Month: January 2007

He told Leahy that he’d soon have new information on the case. The new information is that the U.S. government is keeping Maher Arar on its watch list and won’t say why. That information is contained in a letter dated last Tuesday – before the hearing. So Gonzales knew full well the government’s latest position on Arar when he testified but decided to withhold that information from the Senate. That’s the contempt he feels for the legislative branch on a matter as grave as torture. Time for another hearing, Senator.

Movies in 2006 weren’t as bad as the Academy Awards make them seem, argues Dave Weigel. You just never got to see most of them.

Was Jimmy an under-estimated hawk?

Abbé Pierre died yesterday. Here is the obituary from the Times of London. Here is a tribute from Le Figaro. I love the expression that France is "endeuillée." Money quote from the Times:

On a visit to Assisi at 14 he discovered St Francis and decided to become a monk. At 19 he told the young woman who was his dance partner one evening: "This is my last dance for I am joining the Capuchins tomorrow."

In 1931 he gave away his worldly goods and spent eight years with the Capuchins, being ordained on August 14, 1938. An assistant priest at Grenoble Cathedral at the time of the 1940 armistice, he started to help Jews to cross the Alps to Switzerland. On another occasion he carried Jacques de Gaulle, the paralysed brother of Charles de Gaulle who was being hunted by the Gestapo, across the barbed wire of the Swiss border and to safety in Geneva.

Then this:

Mitterrand, a longtime friend from the Abb√©’s days in the National Assembly, dropped in at Esteville by presidential helicopter in 1992 to ask him whether he entertained "doubts". The Abb√© replied: "Only when I was 16. There have been many questions since then, but no doubts."

Maybe that’s a more eloquent formulation than my defense of faith-in-doubt. Maybe I mean faith-with-questions. I’ll wait for Sam’s next sally and try to explain again.

We have evidence of one plot against the U.S. from Jihadists in Iraq. Peter Bergen (TNR firewall) argues that the situation is worse than many believe:

Several studies have shown that the suicide attackers in Iraq are largely foreigners, while only a small proportion are Iraqi. In June 2005, the site Institute of Washington found, by tracking both jihadist websites and news reports, that, of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 17 were from Iraq. And the University of Missouri’s Mohammed Hafez, in a study of the 101 known suicide bombers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that, while 44 were Saudi (and eight were from Italy!), only seven were from Iraq. Most of these foreign suicide attackers are affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, which the DIA judges to be "the largest and most active of the Iraq-based terrorist groups." Meanwhile, a classified U.S. Marine assessment of the situation in Anbar province–obtained by The Washington Post in November 2006–states that Al Qaeda surpasses all other groups "in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni" and is an "integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq." No wonder the organization felt emboldened to recently declare an Islamist emirate in Anbar province.

Hey, we sent, er, 4,000 more troops there. Stuff happens.

The Arizona senator finally tells the truth:

"The president listened too much to the Vice President … Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense … Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with McNamara, as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history."

This will now become the official Republican defense of Bush (someone tell Hewitt): that he was done in by Cheney and Rumsfeld, despite the fact that he chose Cheney and Rumsfeld and could have removed either at various points in his presidency. That’s the best defense they’ve got now. Just in time for the SOTU.

"I find the misuse of statistics described above appalling. If this were an isolated incident, it might be excusable. But, having been a watcher of evangelicalism for many years, I know that this is not an aberrant case. Evangelical leaders and organizations routinely use descriptive statistics in sloppy, unwarranted, misrepresenting, and sometimes absolutely preposterous ways, usually to get attention and sound alarms, at least some of which are false alarms," – Christian Smith, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, in Christianity Today.

A reader writes:

I have not read D’Souza’s latest, but if reviews are accurate, I am very disappointed in him. Barnett notes that D’Souza discusses Sayyid Qutb and how his disgust with American culture helped lead us to where we are now. According to Barnett, D’Souza fails to note that Qutb lived in the US in the late 1940s, before hippies and sexual liberation and the rest. What Barnett failed to mention was that what apparently pushed Qutb over the edge was a church dance in Greeley, Colorado (a city that at the time was dry).

The Denver magazine, 5280, ran a story in 2003, detailing Sayyid Qutb’s encounter with small-town Colorado in 1948. It’s a fascinating article, not least because it reveals Qutb’s first reactions to America and the West. He is repelled – by the apparent joylessness of post-war suburban America. His critique is reminiscent of many left-liberals of the time:

"This small city of Greeley, in which I am staying, is so beautiful that one may easily imagine that he is in paradise. Each house appears as a flowering plant and the streets are like garden pathways. As one observes, the owners of these houses spend their leisure time in toil, watering their private yards and trimming their gardens. This is all they appear to do …"

Gomorrah anyone? Qutb goes on:

"I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves, even on summer nights when breezes waft over the city as if in a dream. The most important thing for these people is the tending of their gardens, much in the same way a merchant spends time organizing his store or a factory owner his factory. There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment."

Yep: Qutb was a liberal snob, condescending to small-town American life. No doubt small towns in Egypt were saturated with profundity at the time. Then there’s the infamous dance. Not exactly a circuit party:

The dance began after an evening service, and was led by the church’s pastor, who, according to Qutb’s breathless account, lowered the lights and put a recording of "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" on the turntable in an effort to get the few remaining wallflowers out on the dance floor. "The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs," Qutb later wrote. "Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion."

Qutb never mentioned the incident to [contemporary Arab student Saeed] Dajani, so neither he nor scholars know exactly when or at what church Qutb’s dance took place. Such events were common, often drawing hundreds of students. Dajani, however, had a similar experience, albeit with a bit of a twist.

"I do not know if this is the same one that Mr. Qutb wrote about, but I went to a dance at the Methodist church. And I thought, ‘This is outrageous, seeing boys and girls dancing together.’ You have to understand, we had a Moslem background where the sexes were kept apart, in schools, and in most other ways, until marriage. So this was shocking to us."

It may be, of course, that Qutb’s Islamism, metastasized into bin Laden’s Islamism, is indeed shocked beyond measure at the thought of women’s equality, gay dignity and the more lurid aspects of American popular culture. But the shock goes far deeper than anything that has happened in America since the 1960s. The social conservatism of the Islamic fundamentalist did indeed see small-town America of the 1940s, even in a dry county, a repository of evil. That’s our problem. That’s how deep their fundamentalism goes. The president is right: they do hate us for who we are. And for daring to reach for a freedom that their version of Allah would never allow.

This new Google tool is almost as much fun as HDTV. (Hat tip: Radley.)

He’s the senator I’ve been using as my rough guage of whether this president truly has lost his own party on the conduct of the war. So we have a verdict. "Mr President, go back and look at all the options," is Republican for "You’ve got to be kidding." His position is a completely intelligible one:

"The American G.I. was not trained, not sent over there ‚Äî certainly not by resolution of this institution ‚Äî to be placed in the middle of a fight between the Sunni and the Shia and the wanton and just incomprehensible killing that’s going on at this time. We don’t lessen importance of that mission, but it should be performed by the Iraqi forces and not the coalition forces."

The last thing the United States should be doing is entering into a centuries’ old theological dispute in the Middle East. No amount of face-saving, rationalizing, or wishful thinking can erase that fact.