Month: September 2009

A reader writes:

Also consider the shrewdness of having the announcement made

by the U.S., Britain, and France.

In 2002, when the U.S. tried to confront Iraq at the U.N.

about its supposed WMD programs, remember it was France who led the charge

against us, splintering the West and greatly undermining the international

legitimacy of any future action against Iraq.  I remember watching

Dominique de Villepin responding to Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe”

comment with his disquisition on France’s hard-earned wisdom and why the

American position was impetuous and wrong.  I also remember Jacques Chirac

playing the reticent statesman while we were reduced to the appearance of foot

stomping children (which, in fact, we kinda were).

Not this time.

France is right there with us, in the same room as 2002, but this time confronting Iran’s activities.  That has a meaning of its own.  Combine that with the credibility Obama has accumulated through his outreach to both allies and non-allies, and it sends a much more convincing message that these charges need to be taken with utmost seriousness.

It also reminds me of the Cairo speech.  I read a commentary yesterday from a Syrian Muslim scholar who noted the important symbolism of the fact that Obama had visited Saudi Arabia the day before the Cairo speech, then gave the actual speech in Egypt.  Saudi Arabia and Egypt.  The home countries of Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.  A sort of subtle confrontation in that.

I’m thinking that when we look back on Obama’s tenure as president, we will not be so swept up in the mystique of his oratory or the fascinating impact he has as the first black president.  I think what will have greater staying power is the basic fact that the guy is just really, really smart as hell and shrewd.

Ambers squints his eyes:

It's safe to say that if health care was 80% done at the beginning of the week, it is no less than 83% done at the end of the week.

Bruce Bartlett sees them as the only way to enforce some kind of fiscal realism in America.

Damon Linker has a brutally accurate take on the mainstream right's response to Sam Tanenhaus's vibrant pamphlet, The Death of Conservatism. He's right about many things, including the fact that zombie populist 'conservatism' can still win elections. My favorite passage:

Take Peter Wehner’s representative remarks about the book, published on Contentions, Commentary’s

group blog. A former assistant to Karl Rove in the Bush White House, Wehner is a master of deploying the rhetorical trick that contemporary conservatives use to convince themselves that they’re always right. At bottom, it amounts to a high-minded version of the old Pee-Wee Herman taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?” There are countless examples. A handful of liberals stupidly describe conservatives as fascists, so Jonah Goldberg responds by writing several hundred pages about the threat of liberal fascism. (Get it?) Liberal Jews frequently congratulate themselves for their secularism, so Norman Podhoretz produces a book in which he claims that Jews treat liberalism as a

religion. (Clever!)

And Sam Tanenhaus defends a moderate version of conservatism against the ideological thinking that dominates the right and Wehner responds by saying that “Tanenhaus is precisely what he condemns in his book—an ideologue, a man of dogmatic fixity, a person of knee-jerk liberal reflexes.” Oh, what a wily man you are, Peter Wehner, turning the tables on him like that and relieving yourself of the burden of self-examination. That was a close one! (Liberals, meanwhile, will be quite understandably perplexed by Wehner’s suggestion that a man who generously praises Nixon’s pre-Watergate domestic and foreign policy, as Tanenhaus does, is actually a liberal “through and through.”)

A reader writes:

You write: "Imagine if Iraq's Jews were being rounded up, tortured and murdered on the streets by death squads allied with the ruling Shiite powers. Do you think there would be silence? Or just a small story in the Guardian?"

As it turns out, Iraq's Jews were, in fact, rounded up, tortured, and murdered in Iraq, culminating in the infamous Farhud pogrom of June 1941, in which nearly two hundred Jews were killed and another two hundred were injured. It's hard to imagine today, but Iraq's Jews once numbered over 150,000; Baghdad was once a major Jewish metropolis. Today, about two dozen Iraqi Jews remain in the country. Iraq today is a country whose parliamentary speaker recently felt justified in publicly blaming corruption on "Jews and sons of Jews," and which tried to execute a politician for traveling to Israel for a counter-terrorism conference. (Now there's a perfect example of antisemitism hurting a country's own interests.)

