Month: April 2007

"Hamas or Abbas, it makes no difference. The ball is in their court, and we just have to show patience and not push any peace process until they do what they have to do … They don’t just have to say the words. Anyone can say the words. They have to show that they are ending terrorism; they have to show that they are doing what they have to do to end terrorism. I’m a strong proponent of the philosophy that we can trust, but we have to verify. If all that happens, then it will lead naturally to a peace process, but we have to wait patiently until they are ready to make it happen. And no one should make any concessions to the Palestinians until they take those steps," – Rudy Giuliani, staking out more territory.

Uh-oh.

A reader writes:

Reading that laughable essay, especially the second portion you set off, I thought of one thing immediately: "It’s not torture, dear, it’s coercive interrogation."

Ah, yes, conservatism. Willing to look white lies in the face and expose them.

Rudy unveiled his 2008 electoral identity yesterday. It’s a very powerful one, and perfect for him to deploy. Here’s the money quote:

"I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense. We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense… The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."

It’s worth unpacking the argument. What does going on defense mean? For Giuliani, it means first of all "the white flag on Iraq." But, again, what does that mean exactly? Who will we be surrendering to if we redeploy out of Baghdad and into the Kurdish areas, and let the Iraqis know we have no interest in permanently staying in their country? If Giuliani means we are surrendering to the Shiite majority in Iraq, or the Maliki government, then wasn’t that the point of the entire war? Isn’t that actually victory? If he means surrendering to al Qaeda, whose presence in Iraq was minimal before we invaded, then he must explain why Barack Obama’s proposal for an "over-the-horizon" force that would still target al Qaeda is meaningless or insufficient? When you probe Giuliani’s logic, it means that we should start invading every country that could or does harbor al Qaeda – and that we should stay in Iraq indefinitely, since our presence there manages to generate more terrorists than we can kill. In fact, there’s strong evidence that we are effectively training the next generation of al Qaeda in Iraq by honing their skills against a superior enemy.

The logic of Giuliani’s case is therefore an open-ended occupation of much of the Middle East – an idea that seems extremely September 12. Has he learned nothing from Iraq – except the need to create more Iraqs? The "offense" argument is so crude, in other words, as to be meaningless. The question is not about "offense" or "defense"; it’s about smart offense and dumb offense. We’ve seen dumb offense. Look at what it has accomplished.

"Cut Back the Patriot Act". Again: can he be specific? What is he referring to and how would it impact the war? "Electronic surveillance". I know no leading Democrat who doesn’t support such surveillance. The issue is simply whether there should be court warrants. "Interrogation." Here is a critical issue. What does he mean by interrogation? What does he mean by torture? Does Giuliani support the Bush-Cheney policy of detainee imprisonment without charges, rendition, abuse, and torture?

I think Giuliani will run as the Jack Bauer candidate. It’s in his DNA. There isn’t a civil liberty he wouldn’t suspend if he felt it was necessary for "security." And there isn’t a dissenter he wouldn’t bully or silence in the interests of national security. There is a constituency for this – a big one. It has been primed by pop-culture to embrace torture and the suspension of habeas corpus. It is a constituency with scant respect for any civil liberties when a war on terror is being waged. If that’s the path Giuliani wants us to take, we have to be very clear about what it means. We have to ask ourselves: after the next terror attack, what powers would a president Giuliani assume? And what would be left of the constitution after four years of the same? Give Rudy the office that Cheney has created – and America, already deeply altered, will become a new political entity altogether.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty.)

A Reuters classic.

Kirkuk, actually. Michael Totten reports – with video!

Denver, Colorado, 2.27 pm.

A reader writes:

I read your side of the conversation with Mr. Harris as a step toward dialogue: you were seeking to explain and understand. By seeking to convince you of his own convictions, Sam Harris was engaged in dialectic.

My understanding of my own immune belief in the existence of God despite challenges from ‘the world of evidence’ is founded on the epistemology described by Martin Buber. Very briefly stated, Buber claimed there are two types of knowledge: I-It and I-Thou. The former is scientific knowledge, objective observation, the world of facts. I-Thou knowledge is a gestalt of the world of facts. It happens when you find yourself confronted by the whole rather than the sum of parts.

I-It is ‘knowing about.’ I-Thou is ‘knowing personally.’ I can say, ‘I know about Andrew Sullivan.’ I cannot say, ‘I know Andrew Sullivan,’ because we have not met. For me, it is otherwise with God. I know nothing factual about God. But I know God because I am in dialogue with him: when he speaks to me through my experiences and meetings with others, and in the dark of night when I look up at the stars and ask, ‘Why?’

I have done Buber an injustice by not citing him or presenting his ideas in more philosophically appropriate terms, but I wanted to couch my understanding in my own words. In any case, I leave you with a quote from him: "The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God."

… about a "foofewaw". Question answered.

Here’s a bracing piece. Money quote:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Oooh. Shock me some more. The core argument of the essay is that conservatism looks unflinchingly at reality and tries to defuse the illusions – the "white lies" – of the left. As an abstract concept, I’m in complete agreement. As I argue in The Conservative Soul, conservatism is based in part on the notion that building politics on reality rather than on dreams is more likely to make the world a slightly better place than the well-meaning alternative. But then when you read the entire piece, you realize that in its dogmatic insistence on the inarguable truth of various contentious ideas, it is the opposite of what it claims to be. Take this glib series of assertions:

Because it depends on — indeed is defined by — describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence — he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment — leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

Look: I understand the issue here. Political correctness is a new form of sanctimonious etiquette. I don’t like it either. I’d probably end up as cranky as Mickey if I lived among the Hollywood left. In my time, I’ve argued for fundamental differences between men and women, aired "The Bell Curve," was a skeptic of the mythology around Matthew Shepard and generally rubbed many liberal nerves the wrong way. But the point of all this is to find reality, and to be open to be proven wrong as well. It is not to assert a new form of dogma. Nor is it a way to find excuses for cruelty, bad manners or bigotry. I see no conservative reason to refer to people with physical handicaps as "crippled"; I see no real distinction between a slum and an inner city (but I was and am for welfare reform); and I find the attempt to describe the excruciating problems in Iraq as a choice between "surrender" or "victory" to be little short of moronic.

This, moreover, is not conservatism. It is faux-conservatism. Shock-jock conservatism. Or conservatism calcified into an ideology that has become very difficult to disentangle from arrogance, ignorance or just plain old prejudice. The job of conservatives is to filter fact from ideology. And that includes filtering facts from the ideology that now passes among so many for conservatism itself.