Category: Old Dish

Will Saletan at Slate is honest enough to realize that president Bush has essentially outmaneuvered his opponents. Ignore Will’s silly credentializing with the left. Like many others, Will’s short memory simply ignores Bush’s campaign pledge to take Saddam out if he didn’t renounce weapons of mass destruction. But the good news is that Will recognizes that Bush has spectacularly called the U.N.’s bluff. As he puts it, “If you think that an American invasion of Iraq is unwise and that the world would be better off with unfettered U.N. weapons inspections backed by the serious threat of force, you’re probably right. But if you get what you want, thank Bush.” Even Howell Raines had to concede that the president is right today. The Times will now, of course, try to wriggle out of this. They call for a “thoughtful and resourceful plan” for weapons inspections, whatever that means. But they’re flailing. They can hardly back Saddam, but very shortly, when Saddam refuses to allow real and meaningful inspections, they will have to choose between supporting Saddam and supporting Bush. Even the Bush-haters on 43d Street may have to back the president, a delicious irony not lost on the White House. (Liberal journalist Patrick Tyler tries yet another anti-Bush spin-job today, but it’s looking desperate).

CHECK: It seems clear to me in retrospect that Bush’s summer strategy has been really, really smart. Let Cheney and Rummy threaten unilateral strikes. Get all those boomer lefties with Vietnam complexes to get so scared that they all but beg the president to go through the U.N. And then go through the U.N.! Now what do the Bumillers and Tylers and Kristofs do? Either they have to fess up and say they have no problem with weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad or they have to back real disarmament, which will, of course, mean war or regime change. The Times will try to argue for a long inspections regime, for the same merry-go-round that the Clinton administration fecklessly tried forever. But last March, they opined that “unless [Baghdad] fulfills those cease-fire requirements now, Iraq invites the kind of coercive actions Mr. Bush has threatened.” (My italics.) It’s now six months after “now”. How much longer can we afford to wait? Once again, advantage Bush.

A CASE IN POINT: Check out how desperate uber-lefty Robert Fisk has gotten. No, of course he doesn’t back Bush. But he does say that “one of the most telling aspects of the Bush speech was that all the sins of which he specifically accused the Iraqis a good proportion of which are undoubtedly true began in the crucial year of 1991.” (Again, my italics.) What’s interesting about this is that the anti-war left no longer disputes the mass of evidence that Iraq has flouted U.N. resolutions. How could they in the face of what Bush has so devastatingly outlined? They just think that nothing serious should be done about it. Fisk’s argument (Like Sontag’s) for doing nothing is that at some point in the past the U.S. had dirty hands in the matter. But even granting them this point, doesn’t that make it more incumbent on the U.S. now to set things right? Fisk doesn’t answer this. Because he cannot. The case Bush made today at the U.N. is basically unanswerable. So the anti-war left will simply come up more excuses, side-shows and changes of subject. I can’t wait. A reader writes to point out the similarities in Bush’s strategy with his tax cut and his war on terror:

On both issues he faced a vocal opposition to his policy and in both instances his strategy was the same: Silence & Patience. His initial stances on both issues were so rigid and resolute (as well as right), that the debate quickly moved away from the “if” of a tax cut or a regime change to more qualitative arguments, like the size of the tax cut, or the timing of the attack. I think this is more than coincidence. It seems Bush is becoming the rock against which his enemies break themselves.

And a rock on which this country can increasingly rely for its self-defense.

WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS? The short answer is that they’re so busy calling for us to have a debate that they’ve forgotten to join it. How many Democrats have come out clearly either for or against a war with Iraq? Very, very few. Daschle bravely said yesterday that the Democrats were “not prepared to make any commitment” to voting on a war resolution until yet more questions are answered. He’s scared shitless. The New Republic rightly puts the boot in this week. It’s one brilliant editorial. An honorable exception is Bob Kerrey, whose piece in the Journal yesterday was wonderfully sane and sensible. But he’s retired from the Senate! As for the rest of them? Pathetic weather-vanes. You know, the media hates the fact that Republicans might use the war on terror as a campaign issue this fall. But I think they’re quite right to. With a few exceptions, the Democrats’ contribution to one of the most vital discussions this country has had in many years has been next to nothing. Why should a party that has almost nothing clear to say on the most important matter before us be entrusted with control of the Congress? They deserve to lose big.

