepticism played some role in the Spanish vote, and it accounts for some of the British hostility to Blair. If I were Kerry, I’d respond to the devastating Bush ads exposing his ability to say everything at once with a few focused ads on Bush’s history of inaccuracies. I’d start with replaying large sections of the Meet the Press interview.

PORTRAITS OF GRIEF: Iberiannotes blog has a few sketches of some of the victims of the Jihadist massacre in Madrid. We too easily forget the victims. Here are a few.

SOAP FROM STARBUCKS: I think this is not a spoof. But I may be wrong.

STU TAYLOR ON FFC: An interesting piece by Stuart Taylor on marriage and the Full Faith and Credit Clause. I’m less worried than he is about the U.S. Supreme Court intervening any time soon. But his piece is revealing because it shows that even if you do believe that the judiciary is going to impose civil marriage rights for gays, the Musgrave amendment is still not the way to go. In Taylor’s words:

By no stretch of the imagination, however, is the proposed amendment behind which Bush has placed his prestige an appropriate way to protect representative government. Quite the contrary. The first clause of the so-called Musgrave amendment (sponsored by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo.) would impose a uniform federal definition of marriage upon the whole country: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” This amounts to an anti-democratic, anti-federalist effort to ban all state legislatures, for all time, from experimenting with gay marriage — even if and when most voters in most states come to support gays’ right to wed. And public opinion appears to be headed in that direction: Although polls still show voters opposing gay marriage by a ratio of about 2-to-1, the numbers appear to be softening over time. Especially significant is that young voters are far more open to gay marriage than old ones.
In this sense, the president’s position on gay marriage has something in common with that of the Massachusetts court: Neither is willing to defer to democratic governance. While the court has imposed its definition of marriage on today’s voters, Bush seeks to impose his own definition on their children and grandchildren.

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” – Democratic nominee, John Kerry. In some ways, that small sentence completely sums him up.

Well, we have a very quick new entry for the Prodi award, and it’s Howard Dean. Blaming the murder of 200 innocents on the Bush administration’s liberation of Iraq is a sign of serious moral derangement. “The president was the one who dragged our troops to Iraq, which apparently has been a factor in the death of 200 Spaniards over the weekend.” Dragged? As commander-in-chief, he ordered, and he did so with the overwhelming backing of the Congress and dozens of allies. But then you have the real Dean touch: he has the phenomenal capacity to assert something obscene and then refuse to take responsibility for it. Remember the “interesting theory” that the president knew about 9/11 in advance? Here we go again: “Let me be clear, there is no justification for terrorism. Today I was simply repeating what those who have claimed responsibility for the bombings in Spain said was the reason they carried out that despicable act.” So he’s just parroting Jihadist spin, not endorsing it. Looking back, I was simply wrong to entertain the idea that a Dean nomination would be refreshing for the country. If he were the nominee today, he would have just lost the election. And there would be no more debate.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MARRIAGE: Please, please read this piece in the New York Times. It reiterates something I have been banging on about for months. The social right just ignores it. But the important truth is: the Full Faith and Credit Clause does not apply to marriage. The looming civil marriages in Massachusetts will be restricted to Massachusetts because a) it’s accepted legal doctrine that all other states can refuse to recognize such marriages if they violate the public policy of those states; b) DOMA underlines this and puts several exclamation points after it; c) Massachusetts law itself voids any civil marriages contracted in that state for the purpose of evading marriage laws in another state; and d) 38 states have passed their own mini-DOMAs to declare their own public policy on such a matter with no ambiguity at all. The notion that this limited exercise in federalism poses such a terrible threat to the whole country that it has to be pre-empted by a federal constitutional amendment is simply hysterical nonsense. The Cheney position remains the smartest one: let the states decide. Let them come up with a variety of means to recognize gay couples; let’s see which ones make most sense; leave Massachusetts alone to resolve its own public policy without clumsy federal intervention. I thought that was what conservatism was supposed to be about.

