Month: January 2007

Drugs still winning.

From the 1959 archives. Today, National Review’s scorn is heaped on the gay rights movement.

A Democrat gets serious about the White House.

State Department lawyer, John Bellinger, engages the blogosphere with a defense of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the war on terror. Money quote:

[W]e found ourselves in an armed conflict in Afghanistan starting in October 2001. In the course of that conflict, we detained members of al Qaida and the Taliban, some of whom are now in Guantanamo. U.S. or allied forces captured the majority of these detainees in late 2001 or early 2002 in or near Afghanistan. One of the most basic precepts in the law of armed conflict is that states may detain enemy combatants until the cessation of hostilities. It cannot reasonably be argued that the United States and its allies had the right to use force in Afghanistan but did not have the right to detain individuals as an incident to the armed conflict that ensued, unless we planned to charge them with a crime. The Supreme Court explicitly has affirmed in Hamdi that the United States had the right to detain enemy combatants in the armed conflict that ensued after our decision to act in self-defense.

Of course, if al Qaeda detainees had actually been treated as "prisoners of war," and not tortured, then this debate would not be occurring at all; or it would be occurring with a minimal level of trust in the decency and good faith of this administration. But we have learned not to give Bush or Cheney even a minimal level of trust. And their brutal, dumb and self-defeating detainee policies are central to that lack of trust. 

Bill Buckley takes a sane conservative stand. And it seems to be contagious.

It’s still nascent, but has a foothold. Could it help foster cultural change to make democratic life more imaginable? We can sure hope so. It could also give Jihadists new tools for organization. Here’s an interesting review of the possibilities for new media in the Arab world. Money quote:

Those bloggers are people like Roba Al-Assi, a twenty-one-year-old design student in Amman, Jordan, who recently wrote about her opposition to the death penalty for Saddam Hussein:

"It is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state in the name of justice (I know he killed thousands, but it is in my moral fabric to be better than others. Throw him in jail for the rest of his life, that’s a lot worse than death)."

Or the Egyptian blogger who calls himself Big Pharaoh, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of the American University in Cairo, who expressed his support for the Egyptian culture minister who was criticized for stating that he thought the hijab, the traditional woman’s head covering worn by some Muslim women, was “regressive”:

"There are numerous things that make me proud of this country. How the country descended into such stupidity, ignorance, and darkness is definitely not among them. I feel like vomiting every time I think about how this man was virulently attacked for merely stating his opinion on a thing as stupid as the hair cover."

Norm Geras notes this priceless interview with Martin Amis in the Guardian:

What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best?…

Martin Amis: The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you."

Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

The best thing has been to find myself living in what, despite its faults (despite a million ills), is an extraordinarily successful multi-racial society. This is a beautiful idea, with a good chance of becoming a beautiful reality, too.

It is this peaceful, tolerant, multicultural achievement that the Islamists and Christianists both hate. The Islamists are by far the greater danger. But it’s important to know how similar the loathing of diverse modernity is on both the Christianist and the Islamist right.

"Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression," – Edmund Burke, "Tract on the Popery Laws," published posthumously.

Here’s a recent report from the Sunni insurgency in the Guardian:

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad’s western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism …

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar’s warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

Jeff Weintraub comments here.

(Photo of detained Sunni man by Chris Hondros/Getty.)

Read the case for it here.