WHOPPER OF THE DAY: “Since the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, each time Mr. Hussein has pushed, we have pushed back.” – Madeleine Albright in the New York Times today. This is sadly untrue. While Albright was secretary of state, the U.S. sat back and let Iraq try to develop weapons of mass destruction with no inspectors present and no credible military threat to force his compliance with U.N. resolutions. She is one of the people who allowed us to get into this predicament. She’s one of the few Democrats who really should keep her mouth shut.

Here’s an editorial from March 10 of this year from the New York Times. I reprint it today just to show that what president Bush is now doing has been long in the works and was once supported by the paper of record. Here’s what the Times wrote:

President Bush’s tough talk on Iraq may be working. Russia and the Arab world are now urging Saddam Hussein to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors to avoid a large-scale American attack. Pressure on Baghdad needs to be sustained, a point Vice President Dick Cheney will make on his trip to the Middle East that begins today. The journey will feature discussions about possible future military action against Iraq.

Last week Iraq held its first serious discussions with the United Nations about resuming investigations of Iraqi facilities, oversight that was suspended more than three years ago. The positive tone of the talks justifies a second meeting next month.

Meetings are not a substitute for inspections. No one knows what Iraqi scientists have been up to for the past three years, but there is good reason to fear the worst. Baghdad must not be allowed to drag out these discussions while moving ahead with the development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Nor can there be any negotiations about diluting the inspections and arms control requirements. The team of tough, independent professionals assembled by the United Nations’ new chief inspector, Hans Blix, must be allowed to do its job unhindered, as Washington insists. Iraq’s latest effort to divert trucks imported under the oil-for-food program to military use shows that Mr. Hussein has hardly given up on his military ambitions.

This time, a show of compliance will not do. More than a decade ago, at the end of the Persian Gulf war, Iraq agreed to turn over and destroy its medium- and long-range missiles, poison gases, germ weapons and nuclear bomb materials to the satisfaction of the United Nations’ weapons inspectors. It has still not done so. Unless it fulfills those cease-fire requirements now, Iraq invites the kind of coercive actions Mr. Bush has threatened.

If the Times is in any way consistent, it will therefore applaud president Bush’s tough stance at the U.N. today when it editorializes tomorrow. In fact, I fail to see how any reasonable person who isn’t a supporter of Islamism or terrorism or pacifism can disagree with the president’s message. My suspicion is that the canards about the president’s upping the ante in Iraq as a way to distract from al Qaeda failures or a sagging economy (the smears regularly spat out on the Times op-ed page) are a strange form of projection. My suspicion is that it is the New York Times that has abandoned its once principled position of enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq by force if necessary because of partisanship and cynicism. Their hatred of this president has led them to leave the world at risk of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We’ll see tomorrow if they have any integrity on this matter, won’t we?

SONTAG AND LINCOLN: A reader makes a telling point about Susan Sontag’s grasp of history:

You quote Susan Sontag (in your Salon piece) mentioning Lincoln, and she says that he made “bold statements of new national goals in a time of real, terrible war.” Funny thing, though, that the North never declared war against the South in the Civil War – only the South declared war. Why? Look to Lincoln’s address to Congress on July 4, 1861, where he specifically states that the action of the southern states is one of rebellion, NOT secession. To declare war would require acknowledging that the South was a legally separate and sovereign entity. Therefore Lincoln merely called for force to be gathered and used to suppress the unlawful rebellion. How interesting that Sontag would ignore Lincoln’s warmongering-without-formal-war while criticizing Bush for the same.

Additionally, in taking on the Civil War Lincoln took for himself a vast array of power (even dictating to Congress when they should meet) that Bush and Ashcroft have never even dared consider, even with their occasional overreaching granted. Of all presidents, Sontag picks a mighty odd one to try to make her points with. Seems like if she were a writer at the time of the Civil War, her own arguments would demand that she lay even more caustic venom at Lincoln’s feet than Bush’s.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes-
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

– Emily Dickinson (#341)

