Month: March 2006

Isaac Hayes departs South Park because they dared to take on Scientology. I’m glad to see that Trey and Matt haven’t bought the Isaac Hayes line about "bigotry." Chef didn’t quit after "Red Hot Catholic Love," after all, did he?

Rummy’s Pentagon is enforcing tighter standards for uniforms and physical appearance among military personnel. The troops in Iraq appear unimpressed. Money quote:

"Just returned from OEF yesterday and I’m getting caught-up on these forums. A month ago, as I was urinating at Bagram, a MSgt (1st Sgt) said that I needed to have my hat off while I was pissing! Shock and awed, I asked ‘Why?’
I was advised that having one’s headgear on my head while pissing was not setting a good example of abiding by the AFI (36-2903).
In plain English, I retorted ‘This is my third time here, and when the focus has shifted from killing Al Q-aida to pissing with hats-on, it’s time for me to leave.’"

Others are less diplomatic:

"Hey guys, I s*** you not … I got that tonight and sat back and was like. … WTF? There are assholes trying to provoke a civil war, the media is escalating things, the military is down playing things, s*** is wearing out, money for this bottomless hole is in question, Iran next door is flicking their nose at us and stability is non-existant…..and this is what the hell they are worried about at the high command??????"

No one said Rumsfeld was reality-based now, did they?

A lively debate between Frank Fukuyama and Bernard Henri-Levy. BHL doesn’t come out too well, I fear. Because Europeans grow up with American culture in a way that Americans do not grow up with Europe’s, it’s very easy to reach quick decisions about what America is and what it means. The European already has a stack of assumptions, ideas and arguments about this country; and visiting here requires a steady abandonment of them until something like the complex reality of this marvelous place emerges. Not everyone is able to lose those assumptions, and from what I’ve read of BHL’s book, it’s largely pretentious dreck. I’ve lived here for over two decades now. My first impression, literally, was that I was in a movie. I’d heard those accents my entire life, but they had always been on a screen. Now, they were all around me, like a strange dream. My first summer, a friend and I traversed by car the entire continent and back: Miami to San Diego to Seattle to Boston. I’ve been to almost every state in the succeeding two decades. But I still feel I have only a tentative handle on this country. In fact, I wondered after that first summer whether this entity that spans a continent and includes New Orleans and Seattle, Little Rock and Manhattan, Miami and Minneapolis, can legitimately be called a single country at all. My only consolation is that many Americans seem to feel the same way. Hence one single but increasingly vital word: federalism.

(Photo: AS, July 3, 2005, Provincetown, Mass.)

For those of you who don’t find the Huffington Post sufficiently left-wing, provocative, irritating or enlightened, the Guardian has now started its own version. Enjoy. (Hat tip: Pickled.)

Sometimes, sour grapes are an acquired taste. This diatribe against the Oscars by "Brokeback Mountain" author, Annie Proulx, is quite something. Bitchiest comment:

"[R]umour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver."

The rest is better, but bitter.

According to this website, the woman who edited the now-removed article on Islamist intimidation has now herself been fired. This website seems to have put pressure on the Telegraph. Update: the reasons for Sands’ removal are murky. I haven’t seen anyone directly link it to the Palmer article. But she was suddenly dispatched after a mere eight months on the job.

"May God damn you. You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won’t interfere," – Moqtada Sadr, on Don Rumsfeld. The Shiite thug is finally learning what the rest of us have been forced to learn: Rumsfeld will say anything. And he has no clue what he’s doing.

Here’s an arresting quote:

"One of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey. Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion – and it is their aim to achieve this. That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future – and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate. Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."

The quote is by Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, in London. The quote was originally in a fascinating piece by Alasdair Palmer for the Daily Telegraph in Britain. The piece is now unavailable, and even its URL was altered. The webpage first explained that: "This story has been removed for legal reasons." Now, there’s a more generic message. But it has gone. Even the Google cache has been erased. Why? I must say it sounds suspiciously like self-censorship or, worse, government censorship.

It’s worth unpacking another element of the debate; and that is what "WMDs" actually meant before the war. I took the shorthand to mean chemical, biological or nuclear material that could be used either as weapons or given to terrorists to use. I think that’s pretty much in line with what most people assumed. But we may have been talking past each other. Only recently have I absorbed how so many on the anti-war left and right heard primarily "nuclear" when the term WMD came up before the war. And so we ended up debating different things. The nuclear case was always very weak, but then we had the experience of 1990 in our heads, when we seriously under-estimated Saddam’s WMD capacity. Markos Moulitsas, to take a pretty representative sample of the left, was right to question the nuclear part of the equation, but he took the existence of other WMDs for granted before the war:

"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Join the line. About a dozen nations have such weapons these days. Only the US has deigned to use them, and that was when it was the sole nuclear power. The threat of annihilation through retaliation has checked any subsequent use of such weapons.
Iraq will give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists? Would the secular Hussein give such weapons to religious fundamentalists? Doubtful. Terrorists are more likely to receive such weapons from Pakistan’s intelligence agency ‚Äî which has deep ties to the Taliban and Al Queda [sic]."

As I said, one of the more vocal arguments against the war was that an invasion was the only scenario in which Saddam would indeed use WMDs. Their existence was a premise of the anti-war case, and their non-existence dramatically reduced the risk of war. And so, while we’re playing the hindsight game, the U.S. casualties in this war, however awful, are still way below what most people expected. Here’s Kos again, from September 2002:

"Current plans seem to range from 50,000 to 250,000 invading troops. Of those, the vast majority are support troops, so say, 10,000 to 50,000 actually participate in a Baghdad assault. At 10 percent casualty rates, that could mean up to 5,000 US dead. And that’s assuming no use of WMD."

I remember fearing up to 10,000 casualties in taking Baghdad alone, so I’m not beating up on Kos. The point is: almost all of us were wrong, (while only a few made truly dumb predictions like 9/11 "will be off the evening news by Thanksgiving"). That’s the nature of history. And that, in retrospect, is why conservatives like me should have been more risk-averse, empirical and skeptical in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Abortion politics just got a lot more interesting. My take here.