You’d be a fool to predict anything, but I do think the odds of the next major Jihadist terrorist action happening in Europe just went up a notch. Al Qaeda and its multiple off-shoots have learned a couple of things recently. The first is that the U.S. will not cower before a terror attack. Bin Laden misjudged that one on 9/11, foolishly believing that he could move public policy in his direction by shell-shocking the American public. He was hoping for classic isolationism in response to the casualties of that awful day. Wrong. In fact, the opposite happened – a huge miscalculation on al Qaeda’s part, which led to the destruction of their client state, Afghanistan, and the removal of a strategic anti-American ally, Saddam. The American counter-attack also took Libya out of the WMD equation. But now the Jihadists know something else: that the 9/11 gambit can work in Europe. Starting with Spain, and wrecking the anti-terror alliance of New Europe, was a master-stroke. But it has an added effect of demoralizing the others – especially Italy. That’s why Romano Prodi’s astonishing disavowal of any force in response to terrorism was so devastating. Then Britain, where the terrorists may not be able to get rid of a Labour government, but may well try to inflict such a blow against Blair (in next year’s elections) that he is ousted in favor of a more amenable center-left alternative. Humiliating Blair will prevent a future prime minister from ever fully and unequivocally committing to the American-led war on terror again. France and Germany can be left till last – they are already deeply vulnerable to Islamist terror networks and in France’s case, there’s also a vast, unassimilated Muslim population ripe for exploitation. The alligator will eat them last. Let’s hope they enjoy the ride in the months left to them.

LAW ENFORCEMENT: John Kerry’s strategy against terror was tried before, by the Clinton administration. They even had Osama in their sights. So why was nothing done? Lisa Myers’ piece strikes me as an important one for the choice in front of us in this election.

THE PRODI AWARD: Why not set up a new award, after the depressing response to the Madrid massacre, devoted to those whose response to terror is immediately to run away, concede critical issues, and generally appease? Romano Prodi’s stunning comment that “It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists,” is such an obvious front-runner I’m not going to name the award for it. But in a close second place saunters our old friend Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. Here’s a classic from his increasingly priceless ‘Letter from the Editor,’ (for April) noticed by Belgravia Despatch: “It’s about time Americans stopped worrying about the Baathists, Shiites, and Islamists playing footsie with free elections in Iraq, and paid attention to more pressing electoral problems we have here at home.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “Even in a mass attack, there is individuality. Quite a few of the dead had never made it out of their machines. Those were the worst, because they were both exploded and incinerated. One man had tried to escape to Iraq in a Kawasaki front-end loader. His remaining half body lay hanging upside down and out of his exposed seat, the left side and bottom blown away to tatters, with the charred leg fully fifteen feet away. Nine men in a slat-sided supply truck were killed and flash-burned so swiftly that they remained, naked, skinned, and black wrecks, in the vulnerable positions of the moment of first impact. One body lay face down with his rear high in the air, as if he had been trying to burrow through the truckbed. His legs ended in fluttery charcoaled remnants at midthigh. He had a young, pretty face, slightly cherubic, with a pointed little chin; you could still see that even though it was mummified. Another man had been butterflied by the bomb; the cavity of his body was cut wide open and his intestines and such were still coiled in their proper places, but cooked to ebony.” – Mike Kelly, writing in the New Republic during the first Gulf War. The first anniversary of Mike’s death is just coming up and it’s worth remembering why he was such a damn good writer. I just wish I could read his columns on John Kerry this election season. Can you imagine what fun he’d have? Here’s a touching tribute in the upcoming Atlantic Monthly. Renewed condolence to Max and the boys, and his whole family.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.” – Clive James, after the Bali bombing. (I don’t recall Indonesia being a major ally in the Iraq war, but I may be wrong). His words were wonderfully astute then and they bear re-reading after Madrid.

Their craven response to the Madrid massacre deserved a riposte. So I fisked ’em.

A great editorial in the Jerusalem Post implores Europeans not to pretend they are not at war:

For a while, many here [in Israel] thought the terrorists could be either manipulated by Western negotiators or persuaded by Arab leaders to lay down their arms, provided their grievances were heard and some of their demands heeded.
Israel has since learned that terrorism cannot be beaten by satisfying “grievances.” America, which until 9/11 was also plagued by the denial syndrome, has since launched a global war on fundamentalist terrorism and Middle East autocracy. Europe, however, has not joined America’s ideological cause, and that goes even for Britain, which is Washington’s closest EU ally.
Now, some Spaniards can be expected to blame themselves for their own victimization. If Spain had not joined the war on Iraq, they will say, it would not have been attacked. We cannot but implore Spain to avoid that kind of thinking; we’ve been through all that and can now confidently say that Spain was targeted not for anything it did or failed to do, but for what it is, namely a country that embraces and offers all the freedoms that Muslim fundamentalism detests.