YESTERDAY: I couldn’t watch the television. We’ve all seen enough. It was a very high tide here. The water kept coming and coming toward the wharf I live on until it lapped almost underneath. As the tide crested, three boys and a chocolate lab puppy played in the surf, tossing branches into the water and having the puppy fetch. On wharves to either side of me, Old Glory fluttered. And as the sky cleared, and the boys left, the beagle and I went for a walk on the beach and fetched a cup of tea from a nearby coffee-shop. I wanted a normal, quiet day. I wanted to live a piece of the normality that was so abruptly snatched from so many a year ago. I wanted quiet. Quiet before more dread of the future. It occurs to me that my somewhat insistent view that we need to fight back against the roots of this horror might be misconstrued as a love or passion for war. I hope not. In fact, I think some of the anger many of us felt a year ago is related to our hatred of war. I loved the innocence of America when I came here almost twenty years ago. The one strain of American isolationism I warmed to was the natural and so American desire to be left in peace on this continent, to start the world anew, to live as if the routine of war and threat and danger were forever dispelled by the vast oceans that surround this continent. I love the fact that Americans actively hate war, its trappings, its necessities. No lover of freedom loves war, which always limits freedom. But war was brought here – a vile, almost medieval religious war, fueled by hatred and resentment and paranoia and failure. Their campaign, alas, is not a metaphor. They are brutally opposed to such things. Even imagery is banned under their austere form of Islam. They read literally; they hate with divine dispensation. Our campaign against them and their sponsors and supporters in Baghad and Damascus and Ryadh and Tehran is not therefore a function of our love of war; but our determination to end it, and to liberate that part of the world from the despots and psychoses that now hold it back.

THE BEST 9/11 PIECE: Lileks always makes me feel less lonely.

SCHRODER’S GAMBLE: The German Chancellor has made clear that he opposes any military intervention to rid the world of Saddam’s threat of weapons of mass destruction. But re-reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s superb piece in the New Yorker earlier this year, a reader came upon this passage:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program. I talked about this prospect last fall with August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, in Berlin. We met in the new glass-and-steel Chancellery, overlooking the renovated Reichstag. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam’s nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel’s security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.

So the head of German intelligence believes Saddam will – not “might” but “will” – have a nuclear capacity in three years. And he also believes no single missile-strike will remove it. Why hasn’t anyone called Schroder on this?

THE PRO-WAR LEFT: Lest we forget it exists, here’s a passage from an email I just received:

I have always been a knee-jerk liberal, and passionate Democrat. (While George Bush and I were both at Yale, I canvassed New Haven working class neighborhoods for Eugene McCarthy.) But September 11 has made me a kind of War-On-Terror liberal, something like the old Cold War liberals I used to – mistakenly, I now see – disparage. Anyway, I am now completely behind the war against the Islamic fascists. And I think Sontag is a contemptible fool. Your perspicacious reader was exactly right to suggest the world has passed her by; I think this is a deep problem for many people just now.

Hope again.

flashbulb memory. As time passes, the chronology gets jumbled up; we fumble on the details; we airbrush some parts and highlight others. We re-imagine the past to make it more coherent, meaningful, bearable. One ongoing study at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Psychology Department – of a large, country-wide sample of people – is finding out that we have already forgotten some things about September 11. How much time between the first and second plane? Which tower fell first? What was the flight number of the second plane? Was the Pentagon hit after both World Trade Center Towers? We forget. We conflate. We confuse.

But we also know, of course, that this kind of memory is not the most important one. Some events solder themselves into our consciousness so intensely that they change the way we see the world for ever. The details barely matter. The change itself matters. Your child is killed in a car accident; your mother is diagnosed with breast cancer; your best friend betrays you; your wife is raped. These kinds of events stop your life for a moment; your soul freezes while the rest of the world swivels around you to a new position. Part of you insists: this hasn’t happened. Part of you demands: move on. Most of you knows that neither is an option.

And most of us know that there is no moving on from September 11. It wasn’t a random tragedy for which grief is a slow-acting salve. It was a massacre – a cold-blooded, fanatical murder of civilians by men possessed by a theocratic ideology. It was an invasion – the violation of sovereign American soil, the erasure of a visible monument to American success and energy and civilization. It was a crime – the filling of the air of a great city with the irradiated dust of innocent human lives. It was a statement – that radical Islam intends to attack and destroy the very principles of the Enlightenment that underpin the American experiment – freedom of religion, of conscience, toleration and secularism. The appropriate response to this act of nihilism and evil is therefore not grief or remembrance or sadness or reflection, although each of those has its place. The appropriate response is rage.

