Category: Old Dish

American Jews are still mystifyingly Democratic. I put it down to fear of the religious right. But since September 11, Jewish voters have seen the biggest proportional jump in support for the president. Maybe many are realizing that in this epic global struggle, Bush is a far more reliable friend than many in the Democratic Party. Here’s Gallup’s summary:

Bush approval went up slightly more among the Jewish population than among either Protestants or Catholics. The increase was 19 percentage points among Protestants, 24 points among Catholics, and 30 points among Jews. Thus, while the difference between Jews and Protestants in Bush approval was 26 percentage points in the surveys conducted before Sept. 11, 2001, it narrowed to only 15 percentage points in the surveys conducted after the terrorist attacks. The same general pattern of narrowing differences in this approval number occurred between Catholics and Jews.

“If you close your eyes when they are talking about Iraq and replace it with Israel then everything they say applies. The weapons of mass destruction are there in the Middle East, they are in the hands of the Israeli government, the most dangerous hands they could possibly be in.” – British socialist, Paul Foot, calling for “regime change” in Britain.

THE LEFT VERSUS INSPECTIONS: Fascinating, to me at least, that both the Guardian and the New York Times have pieces today saying U.N. weapons inspections cannot work. Does that mean both papers will back president Bush’s insistence on U.N. backed actual disarmament? Don’t bet on it.

I just read the new Atlantic’s essay on the rise of fundamentalist, Pentecostalist and arch-conservative Christianity across the developing world. It’s not online, but there’s an interview with its author, Philip Jenkins here. His book might make interesting reading. What to make of it? It’s not exactly news, but its implications are clear. People like me who are devoted to post-Vatican II Catholicism will probably in our lifetimes see the Western (or Northern) Church either go into real schism or collapse altogether into an orthodox and severe rump, from which we will be effectively excluded. The future of Christianity – where its energy is, where the passion is, where the new flocks are – is clearly in Africa and Asia and South America, where pentecostalist movements or highly traditional forms of Catholicism are making huge gains. The next pope, it seems likely to me, will make this one look like a liberal. Immigrants to the United States will also bring this kind of religion more forcefully home, as the new religion census is showing. On matters such as the role of women or homosexuality, the power is increasingly moving toward those who view any diversion from traditional gender roles as unthinkable and any variation on marital heterosexuality as an abomination. And on the matter of separation of church and state, political liberalism is going to be challenged in ways as profound as in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the sheer financial power of the Northern churches will exercise some sway over the force of Third World conservatism, but I doubt it. This holds for Anglicanism as well, by the way. What I found most arresting in Jenkins’ essay is the importance in these new areas of the force of miracles, especially of the medical variety. Personally, I’ve never been embarrassed by the presence of physical miracles in the Gospels and believe them. But my own faith certainly doesn’t rest on the need for such manifestations of divine power. For growing numbers of people, however, miracles are integral to the conversion experience and the lived faith. Just as in Jesus’ time.

SCHRODER’S BOOMERANG?: A poll yesterday found the Christian Democrats inching back into the lead in Germany’s election. It’s too close to call, but there are signs that Chancellor Schroder’s near-pacifist position – no war, ever, whatever the U.N. says – might actually damage him. It has certainly damaged Germany’s relations with the U.S. and the U.K.

BLOGOSPHERE VERSUS NEW YORK TIMES: Here’s another embarrassing correction in the New York Times for September 17:

An article on June 14 about potential successors to Yasir Arafat and one on Aug. 15 about the indictment of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader who is being tried by Israel on murder charges, misstated the history of his arrests and deportation. He was first arrested in 1978 at the age of 19, not 16. He was deported once, in 1987, not twice, and returned to the West Bank in 1994, not 1993. (A reader reported the errors by e-mail on Sept. 2; this correction was delayed for fact checking.)

So it took the Times up to four months [that should be three months] to correct an obvious factual error, and then fifteen more days after a reader had done their job for them? What gives? Many blogs, including this one, make errors. But most blogs correct themselves prominently within hours of finding out, and at most a day or two. Score one for little media. (Readers are hereby invited to find other extremely tardy corrections in the major media.)

DI-FI EMBARRASSED TO BE AN AMERICAN: How was this classic comment missed? Senator Diane Feinstein responded to anti-American sentiment in Europe by saying she was embarrassed to wear a U.S. flag pin. Here’s the passage from the San Jose Mercury News:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., just back from Europe, said she detected growing opposition to the United States among America’s allies. “The driver of a lot of this animus,” she said, “is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To leave this unresolved and to attack an Arab country is going to be viewed as an attack on the Arab world.” She said the anti-American sentiment was so strong that she felt it personally. “As an American, I have always been proud,” Feinstein said. Referring to her U.S. flag pin, she said, “I was embarrassed to wear it.”

