Month: March 2013

A reader quotes me:

“I’m not excusing my confirmation bias, my broad brush against opponents of the war (although I refuse to accept that they were all skeptical of the WMDs’ existence; many were just anti-Bush and anti-war), or my violation of just war doctrine.”

I find your casual dismissal of the many who voiced concerns over the Iraq war rather small-minded.  Many in the intelligence communities around the world were skeptical about the WMD claim, including in the US.  The real reason was that many concluded that it lacked a factual basis, not because individuals were “anti-Bush” or “anti-war.”  The key source of the WMD claim came from Iraqi refuge/informant Curveball, who was interviewed by German intelligence, not the US.  Leading up to the Iraq war, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer publicly addressed the WMD claim, stating: “Excuse me, I am not convinced.”  Germany was far from the only US ally who refrained from participating in the invasion of Iraq on similar grounds.  Their position was also consistent with the findings of the UN weapons inspectors at that time, led by Hans Blix.  Instead of speculating as to why some were skeptical of the WMD claim, why don’t you ask yourself why you were not?

How do you go from my criticism of my own “broad brush” in describing the Iraq War opposition to an inference that I am casually dismissing the serious critics and skeptics of the WMD argument? I was doing the exact opposite. I was distinguishing between those I should have listened to and those who were blindly against the war, fueled by the simmering resentments of the 2000 election. As to why my skepticism was completely AWOL, I’ve said I was terrorized by 9/11 and fear overwhelmed doubt. I was also marinated in a DC culture that saw Saddam’s WMDs as a bipartisan matter, backed by the Clintons and Bush. And I genuinely believed that Saddam was such a monster and so convinced of US military skill that the moral question seemed clear. I was wrong on every count. But I was wrong in good, if nearly-blind, faith. And the opposition shouldn’t be painted with a virtuous broad brush either. I went to the anti-war marches. You think ANSWER was animated by the WMD question? Another writes:

I remain fascinated not so much by why commentators I otherwise respect got the Iraq war wrong, but by why even they – in their mea culpas – so rarely mention those who got the war right (except, perhaps Barack Obama) and it ties into one of most tiresome excuses people in the Bush Administration give for not finding WMD “Everyone got it wrong.” Except, that’s not true.

Look at how you dismissed Chirac. Was he less a man of honor than, say, Dick Cheney?

One thing that I noticed during the Bush administration about the Republicans’ (and news media’s) attitude towards France was how rarely we were reminded that the French not only had better sense than to join us in Iraq, but they also foiled a jet-into-tower attack before 9/11. Bush really didn’t want people to think too much about how some leaders managed to hear and follow up on their nation’s intelligence services while he opted to go fishing. Chirac did see the kinds of intelligence of our leaders saw. He and his government must surely have subjected it to some analysis. There’s no reason to believe that a nation with that many not-fully-acculturated Muslim citizens and immigrants would have been indifferent to any probable detonation of dirty bombs or nuclear bombs by Islamists.

Another:

I was 21 when we invaded, and a few years later I was in Iraq. I watched Colin Powell give his presentation on television. I was an early skeptic of this war – why are we moving on when we haven’t found bin Laden and Afghanistan is still a mess? And why does Saddam need to go, now, when this evidence is so sketchy?. But I had tremendous respect for Powell. I also knew that he wouldn’t go before the UN without real evidence. He had too much integrity. I was ready to be persuaded.

And then he stood there before the world, and tap-danced. This was the moment for the US to show its hand, and we had nothing. And Powell knew it. He wasn’t convinced. You could see it in his face. I felt embarrassed for him and terrified for the country and ashamed that someone with such integrity would  peddle something he almost certainly knew was a lie with such disastrous consequences.

To this day, more than anything else, it is Powell’s presentation I think back to when I try (and fail) to understand why so many people supported the war with such smug confidence, and such disdain for those who raised truly reasonable objections. And to read things like this now, 10 years later, after so much blood, and after the violent deaths of so many – of some I knew – makes me nauseous.

Another:

For my mea culpa, one name is burned into my brain: Judith Miller. I trusted her. I expect the government to lie to me. But I did not expect a NY Times reporter to lie like the most corrupt politician, an absolute snake in the grass. The Times carries a heavy burden of responsibility for that war.

Another:

I think you (and many others) miss a huge detail of how we got into the mess in Iraq. One of your posts highlighted how Clinton made it US policy to force regime change in Iraq … but this misses a big back story.  I wrote my masters thesis on the phenomenon of foreign lobbying as a kind of covert action, both by states and non-state actors. One of my case studies was Chalabi and his efforts to push for the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 (which is the act that made it US policy to promote regime change in Iraq). In short, I think in many ways the United States government and media were the targets of a very shrewd effort by a foreign entity, i.e. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to change US policy to its needs. It was able to do so in large part because of the lack of enforcement of US laws regulating foreign lobbying.

So beat yourself up all you want, but remember that there was a definite propaganda effort being pushed there, with a lot of help from trained intelligence professionals and professional lobbyists in Washington.  The sad thing is that much of this was revealed after the WMD commission was completed, so Chalabi’s role is largely forgotten in the official history of the lead up to Iraq War.

Read the whole recent Iraq thread here.