For whatever else September 11 was, it was a declaration of war. That war continues. The totalitarian force of fundamentalist Islam, like the forces of Nazism and Communism that preceded it, has not disappeared. We briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there, it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction which his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. The United Nations and much of the civilized world would rather let him do so than face the risks of taking him on. Suicide bombers – ideological comrades of the twisted sociopaths who flew planes into the World Trade Center – have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past a core of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient home in Europe. Educated men and women who regularly find the slightest fault in democratic Western societies, vie with each other to provide excuses, justifications and rationalizations for the murderous tyrannies and blood-thirsty mobs of the Arab Middle East. In a welter of arguments, articles, op-eds and books, intellectuals are eagerly laying out the case that the murderers of 9/11 died for an explicable and justifiable cause, that the West itself is in part responsible for what was unleashed against it, that war can be avoided, that there is nothing but shades of gray in this complicated world.

But through all this, we know what that day showed us. It really wasn’t complicated. That day showed us that we stand deeply vulnerable to a destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it kills civilians not as a by-product of fighting but as an end in itself; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. September 11 showed Americans that for the first time in their history, they stand vulnerable to that force in their homeland. War has been brought to them. And, deep in their hearts, they know it.

That’s why I think that, for all the return to superficial normality, Americans really have changed. The illusion of isolationism has been ripped apart. How can America opt out of the world when the world refuses to leave America alone? The illusion of appeasement has been destroyed. Do we really think that by coddling regimes like Iraq or Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia, we will help defuse the evil that lurks in their societies? The illusion of American exceptionalism has been shattered. The whole dream of this continent – that it was a place where you could safely leave the old world and its resentments behind – was ended that day. The proliferation of flags that day and subsequently was not a function of jingoism. It was the display of a symbol whose meaning had just been changed for ever. The inviolability of America had been destroyed. And the display of Old Glory was a signal not of blind patriotism but a way to show the world and the enemy that we loved it still and passionately, and that we were prepared to fight to restore its honor. A whole generation will grow up with this as their most formative experience – a whole younger generation that knows that there actually is a right and a wrong, and that neutrality is no longer an option. That generational power has only just begun to transform the culture. In decades’ time, we will look back and see what a difference it made.

And if we need to humanize this, perhaps we should leave our own memories of that day behind and think of those wives and husbands and children and parents who cannot live a single day without remembering. For them, normality can never return. Every evening when a father doesn’t come home, every birthday when a card cannot be sent, every Christmas when a child’s mother is no longer there is a rebuke to the very idea of our broader forgetfulness. They are symbols of our wider collective wound, goads to us when we falter in the fight back, emblems of the free society that this new enemy is determined to destroy. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, everything is everything and they are still missing. And they demand that our vigilance never end.

My analysis of Sontag’s op-ed will be up on Salon shortly. But I was struck by the similarity of her opposition to any description of our current struggle as war with Paul Krugman’s op-ed today as well. Here’s Sontag:

When the government declares war on cancer or poverty or drugs it means the government is asking that new forces be mobilized to address the problem. It also means that the government cannot do a whole lot to solve it. When the government declares war on terrorism – terrorism being a multinational, largely clandestine network of enemies – it means that the government is giving itself permission to do what it wants. When it wants to intervene somewhere, it will. It will brook no limits on its power… What I do question is the pseudo-declaration of pseudo-war. These necessary actions should not be called a “war.” There are no endless wars; but there are declarations of the extension of power by a state that believes it cannot be challenged.

And here’s Krugman:

But if this is war, it bears little resemblance to the wars America has won in the past. Where is the call for sacrifice, for a great national effort? How will we know when or if we’ve won? One doesn’t have to be a military expert to realize that the struggle ahead won’t involve any D-Days, nor will there ever be a V-J day. There will never be a day when we can declare terrorism stamped out for good. It will be more like fighting crime, where success is always relative and victory is never final, than like fighting a war. And the metaphor we use to describe our struggle matters: some things that are justifiable in a temporary time of war are not justifiable during a permanent fight against crime, even if the criminals are murderous fanatics.

Clarifying convergence, huh?