Revealing, huh? For Feinstein, American foreign policy should be dictated by the views of a continent fixated on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, rather than American interests. And Feinstein’s Jewish and not-so-liberal! If the Democrats want the country to believe that they’re capable of guarding national security, they should surely avoid statements like that.

THOSE HIV STATS: I’m a big skeptic of most HIV statistics and the sloppiness of much reporting about the epidemic. But this story from the BBC manages to produce two statistics within a few paragraphs. First, one in nine South Africans is HIV-positive; then one in five is. The BBC. Is it becoming Reuters?

SOME LIKE IT HOT: Some flies go gay when the temperature rises. More evidence for a genetic component for homosexuality.

From London’s Evening Standard, the following paragraph today:

And the Arab League’s ambassador to London, Ali Muhsen Hamid, gave the first indication that the inspectors might not be allowed the unfettered access required when he said they could inspect only “military sites”.

Why am I not surprised?

“If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.” – George Galloway, Scottish Labour deputy and leading anti-war campaigner, in the Guardian. Give him points for candor.

OBITS TO DIE FOR: “As well as being a nude model for artists, Eileen Fox undertook work as a film extra, specialising in crowd scenes that called for gummy medieval serfs. One of her last appearances was in Kevin Costner’s ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ (1991). In 1980 she took British Airways to the Court of Appeal, alleging that she had been bitten on the bottom while travelling on one of the company’s Boeing 747s to the Seychelles. ‘It was a jumbo jet and they must have been elephant fleas,’ she told reporters afterwards. She claimed that the unsightly bites cost her professional earnings as a nude model. Lord Justice Megaw and his colleagues were not convinced.” – from another priceless Telegraph obit today.

Not likely. Saddam’s latest gamble is less an indication of his intent to disarm than a sign of how desperate his plight is. He wants to use the inspection issue – its vagaries, details and endless process – both to split the Security Council (i.e. France) and to buy time. This was, of course, always a risk and one of the strongest arguments for by-passing the U.N. altogether. But Bush’s speech was smarter than Saddam may recognize. The resolutions Bush invoked mean that Iraq must do far far more than simply play the inspector cat-and-mouse game again. It must actively disarm, destroy its weaponry, allow U.N. monitors a long-running role in the country, and give up its active sponsorship of terrorism. The White House is therefore absolutely right to throw the issue back to the Security Council with the assertion that “this is a tactical step by Iraq in hopes of avoiding strong U.N. Security Council action. As such, it is a tactic that will fail.” We’re now headed, I think, for a fight over what genuinely unfettered inspections require and which resolutions Iraq is supposed to adhere to. I say: unconditional, unfettered, military-backed inspectors with no time limit on their withdrawal; and every single U.N. resolution. Apart from the obvious need to have real access anywhere any time, it also seems to me that inspectors should have the right to interrogate Iraqi scientists and be in a postion to offer them political asylum if needs be. The regime’s very existence impedes genuine inspection, which is why some political space must be created for inspections to work adequately. My best guess is that there will be several rounds of shenanigans and a great deal of brinkmanship in the weeks ahead. But whatever happens, the U.S. cannot let the inspections regime return to the farce of the 1990s. Meanwhile, war preparations need to continue apace. They’re the reason we have this concession. They’ll be the reason we get any more.

THE BRITS RALLY: A dramatic swing in British public opinion toward war with Iraq. Even the Guardian is aghast:

Three weeks ago a similar Guardian/ICM poll asking the same question showed 50% opposed to a military attack on Baghdad and 33% in favour, a gap of 17 points. Now the gap has narrowed to four points with 40% against the possible war and 36% in favour. The rise of the “don’t knows” from 17% to 24% suggests that growing numbers are no longer sure that they disapprove of the idea.

This is called leadership. Bush and Blair have done this. Without them, it would not have happened.

THE LAST WORD ON SOUTH FLORIDA: Yes, Dave Barry has it down.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Defense attorneys had asked the jury to spare Westerfield’s life by portraying the defendant as a family man who has contributed to society through his patented design work on devices used in medicine and other fields. Westerfield had no prior felony record and played an active role in the lives of his children and close friends, defense attorney Steven Feldman said. ‘He’s a good man but for one three-day weekend of terror,’ he said.” – From MSNBC’s account of the conviction of David Westerfield for kidnapping and killing a 7-year-old girl.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG: Why I’m wrong about appeasement; wrong about the New York Times and Zimbabwe; wrong about the war; wrong about Chomsky; and wrong about the U.N. Welcome to the most masochistic Letters Page on the web.

