Month: August 2006

It’s revealing of so much:

Tom Ricks, author of "Fiasco": I asked one officer why are you talking to me about these things, and he looked down at his hands, and he said because I have the blood of American troops on my hands. And I said what do you mean? And he said because when I said to Rumsfeld we need that division, and Rumsfeld said no, I gave up. I compromised. And he said U.S. troops died because of that. And he said that’s why I’m talking to you.

Hugh Hewitt: And you can’t name him, though?

TR: No.

HH: Well, you’ll pardon me, Tom, Mr. Ricks.

TR: And he was practically crying as he spoke to me about this.

HH: Yeah, I’m just not going to buy that.

So Hewitt accuses Ricks of lying. Because if the truth about Rumsfeld’s criminal incompetence has to compete with Hewitt’s "no-mistakes-were-made" Caeasarism, then the facts be damned and the reporter’s a liar. Ricks or Hewitt? Reality or ideology? I link. You choose. A reader notes another quote from Hewitt, which is just as revealing. He seems to believe that all the criticism of this botched war is due to some sort of conspiracy:

The "money quote," as you say, is this from Hewitt:

"A cadre of Clinton-era senior brass, who did not see it coming, it being the Islamist world war, got bitter and angry at having been passed over and pushed aside by the 9/11, post-9/11 Pentagon, and they have spent the next five years doing their best to undermine this administration, using reporters like you who are good, to carry out that story, and amplify every mistake, and there are many, and to downgrade every success, and there are many, in a continued war against the people who tossed them out, and perhaps against their own conscience for not having seen it coming. Your response?"

Throughout the interview, Hewitt deals with the overwhelming evidence that he is wrong by, first, using a quibble about some fraction of the evidence (here, that some of the sources are anonymous) to cast doubt on all of it; and second, by accusing everyone of pursuing the same kind of partisan agenda that he himself is. There are no facts, to him. There is just a fight, and if you say something that supports the other side, you’re on it.

Here’s Ricks’ response:

"It is not partisan, it is not a bunch of burn-out generals. It is the military trying to do the best it can in an extremely difficult situation. And to disregard it and slap it aside, if you’ll excuse me, I think is aiding and abetting the enemy."

Finally Ricks is giving Hewitt the medicine he so regularly dishes out to others. I think of Hewitt as an American version of Baghdad Bob – you remember, the guy who insisted that U.S. forces were defeated even as U.S. shells were pounding in Baghdad behind him. No, I don’t mean the analogy literally – just in so far as it reflects the Christianist inability to deviate from received dogma, even when confronted with empirical reality. Hewitt is a very smart, completely partisan propagandist. Once you understand that, the rest fits into place.

Chicago, Illinois, 7 pm.

First they were for a cease-fire; now they’re against it.

Yes, we knew they were screwed up. But some Shiite Islamists in Iraq are allegedly killing shepherds because they have not put modesty "diapers" on their goats! The goats are too tempting for Muslim males, it appears.  Well, compared with the walking black tents they force their women into, goats are indeed quite fetching. The logic of religious fundamentalism is nothing if not relentless.

Why is this war different from all other wars for Israel? The answer lies in Bernard-Henri Levy’s essay in Sunday’s NYT magazine. For the first time, we’re not really discussing a conflict over land or territory or even the treatment of individuals. We’re not talking about Arab nationalism. We’re not talking about the Palestinians. We’re not even talking about the political existence of the Jewish state. We’re talking about the divine mandate that the Islamists believe they are following, an eschatological struggle toward the End-Times, where the Jews must be destroyed as a people and as a sovereign state in order for the Apocalypse to occur. In this, Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are in complete agreement. The trouble is: Robertson can be dismissed as a corrupt kook; Ahmadinejad has some serious weaponry and a state under his control.

I wouldn’t dismiss Bernard Lewis’ noting of the ominous repetition of the date of August 22 by Ahmadinejad – and the Iranian president’s breathless predictions of a liberation coming soon. Although we have no hard evidence that Nasrallah has been acting according to Ahmadinejad’s wishes, their worldview is interchangeable. I would not be surprised if the Lebanon skirmish is a prelude to something much more ambitious. Syria’s foreign minister – a more cynical actor – has already opined that a war with Israel would be "most welcome" from his point of view. The notion that a group like Hezbollah can be "persuaded" by the Siniora govermnemt to give up their goal of exterminating every Jew in the Middle East – when it is the primary reason for their existence – is ludicrous. We should hold fast to the U.S.-French cease-fire deal and let Israel do its best to degrade its mortal enemy in the meantime. If conventional missiles can be launched today, have no doubt that, with Ahmadinejad’s support, non-conventional weapons will be used some time in the future. Why should Israel make itself vulnerable to WMD extinction from a few miles outside its borders?