Tony Blair knocks it out of the park at the Trades Union Congress. Here’s an argument that strikes me as a critical one in the debate over pre-emption:

Suppose I had come last year on the same day as this year – September 10. Suppose I had said to you: there is a terrorist network called al-Qaida. It operates out of Afghanistan. It has carried out several attacks and we believe it is planning more. It has been condemned by the UN in the strongest terms. Unless it is stopped, the threat will grow. And so I want to take action to prevent that.
Your response and probably that of most people would have been very similar to the response of some of you yesterday on Iraq.
There would have been few takers for dealing with it and probably none for taking military action of any description.

Read the entire speech. But it seems to me that this early question posed by Blair must surely be asked of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Raines, Sontag and many others opposed to war in Iraq. If you had been given evidence of al Qaeda’s capabilities and intent to kill Americans prior to September 11, would you have gone into Afghanistan to prevent it? The answer seems to me a pretty clear one: almost all the critics of pre-emption would have refused to go into Afghanistan to prevent 9/11. Their policy is this: we have to wait to get devastated before we act. My policy is: once is enough. The advocates of inaction – or, worse, the appearance of action – seem to me to be essentially bargaining away the lives of American citizens to protect their anachronistic notion of an international order. No president of the United States can do that while performing his constitutional duty to protect us from a foreign menace. Thank God.

“Some people in the United States were rather delighted that it (the attacks) mobilized the entire country and focused on a single enemy, which we’d been demonizing for quite some time — the Muslim world. He [Bush] wants this to go on forever. He said to Congress after 9/11: ‘It’s going to be a long war’. He was thrilled.” – Gore Vidal on the BBC World Service.

BUSH REBOUND? Has the Iraq debate halted Bush’s polling slide? And hurt Democrats’ chances in November? Ipsos-Reid sees some evidence for it, although the Dems still have a clear edge.

MUST READ: “The hostility which these regimes, and the terrorists they sponsor, feel towards the West is existential. It cannot be assuaged by more international aid, a reordering of the world financial system, a new peace plan for the Palestinians, the signing of the Kyoto treaty or any other of the panaceas for soothing away world tension peddled by the new Left or old Arabists. As with Nazis and the Communists, they hate us for what we are, not what we do. And that hatred, being molten, is dynamic. It cannot be limited by lines in the sand, or constrained by diplomacy. Just as it is in the nature of totalitarians to hate so it is endemic to them to attack, to expand, to export their violence.” – Michael Gove in the Times (of London) today.

From the Washington Post:

“Report Warns Iraq Could Produce Nuclear Weapons

LONDON, Sept. 9–Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon “in a matter of months” if supplied fissile materials from an outside source, according to a report released here today. Saddam Hussein’s government also has an extensive biological weapons capability, a smaller chemical weapons stockpile and a small supply of missiles to deliver them, the report concluded.”

From the Raines Times:

“London Group Says Iraq Lacks Nuclear Material for Bomb

LONDON, Sept. 9 – Saddam Hussein has substantial stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and the capacity to expand production of them on short notice, but Iraq will be unable to build a nuclear weapon for years unless it obtains radioactive material on the black market, a leading security affairs research organization said today.”

9/11 IN OSLO: My friend Bruce Bawer emails to let me know that Oslo’s main commemmoration of 9/11 will be a major address by … Gore Vidal! Pilger was already booked.

Whose inspired idea was it to ask Susan Sontag to write an op-ed for the New York Times the day before the first anniversary of September 11? Sontag and Raines … together at last. (I’ll respond to her arguments later today).

I must say I found Adam Shatz’s long essay in the Nation about the Left’s response to 9/11 to be pretty fair, comprehensive and occasionally fascinating. What its conclusion amounts to, I think, is that the crime of 9/11 has still not finished throwing that diverse coalition we call the Left into a deep and long-lasting crisis. Check out this paragraph:

Some of the people I interviewed opposed going to war in October because they feared a bloody quagmire and didn’t trust the Bush Administration, but changed their minds a month later when the Taliban unexpectedly fell. Others went in the opposite direction, coming out against the war only after US bombing began to inflict heavy civilian casualties. A few people supported targeted strikes against Al Qaeda training bases, but not the overthrow of the Taliban – not because of any sympathy for the regime but because the Bush Administration might be emboldened to overthrow other governments. Others argued, in contrast, that we shouldn’t be bombing Afghanistan unless we were willing to send in ground troops. Some said that a struggle against radical Islam is necessary, but that we should be waging it in Saudi Arabia, not in Afghanistan. And many of the people who cautiously supported the Afghan intervention passionately assailed the war on terror as a new cold war, a danger to both American democracy and security.
To be honest, I’ve held a number of these positions myself.