Kent Sepkowitz applauds how the latest episode of Girls depicts Hannah’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder:

She inserts a Q-tip into one ear and traumatizes it, causing a bloody mess and giving the episode its great line (“I heard hissing” after the puncture). Then comes the requisite sitcom schlemiel-like ER visit with a doctor and some drops and some close-ups. But in the episode’s last scene, she grabs the difficult third rail of mental illness once again, showing us Hannah placing a new Q-tip into the other ear. And counting.

With this scene, it appears Dunham is willing to portray real OCD, not the scrubbed and kinda fun version where people are cleaning their hands at inopportune times or else hopping over cracks in the sidewalk. She is trying—I hope—to pull the mental illness away from the lighthearted and silly, and show it as the anguishing compulsion that requires immediate attention and a rain-dance-like repetitive activity to maintain the ordered rows and columns necessary to assure that true darkness remains way over there. The depiction seems promising enough that Dunhamalready has gotten thumbs-up from people involved with OCD treatment and research.

Relatedly, William Brennan advises never putting Q-Tips in your ears:

The problem with removing earwax (by Q-Tip or any other home remedy) is that earwax serves important functions: It is a lubricant, a defense against foreign objects, and even a natural antibiotic. Earwax becomes a problem when it is packed into the canal and hardens, causing “impaction” (or blockage), and evidence shows that Q-Tips can cause impaction.

A reader writes:

As the fine arts book buyer and assistant manager for an independent bookstore [seen above] in your newly-adopted city, I am disheartened to learn that you’re continuing to make affiliate revenue from Amazon, a corporation hell-bent on destroying print culture and, along with it, my job. From their loss-leading book pricing to their vile price-check app, Amazon has made itself the scourge of small booksellers everywhere.

You may not have much love for the publishing industry, but, like it or not, we need traditional book publishers to sift through endless submissions, just as we need highly-literate booksellers to promote exceptional new works to the public. I’m just not convinced digital self-publishing on its own can sustain literary fiction and scholarly nonfiction written by little-known authors. I have enormous respect for publishers like Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and Twelve Books that continue to release amazing new books each year. (Twelve Books published Hitchen’s superb memoir, incidentally.) I’m at a loss to understand how such “dead-tree” publishers have incurred your wrath.

I don’t deny e-books have their benefits, but they also have many drawbacks.

The books you buy for your Kindle aren’t covered under the first sale doctrine. You don’t technically own them and you certainly can’t resell them. E-books are not collectable, cannot truly be signed by authors, and, unlike printed books, make for lousy gifts. And forget about finding most illustrated books on art, photography, design, or architecture on you Kindle. And that goes for graphic novels, atlases, and children’s books, too.

Besides illustrated content, printed books themselves can be beautiful objects. Do we really want to entirely replace the tactile qualities of paper and cloth, along with their pleasing cover design, with pixels on a screen? More importantly, do we want to live in a world without bookshops?

In the past, you’ve linked to printed books when the e-book version is unavailable. Noel Malcolm’s edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan isn’t available on Kindle, for instance. You may not have noticed that Amazon user reviews for all previous editions of Leviathan appear on the same page, as if they were indistinguishable. This is just one of many indications of how Amazon sees selling books as no different than selling baby formula or toaster ovens.

It’s wonderful that you provide healthcare for your interns, but I had hoped the revenue from subscriptions would have covered this. Maybe I’m overstepping my bounds, but I’d love to see you link to indie bookstores like Strand, McNally Jackson, or Community Bookstore in the future. Not only would you be helping local businesses in your city, you’d also be taking the right (and, dare I say, conservative) stand.

Noreen Malone rolls her eyes at the lengthy and self-aggrandizing “Acknowledgements” page of Sheryl Sandberg’s new book and complains about what the practice has become:

While Sandberg is the latest egregious example, she’s in good company. E.J. Dionne, a master of the form, tends to include just about every famous person he has ever met in his end pages. “[I]f these acknowledgments are a bit long, I hope the reader will forgive me. It’s because I have a lot of debts to pay,” he writes at the close of Why Americans Hate Politics. (The list is actually very useful in that it offers a much more concise evocation of why Americans hate politics than the book itself: Look no farther than his lengthy list to be reminded of Washington’s much-maligned clubbiness.)

Chelsea Clinton was recently thanked in the acknowledgments of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, and also scattered faux-carelessly amidst the long list of Brooklyn writer types who’d read drafts of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s A Sense of Direction, suggesting either that Ms. Clinton has a particular interest in highbrow modes of self-discovery, or that those interested in highbrow modes of self-discovery have a particular interest in her.

David Haglund counters:

“Perhaps readers already know that book publishing is an insular, back-scratching industry,” [Sam] Sacks says, “but does it have to be revealed quite so openly?” Why wouldn’t we want it to be? The real inspiration for a work of literary art may be mysterious, but the process by which that work reaches us should not be. Transparency is good. And so is gratitude.

But there’s gratitude and then there’s the literary equivalent of fellating every conceivable human being who had anything even faintly to do with the project. It’s a bit unfair to pick on EJ – revealing my own Washington clubbiness – because I bet he’s just a Catholic making sure he is not being ungracious. But he’s the exception to the rule.

There is, of course, the hathetic response: a gleeful examination of the author’s network of influential friends and literary connections. They tell you something about an author.