If I were Saddam, I’d start playing games now. What the administration needs are clear criteria for acceptable inspections – so that they are meaningful and real and permanent. Those criteria must be adhered to. Saddam cannot be allowed to wriggle out of this again. That’s all I can say based on a single sketchy AP story. Check in tomorrow for more. (For the media record: Drudge had this minutes before anyone else. That’s why he rules.)

They’ve just declared that the air above them – for 60 km – is a weapons-free zone. No, I’m not making that up.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “TEN YEARS from now, will we be looking back asking how the United States could have thought that an unprovoked, preventive war on Iraq could succeed when the signs of danger were so clear and ominous? How the impossibility of accomplishing the mission through air power would lead levels of American casualties not seen since the Vietnam War? How an oil shock and deficit spending for war would plunge the United States and world economies into a major recession? How an administration so focused on getting rid of Saddam failed to create a workable policy to shape a post-Saddam Iraq?” – Karen J. Alter, Boston Globe.

Amazing what moral clarity can do for world affairs. Now that president Bush has essentially called the U.N.’s bluff, various countries and allies seem to be singing a different tune. Here’s the Saudi story. This is particularly true of the Arab world where strength leads to respect and respect leads to acquiescence. Even Egypt now seems on board. The question now is whether inspectors, backed by military force, can really determine whether Iraq’s potential nuclear capacity is operational. According to one Iraqi defector, the four years since the Clinton administration gave up on policing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have led to elaborate schemes to conceal them at all costs. We’ll see. But at least the burden of proof is now where it should be: on Iraq, not on the U.S. And almost all of that is president Bush’s doing.

CLINTON AND AL QAEDA: If you haven’t yet, read Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary piece of reporting in the New Yorker. It’s not online and it’s endless, but every page tells you something new about the provenance of al Qaeda, its roots in Egyptian radicalism, and its emergence in the 1990s as such a lethal force. But one thing that deeply impressed me is how damning an indictment this piece is of former president Clinton. What Wright shows is that Clinton’s passivity and inconsistency in the face of Islamist terrorism undoubtedly made matters far worse than they otherwise would have been. By engaging in piece-meal, ineffective and disastrous retreats and half-hearted swipes, Clinton not only failed to stop al Qaeda, he gave it new strength and vigor. It started early on with Clinton’s panicked withdrawal from Somalia:

Bin Laden glorified in the fact that his men had trained the Somali militiamen who shot down two American helicopters in the “Black Hawk Down” incident, in October of [1993], prompting president Clinton to withdraw all American soldiers from the country. “Based on the reports we received from our brothers in Somalia,” bin Laden Said, “we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness.”… Emboldened by the success of the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, bin Laden escalated his campaign against America.

When the Islamists saw how Washington responded to their terror, they ratcheted their campaign up. And why wouldn’t they have? Perhaps the worst of all worlds was Clinton’s highly dubious decision to send missiles to attack al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan. Here’s Wright again:

The strikes which, in the big-chested parlance of military planners, were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, cost American taxpayer seventy-nine million dollars, but they merely exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence. President Clinton later explained that one of the strikes had been aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders,” but the meeting in question had occurred a month earlier … The failure of Operation Infinite Reach established bin Laden as a legendary figure not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden’s voice came crackling across the radio transmission – “By the grace of God, I am alive!” – the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those who had objected the the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa, many of whom were Muslims, were cowed by the popular response to this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. The day after the strikes, Zawahiri called a reporter in Karachi, with a message: “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression… The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”

Part of that answer was 9/11. Notice that this story isn’t written by a conservative opponent of Clinton or in a conservative magazine. It’s by a superb reporter in a left-liberal magazine. No, Clinton is not responsible for al Qaeda, just as Chamberlain wasn’t responsible for Hitler. But Clinton is absolutely responsible for the consequences of his inaction and his appeasement. And it’s vital, if we are to prevent a repeat of the fecklessness of the 1990s, that we remember this lesson and take it to heart.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “George Bush is trying to hijack the UN. Delegates thought it was just a routine peacetime trip. They were settling back in their seats for a snooze when suddenly a scary-looking American president broke through the flimsy doors into the UN’s cockpit, grabbed the controls and tried to steer it into a catastrophe. Will anyone have the courage to overpower him or will they nervously sit it out, hoping that they might somehow survive?” – John O’Farrell, the Guardian. (Thanks to the bloggers at i330.org.)

