Month: February 2007

The meltdown accelerates.

That was Donald Rumsfeld’s shrug when his army invaded a country, toppled a dictatorship, and then watched as anarchy spread. In retrospect, it was the first clear sign of the near-pathological recklessness with which this administration conducted a war vital to this country’s security. But it also may have made a transition to a normal society impossible. Here’s a fascinating interview between Carol Iannone, vice president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, and John Agresto, a former university president who went to Iraq after the invasion to help restore its educational system. Money quote:

Could you describe more specifically the effect of the looting on the institutions of higher education particularly?

Except for the three universities in the Kurdish region and a very few others, the universities were fundamentally stripped bare—no desks, chairs, equipment, computers, typewriters, copiers, lecterns, paper, pencils, blackboards, fans, wiring, plumbing, or books. And what couldn’t’t be stolen, like libraries, was generally burned.

So what were the primary needs in beginning to rebuild and reconstitute higher education in Iraq?

They had nothing. A needs assessment we conducted concluded that simply to rebuild and re-supply the classrooms, dorms, bathrooms, labs, and libraries would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And the students. Were they eager to see reform of the educational system?

At first, yes, but over time we began to see more and more students, primarily male, turning to religious extremism.

There was a chance. Bush threw it away.

No criticism of Islam, thank you. Just Christianity.

I try and tackle it in my Sunday Times column today. Money quote:

The polling is extremely clear: Giuliani, for all his heretical tendencies, is still ahead of every other Republican candidate. Moreover, a recent Gallup poll found only 23% of Republican voters deeming him ‘unacceptable’ compared with 41% saying the same for John McCain. The salient question to ask is: if Giuliani is so abhorrent to conservatives, why is he polling so well?

We don’t know the answer to that yet. It’s hard to gauge a campaign’s viability before it has begun. My view is that the managers and spokesmen of the base may be misreading the real mood of the evangelical rank and file. They’re more pragmatic than their leaders. If Hillary Clinton is the alternative, many Republicans will overlook Giuliani’s social moderation.

Moreover, there is a growing sense even among hardline conservatives that they may have overreached badly these past few years. Their stridency on abortion, gays, stem-cell research and end-of-life issues has begun to lose them many voters in the suburbs, the Midwest and the Mountain West. They are worried that the thumping loss in the midterm elections of 2006 was not a blip but the turning of a tide against them.

If they believe that, maybe Giuliani is the perfect antidote.

Here’s hoping.

(Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty.)

A reader writes:

The issue is not whether it’s appropriate to joke about torture, the Catholic Church, or anything else. All subjects are fair game. But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze the motivation behind the joke. Steyn, et al., are making jokes about torture to minimize or dismiss entirely valid criticism of our government for betraying its principles. They dismiss the criticism with jokes because they have nothing else – on the merits, they have no argument. It’s really just an admission of failure on their part, so let them keep laughing.

I guess the humor is instructive in that sense. It’s a form of denial that masks itself in self-congratulation.

Version One:

It’s a fantastic quote, because it points out one of the big differences between us and the enemy, which is that the enemy is totally humorless. And I think it’s rather disturbing that Andrew Sullivan, who mocks so many of the rest of us on the right as theocrats, is, in fact, turning into a bit of a, you know, theocrat-wise, he’s getting close to the Ayatollah Khomenei in his sense of humor."

Version Two (in the same interview):

"I mean, these are totally unpleasant people who have made the most vivid and repulsive jokes, really, about religion. Now not just the generalized contempt for religion that a lot of people in the secular world have, but as I said, quite vivid imagery relating to the Virgin Mary having sex with God, and this kind of thing. So it’s something insofar as these rather worthless writers have any talent at all, it’s in, simply, heaping abuse upon people of faith."

So it’s not repulsive to joke about torturing captives but it is repulsive to joke about Catholicism. I’m glad that’s all cleared up now.

These two Catholic countries fascinate me, because, like Ireland, they are leading examples of how once-theoconservative nations have moved into modernity. The process is not linear, but it seems clearly unidirectional. The Catholic church has seen its influence collapse under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and, like rebellious teenagers, the countries have occasionally gone overboard in rejecting their clerical and theocon past. At some point, a new equilibrium will surely arrive, when the right to abortion is allied with serious attempts to prevent it occurring, where gay people are integrated into socially responsible institutions like civil marriage and civil unions. In Portugal, there is an attempt to reform its abortion laws to make them more humane, a function of being what one Portuguese woman describes as a "soft Catholic country". In Spain, the explosion of sexuality and pleasure after decades of Francoite repression has its triumphs, excesses as well as its funny side. This report in the NYT today has this pricelessly Catholic quote:

Dr. Fernández recalled that a woman recently urged her husband to seek Viagra but that the husband later begged him to stop writing prescriptions. "My equipment works fine with my mistress," the man said. "It’s my wife that’s the problem."

Then there’s this from the other side of the gender war:

One such woman is Carmen, a chic, twice-divorced 45-year-old information technology executive and Sophia Loren look-alike, who complains that her sexual ardor intimidates most Spanish men. Frustrated by her boyfriend’s sexual performance, Carmen insisted that he take Viagra, which he obtained by making a fake prescription on his home computer.

The Viagra worked, she says, but she decided anyway to leave her boyfriend, an urbane 55-year-old psychologist, for a 32-year-old unemployed student athlete.

"Viagra is not the solution many Spaniards think it is," said Carmen, who declined to use her last name. "I came to realize that the problem wasn’t my boyfriend’s sexual prowess. The problem was him." Now, she added, "I have sex six times a day, but I do miss going to the opera."

There’s always a catch, isn’t there?

Newmarket, Suffolk, England, 11.41 am.

Marijuana continues its role as a gateway … to high political office. The British Tory leader, David Cameron, who has a serious chance of becoming prime minister (I’m hoping), says he once smoked pot, and was disciplined for it at at Eton. There goes his chance to become the next American Idol.

(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)