And yet, for most of the last seven decades, there has been almost total silence about the Jews of Iraq. Even the hugely empathetic and well-educated Andrew Sullivan doesn't seem to have heard about what happened to them. It gets only worse when you look at the wider Arab world, whose Jewish population was cleansed from nearly a million before the 1940s down to a few thousand today.

And it wasn't just the Jews, and it's not just ancient history. More recently, Shiite death squads, angry over Saddam's "preferential treatment" of Palestinians who had taken up residence in Iraq years ago, rounded up, brutally tortured (with electric drills), and murdered countless Palestinians, driving many thousands of them into the no-man's land between Iraq and Syria, where they remained in horrible, horrible conditions. Again, there was almost total media silence about their plight. Does anyone even know where they are now?

I don't know why the media don't cover these sorts of stories. But I think it has less to do with the media not caring about gays and lesbians than it does about the media having very low expectations (possibly stemming from deep-seated racist attitudes) of Arab societies.

Of course, a violent police raid on a Jewish community center in America would probably generate far bigger headlines than the horrific raids on gay bars that have been going on down South. Maybe you do make a good point after all.

Mark Lynch reacts to this morning's revelation:

According to the New York Times, the administration went public because the Iranians had discovered that Western intelligence had "breached the secrecy surrounding the project."  Perhaps.  But it seems rather more likely that the administration chose to go public as part of a calculated effort to ratchet up the credibility of the threat of tough sanctions ahead of the October 1 meeting between Iran and the P5+1 in Geneva.  The public disclosure puts Iran on the back foot ahead of those talks [and] demonstrates to the Iranians the quality of Western intelligence and the difficulty of deception and denial — especially in the atmosphere of (quite warranted) mistrust of their intentions.  That may reduce their reasons to oppose the intrusive inspections and monitoring regime which Gary Sick argues is the most likely reasonable negotiated outcome.  Such an outcome would be far more in the interests of the U.S., Iran, and Iran's neighbors than any plausible outcome of a military strike [.]

do bem™ – Açaí Juice 100% fruit (Tic Tic Tac Wafer's Keyboard) from Hardcuore on Vimeo.

AtlanticWire rounds up reaction to word of a partially successful vaccine. The Dish remains skeptical.

And so you see the Obama mojo again. Look at the moves of the last month. He scraps the missile defense in Eastern Europe, pleasing Russia, and moves the focus of defense to the Mediterranean, pleasing Israel.

He pwns Ahmadinejad at the UN by being the first president of the US to preside over the resolution to enforce nuclear non-proliferation.

He corrals the rhetorical support of the developing world, isolating Tehran still further. He hangs back a little and allows Brown and Sarkozy to do the heavy hitting on NoKo and Iran this past week, again revealing that the desire to curtail Ahmadinejad's nukes is not only an American project.

And then, this morning … kapow!

He busts Ahmadinejad in a air-tight case that focuses on active Iranian deception. All this, of course, may still not be enough. Putin's position remains opaque; and China is still not on the full wagon. But can anyone say that the isolation of Iran has weakened under Obama?

If you add to the mix the critical factor of the Green Revolution, then the West's position vis-a-vis Iran has improved immensely in the last eight months. And if you believe that Obama's Cairo speech was at least a positive factor in helping bring that about – then the promise of the Obama era in American foreign policy begins to take shape.

Weakness? There is sometimes more strength in projecting confidence rather than bluster, and seeking cooperation rather than ultimatums.

(Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

The only metaphors that make sense are too graphic and cruel for popular use (domestic

violence is one example), because the "boiled frog phenomenon" is distinctly human, not animal, activity. Boiled frog scenarios depend upon a shared cognitive reality (he loves me, I need this job, the earth has always been this way) displacing or rendering moot an indisputable physical reality (he beats me, I can find a job that doesn't give me ulcers, the climate is changing). The great thing about the animals we surround ourselves with is that they don't tend to allow thinking to interfere with perceiving what's actually happening.

So what if it's untrue? Even if thousands of conceptual frogs are boiled daily, it's a useful way to talk about a human tendency that's otherwise impossible to talk about in rational, unloaded terms.

Fallows weighs in and Glenn Beck didn't actually kill a frog.