WHY NOT ENGLISH? The Blair government wants Islamic immigrants to speak English when they immigrate. They’re going to set up an English test for citizenship. If I were Bush looking for a good domestic initiative that would also help the war on terror by helping to assimilate Islamic would-be Americans, I’d follow Blair’s lead and ask Ron Unz in for a meeting.

OVER THERE: Matt Welch brought this link to my attention. It’s a blog-site from troops. Illuminating and important to see the men and women still fighting al Qaeda far away from home. Send them your best.

THE ECONOMIST VERSUS ISRAEL: Well, you make the call. Here’s an article on the current Economist website that serves as a brief for Arab anger against the United States and the West. Here’s a paragraph:

As any simple Arab citizen will confirm, resentment of the superpower has never been a response to America itself. Rather, it is a response to its policies: its throttling of Iraq, sanctioning of Libya and Sudan, and, above all, its generous bankrolling of an aggressive Israel. “Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”

“Take Israel out of the equation?” Is that a new metaphor for getting rid of the Jewish state? “Any simple Arab citizen” is also a telling quote. How can you be a “citizen” in a hereditary monarchy, a theocracy or a police state, the current options on offer to the Arab world? Notice too the complete absence of any reference to rabid anti-Semitism among Arab populations. It isn’t even a question raised to be rebutted. It is simply ignored. Why? Notice also the strained call that Arab “governments must devolve more power to the people”. You mean … democracy? Why is the need for un-euphemized democracy so obvious to the Economist’s writers in every part of the world except the Middle East?

PALESTINIAN GAY-BAITING: No surprise that Yassir Arafat’s police state viciously persecutes gay people. No surprise the American left largely
ignores it. One Yalie speaks truth to campus power.

CONSERVATIVES AND MENTAL HEALTH: An amazing sub-head in the New York Times Magazine: “Pete Domenici is a social and fiscal conservative. So how did he become the Senate’s leading advocate for the mentally ill?” Just think about the assumptions behind that headline. Conservatives definitionally cannot favor treating mental illness as a serious matter. Why? Because they’re callous, bad, selfish, inhuman people. Why else? The article drips with the same kind of left-liberal condescension, although it’s perfectly well researched and written in every other respect. The truth is: such issues are not explicable on a liberal/conservative spectrum. Awareness of the seriousness of mental illness is largely a function of understanding the science that shows it to be indistinguishable from what we arbitrarily call “physical” illness. Once you have grasped that, the need for an end to what amounts to active discrimination against the mentally ill in our society becomes apparent. Good for Domenici for seeing this for decades. Good for the Bush administration for being the first to take the argument seriously. Brickbats for the Times Magazine for falling for easy anti-conservative bigotry. (They’ve changed the subhead in the online version. Perhaps someone saw sense.)

A reader sends in another twist to Bush’s smart game this summer in flushing out his opponents:

One other component of Bush’s remarkable summer strategy that I think you missed: The leaking of the legal memo from White House lawyers that Bush didn’t need Congressional approval prior to directing military action in Iraq. The blowhards in Congress – and their predictable, knee-jerk desire to be involved and oppose any assertion of presidential power – led to demands that they debate the issue even before the November elections!

I say: let’s get them on record.

THE PRICE OF TOUGH TALK: Funny, isn’t it, that the French are now becoming a little more friendly, and that the Palestinians are thinking about dumping Arafat. That clumsy oaf Bush actually speaking his mind, destroying our foreign alliances, upsetting the world. And it works!

AL-NOT-SO-BRIGHT: A reader comments on Madeleine Albright’s fatuous op-ed in the New York Times yesterday and my commentary on it:

I think you missed the larger point on the Albright piece – She agrees that Saddam is a mortal threat, that he is actively seeking nukes, and that regime change is necessary. Then she notes that Saddam doesn’t have nuclear capability yet and that his army is weak – and she offers these as reasons for waiting rather than taking military action now! The other remarkable thing about Albright’s article is that she calls for the UN to issue an ultimatum to Saddam, that she believes that the ultimatum will be rejected, but is steadfast in her position that we are not close to the time when we should take military action against him. So, we should issue an ultimatum expecting non-compliance and then back down when it is not complied with. Good strategy! Did she work for the Clinton administration or something?

MOVIE TITLE OF THE YEAR: Sorry, couldn’t resist.