Amen. But it will perhaps take more atrocities for Europeans to acknowledge something that they have proudly built is under threat. History has not ended. Islamism does not seek to integrate itself into Europe. It seeks the abolition of Europe as a democratic, peaceful, pluralist place. And America must understand that this war cannot be lost in Europe either. We need a real and vigorous effort to reunite Europe and the U.S. against this danger. Alas, we just lost one leader, Jose Maria Aznar, who understood that need, and Blair may be next.

AL QAEDA’S GAME PLAN: And here’s a chilling piece of evidence of how pre-meditated this entire atrocity was. Back in December, the plans were in place:

CNN also has obtained a document posted on an Internet message board analysts believe is used by al Qaeda and its sympathizers that spells out the terrorist group’s plan to separate Spain from the U.S.-led coalition on Iraq.
The strategy spelled out in the document, posted last December on the Internet, calls for using terrorist attacks to drive Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s Partido Popular from power and replace it with the Socialists.
That was expected to drive a wedge between Washington and Madrid and result in the withdrawal of Spanish military forces from Iraq.
“We think the Spanish government will not stand more than two blows, or three at the most, before it will be forced to withdraw because of the public pressure on it,” the al Qaeda document says.
“If its forces remain after these blows, the victory of the Socialist Party will be almost guaranteed – and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be on its campaign manifesto.”

Now why would al Qaeda want the disintegration of the transition in Iraq? Because they understand how that transition is the most formidable blow to their hopes of transforming the entire Middle East. When clever anti-war types insist there is not and never has been any connection between the fight for democracy in Iraq and the war against terror, they are thinking in terms of legalities and technicalities – not strategy. The only way to meaningfully defang Islamist terror is to transform the region. If we don’t, we will simply be putting out small fires for ever, instead of dealing with root causes. The root cause is the lack of democracy in the region, which gives these religious fanatics the oxygen they need. Al Qaeda understand the stakes. So must we. Iraq is the battlefield. We cannot, must not, falter. In fact, we must ramp up the pressure. Alone, if needs be.

NOT JUST IRAQ: Some readers have written me to criticize my argument that al Qaeda is striking back at our allies in Iraq because they see how dangerous to them the transition to democracy in Iraq could be. Some argue that the war against Saddam has nothing to do with the war on terror and that al Qaeda is using it as a new way to win recruits and divide the West. But this misunderstands al Qaeda’s basic philosophy. What they object to is any Western or infidel influence in traditionally Muslim lands. They want those lands not just Judenrein but purged of any non-Muslims and even those Muslims who dissent from Wahhabist orthodoxy. They do not and have never needed the war in Iraq to justify their terror in pursuit of these aims. They killed long before the Iraq war. Their objection is to our intervention at all. And part of that agenda is our intervention in Afghanistan. After all, that was their safe harbor. Those who blame the war in Iraq for this counter-attack must also logically blame the war in Afghanistan. Should we not have waged that, since it would only embolden the enemy? In other words, all of Europe was at risk long before the Iraq war. And the Germans and Brits and Italians and many others now in Afghanistan are reason enough for more attacks in Europe. Al Qaeda not only resents any impurity in their homelands, they also long for more Lebensraum. They long to regain Andalusia, something bin Laden himself referred to not long after 9/11. What the Europeans refuse to understand is that there is no proximate cause for this violence. It is structural; it is aimed at the very existence of other faiths; it wishes to purge the entire Muslim world of infidels (which means the annihilation of the Jews), and eventually to reconquer Europe. You can no more negotiate with these people than you could negotiate with Hitler. And by negotiation, I don’t just mean direct talks. I mean attempts to placate by occasional withdrawal of troops from, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, or withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia or abandonment of Israel. All such tactical shifts are regarded purely as weakness. They are invitations for more massacres. How many more will die in London and Rome and Berlin and Paris before the old continent fights to defend itself?