This is what happens when religion takes over politics. Rational negotiation becomes impossible; victory becomes a theological mandate; no end becomes feasible except conflict; and in this case, some of the actors actually want that conflict to be apocalyptic. We have to understand the fundamentalist mindset we are grappling with. It is not rational in worldly terms. It is other-worldly – and rational only under those theological constructs. For those reasons, it is the biggest threat to Western freedom since the totalitarianisms of the last century; and easily the most mortal theat to Israel since its founding. It cannot be disarmed or reasoned with; it can only be defeated.

(Photo: Oded Balilty/AP.)

1994 may be repeating itself – according to this WaPo poll. Good. If any Congress deserves being thrown out in dramatic fashion, this one does.

Now we know its creator is an anti-Semite, where is the new debate about his movie? Where are the MSM explanations of why so many at the time viewed it as an anti-Semitic film? Where are the analyses of its anti-Semitic origins, as in the "visions" of Anne Catherine Emmerich? Where are the investigations of Gibson’s large investments in uber-orthodox churches, with anti-Semitic overtones? This incident was not about one drunken celebrity. It was about one the biggest pop-cultural events in recent history, a water-mark in the Christianist movement’s assault on the culture at large. It matters as a cultural and moral issue whether the Christianist movement did indeed give its imprimatur to rank anti-Semitism. Tim Rutten asks all the right questions here. The architects of this poisonous movie’s success still have not been brought to account.

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear … To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye." ‚ÄîEdmund Burke, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."

(Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP.)

This letter to the Washington Post speaks to a lot of American Catholics, I think:

The truth is, despite my issues with the Church, I most likely will raise my children Catholic. I may not believe everything the Church believes and may even actively oppose some of its positions. But as time has passed, I’ve come to see that, for me, Catholic isn’t so much my faith but my culture. It’s who I am.

It’s 13 years of Catholic schooling. It’s praying the rosary while crouched down in the hallway, hands over head, tornado sirens blaring. It’s the Ursuline Sisters, with their quick laughs, steady guidance and humble intelligence, who acted as teachers, mentors and friends. It’s ashes on my forehead on the first day of Lent, midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, Stations of the Cross, summer church picnics, "The Lives of the Saints," fish on Fridays and "Ave Maria." It’s so many pieces of me that I would not be who I am if I took any of them away.

My Catholicism is for me, in many ways, like home – not always what I want it to be, yet often exactly what it needs to be. It is where I come from and where I belong. For my children to know me, they must know the Catholic Church.

I should say I don’t believe in merely cultural Catholicism. But I don’t think this woman has stopped being a Christian, a believer in the resurrection, and the message of the Gospels. She is merely struggling to keep her faith despite the often maddening flaws of a human church. But the message is strong enough to outlive the flaws. And it will.

David Horowitz responds to my recent criticism of his limited defense of Mel Gibson:

To describe me as someone who operates on the principle of "no enemies to the right" is very unfair. I took on the entire leadership of the Christian Right, writing three widely quoted articles on the subject, when they attacked Marc Racicot for meeting with the Human Rights Campaign, I have whacked Falwell, Bauer, Lott, Armey and Weyrich by name for anti-gay positions and comments, I have stated that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory and has no place in the academic curriculum, I have opposed a Republican bill in Arizona that would force teachers to assign different books to students who were offended by those they assigned first, I defended Ward Churchill’s right to publish reprehensible stuff on the Internet and not be fired and then criticized the Republican governor of Colorado (who happens to be a personal friend) for demanding that Churchill be fired – and I did this in an op-ed in the Denver Rocky Mountain News at the height of affair. My magazine, Frontpage, has slammed Pat Buchanan, Lew Rockwell and the paleo-right time after time over the war and in exactly the same terms we have employed when dealing with the Counter-punch left.