Although it’s hard not to snicker at the pretzels these people have twisted themselves into, it’s also admirable, isn’t it, that some are thinking through their conflicts honestly. There are some contemptible people in the anti-war left, but there are also some people thinking for their lives. Thank God.

ISN’T SHE LOVELY? Baby pictures from the Hamas website. Charming. But, hey, it’s just another culture isn’t it, professor Fish? The pics come courtesy of a blog I unaccountably left out of my August round-up: the always great Little Green Footballs.

IRAQ AND BUSH: Thanks to readers who’ve tracked down old statements by president Bush on Iraq. I was particularly struck by this piece from the Boston Globe in December 1999:

Thursday night, when asked what he would do about Hussein, his father’s nemesis during the war to free Kuwait, Bush was a tad belligerent. He would not ease sanctions, he said. He would not negotiate with Hussein, he said. He would help opposition groups, he continued, and he would make ”darn sure” that Hussein lived up to agreements he signed in the early ’90s.
“And if I found in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I’d take him out,” Bush declared. ”I’m surprised he’s still there. I think a lot of other people are as well.”
When the moderator, Brit Hume, inquired further, Bush either pulled back, clarified, or contradicted himself. ”Take him out?” Hume asked.
”Take out the weapons of mass destruction,” Bush responded.
Yesterday morning, Bush was asked again about Hussein, and how he planned to take out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
”That’s up for Saddam Hussein to figure out,” Bush said during an early morning news conference, declining to elaborate. ”He doesn’t need to be building them. … He just needs to know I’ll take them out. It’s important for a future commander in chief to state our intentions and the means will be evident to him.”

It’s so odd that so many are now calling for a debate about Iraq, as if we haven’t had one before. We’ve been having a debate for a frigging decade. The only reason for the call for a new debate is because the appeasers have so far lost the argument and want to try again. This is a democracy and we should have such a debate – even until we go blue in the face. But it seems to me that the insistence that president Bush “make the case,” is simply a ploy for many on the left to avoid taking a position. Well, pretty soon, they’ll have to. I can’t wait.

HARPERS CALLS ME AN ANTI-SEMITE (I THINK): I guess you can tell where Lee Siegel is coming from when he argues in the latest Harpers magazine (not online, alas) that the Bush administration is composed of near sociopaths, that Paul Krugman is “an economic genius,” and that Richard Goldstein is “perhaps the most gifted gay journalist in the country.” He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, as he is to his view of my own work. He’s entitled to think that,

reading [Sullivan], you feel that he is not thinking, exactly; rather, one side of his brain is merely fondling the other.

Or this gem:

[I]t is hard not to picture the two sides of Sullivan’s brain as two kittens, playfully cavorting with a little rubber figure called Michael Oakeshott.

Two kittens? Why not bunny rabbits? But what Siegel is not entitled to is the preposterous idea that because a) I once considered running an ad on this site for the pharmaceutical companies, and then didn’t, my views are “bought and paid for,” and b) because a friend donated $500 to the site’s expenses, he “bought” a favorable mention in the Dish. The friend is Charles Francis, someone who has done more than anyone to build a bridge between gays and Republicans in recent years. His donation was swiftly disclosed on the site, and still is, and the notion that I would need $500 to support his efforts, when I’ve been banging on about the same themes for over a decade, is simply loopy. Then there’s c) which almost beggars belief. I can’t do better than to cite Siegel’s logic:

More recently, 9/11 gave [Sullivan] the opportunity to recover the fig-leaf of seriousness he repeatedly reaches for; you could see him railing against Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism in The New York Times Magazine, sentiments I would second whole-heartedly were they coming from a writer who really believed them himself. But Sullivan also likes to publish anti-Semitic jokes on his website, which he then virtuously adduces as evidence of rising anti-Semitism.

Now think about that passage for a minute. I think he’s saying that my long years of concern about anti-Semitism, my blogging exposing it, my documented history of love for Israel, and my constant attempts to engage and oppose religious fundamentalisms of all kinds – these are all elaborate fakes, designed to cover what is actually an anti-Semitic, Fundamentalist heart. I do not “really believe” what I write. When I condemn an anti-Semitic joke, I’m really endorsing it. Siegel’s evidence? You just read all of it.