Month: June 2007

Clive Davis loves Brazil’s national song. Sounds kinda fascist to me. But the video’s cool.

You know you want it. Don’t click unless you want the bloody thing in your head for the rest of the day:

"My 2000 Buchanan vote seems smarter and smarter every day," – Daniel Larison.

My low-point in letting hope get the better of the evidence in the Bush era was my airing of the "flytrap" theory a few years back. The theory posited that chaos in Iraq might give the U.S. a chance to target and kill Jihadist terrorists in the Middle East more efficiently than constantly playing defense. Four years later, and it’s clear the reverse is happening. Chaos in Iraq and our presence there is honing Jihadist skills, weaponry and tactics.

A reader writes:

I assume that you’ve had a look at Paul Berman’s loooong article in the current TNR. Since I’m somewhat familiar with all three of the major personalities discussed (Ramadan, Buruma, Hirsi Ali) I found it quite interesting. But…. he seems to come up just a bit short at the very end. He asks "why" and then ends with one or two quick sentences. We need a lot more analysis of this "why" question, on the part of people like yourself. Clearly we in the West are contending with several tectonic shifts all at the same time.

One of these shifts, the one most germane to the question of Ramadan, is this: for a long time – probably over a century – those of us on the left have felt at least an intellectual sympathy with the dispossessed, Fanon’s "wretched of the Earth". Sometimes this sympathy crossed over and became emotional, personal. We felt that the poor and oppressed could – if only they had access to resources like we did – become "just like us". This is what drove left support for the various "national liberation movements" like those of Cuba etc.

Now, however, we are seeing a dispossessed class, namely the Muslim immigrants and near-immigrants (like the killer of Theo van Gogh), with which we can have very very little sympathy. These are people who aren’t and probably never will be "just like us". They are implacably hostile to everything the Enlightenment West stands for. Indeed, they advocate a return to the kind of barbarism that the West (partially) escaped only after a very long struggle.

So, the old memes no longer apply. What we have is a situation in which the left finds itself in uneasy – and incomplete – agreement with those on the right who have traditionally been labelled "paleoconservatives", such as Pat Buchanan.

I want to be careful here. To a great extent we are still in a period of "false consciousness". The left knows that the old model isn’t working very well anymore, at least with respect to Islam (within Christendom things are clearer). Some, like Berman and Hitchens, have jumped whole hog into an alliance with conservatives. This has made them appear as apostates to long-time leftists.

The problem is, at least in general terms, Berman and Hitchens are right. There *is* a threat to us and our values. It’s a threat unlike those we’ve dealt with before (even the Soviets were, ultimately, children of the Enlightenment). The problem for leftists is (and this will take time to work out): how to ally with conservatives on the issue of defending the West and its values, *without becoming conservatives* ?

We need a new left-liberal identity that has shed the old-time "liberal guilt" and its patronizing multiculturalism, that is unapologetic about standing with the West and all enlightened societies against barbarism, notably Islamic barbarism. All of this is going to take some time to work out.

If you missed yesterday’s view, and the single, heart-breaking sentence that accompanied it, check it out.

Edward Wong has been covering Iraq for several years. He offers us a simple empirical, cultural fact about the region we mistakenly occupied with insufficient force to prevail. What we have unwittingly unleashed in Iraq is completely beyond our control. It’s their country; it’s their civil war; they’ve waited centuries to wage it. We think we are powerful enough to control it now? This is Iraq:

The word is ‘sahel,’ and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

"Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’" Razzaq said. "It has always been that way in Iraq."

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it. Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.

It will have to get worse, much worse, before it can get better. No one can surely find any solace in that fact. The innocent lives that will be shed are hard to fathom. But this is the choice. We can either stay in the middle of such a conflict and try to absorb its ineluctable unfolding with the bodies of young Americans. Or we can leave and redeploy over the horizon. Forget what we wish were true. This is what is in front of our noses.

(Photo: A wounded Iraqi girl inspects, 03 June 2007 the rubble at the site, where she was injured in a car bomb which tore, 22 May 2007 through a market in the flashpoint Baghdad district of Amil. Tens of Iraqis were killed and wounded in the blast, the vast majority of which were women and children. By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)

I”ll be watching and subsequently blogging the Dem debate tonight.

"The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Republicans Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture.’ But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture…

The CIA KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Republican Communist principles and is contrary to C.I.A. K.G.B. regulations…

Prisoners are tried before "military tribunals," which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court…

In typical Republican Communist legalistic fashion, the O.L.C. N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or ‘confession,’ it simply declared the prisoner an enemy combatant a "war-crimes suspect" and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war," – "Communist Interrogation," The Annals of Neurology and Psychology, 1956.