Category: Old Dish

Bob Bartley moves the ball a little in his piece this morning. It’s about the criteria for regime change:

A rough cut at a guiding principle, it seems to me, is that the world has grown too small to tolerate a state that (1) traffics with terrorists, (2) is strenuously seeking weapons of mass destruction, and (3) is ruled by a madman. Laying aside quibbles over proof and definition, can anyone object to this principle?
The Saudis may be a problem, but by these tests are not “enemies.” Syria and Libya help terrorists, but are not big players in the nuclear game. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe may have gone mad, but is neither nuclear or a world terrorist.
President Bush’s “axis of evil” – Iran, North Korea and Iraq – help terrorists, are strenuously seeking weapons of mass destruction, and are run by elites that are, to say the least, unstable. Saddam Hussein stands out with madman actions such as starting wars, repressing his own people, deploying poison gas on civilians, trying to assassinate a former U.S. president, and breaking agreements with the U.S. and world community.

Sounds eminently reasonable to me. The real problem with the Europeans, I think, is that they didn’t experience 9/11 themselves, have a history of appeasing terror, and so find the new doctrine not just psychologically novel to them but also an implicit indictment of their entire foreign policy record of the last decade. They’ll have to swallow some pride to come aboard. Like Scowcroft and Powell.

CHOMSKY’S THREAT?: It’s an idle one, of course, this time wrapped in pseudo-concern for the United States. But Noam Chomsky couldn’t be clearer: attack Iraq and the Islamist terrorists will come back at you. Just like they did after we liberated Afghanistan. But the underlying message is still a Chomsky classic: you deserve it.

“You’ve been on planes. Think how it feels, especially on a morning cross-country flight. You got up early; you’re tired; you’ve been buckled in your seat for a couple of hours, with hours more to go. You’re reading, or maybe dozing. You’re essentially cargo: There’s nowhere you can go, nothing you can do, no role you could possibly play in flying this huge, complex machine. You retreat into your passenger cocoon, passive, trusting your fate to the hands of others, confident that they’ll get you down safe, because they always do.
Now imagine what that awful morning was like for the people on Flight 93. Imagine being ripped from your safe little cocoon, discovering that the plane was now controlled by killers, that your life was in their bloody hands. Imagine knowing that there was nobody to help you, except you, and the people, mostly strangers, around you.
Imagine that, and ask yourself: What would you do? Could you do anything? Could you overcome the fear clenching your stomach, the cold, paralyzing terror?
The people on Flight 93 did.” – Dave Barry, in his latest, great, column (via Instapundit).

I really should write a mea culpa about Tony Blair. I’d become more skeptical of him these past few years, especially on domestic policy, but all that has to be balanced now against his piercing leadership in the war on terror. The fact that Britain might be the country to formally prod the U.N. Security Council to act up to its obligations on Iraq is proof enough. But Blair’s matter-of-fact insistence on the profound threat posed by Saddam to the rest of the world rescues the United States from an international isolation it does not in any way deserve. The British tabloid press depicts Blair as Bush’s poodle. Nonsense. He’s Bush’s translator and facilitator. He adds rhetorical nuance and diplomatic finesse to Bush’s gut refusal to risk American citizens’ lives for the sake of pleasing French presidents and the editorial board of the New York Times. Blair and Bush are very different personalities – the down-to-earth Texan, uncomfortable among East Coast elites, yearning for the weekend, compred with the upper-middle-class do-gooder, infused with moral clarity, barely leaving the office. Their relationship is not of identicals but of individual complements in a single cause: ridding the world of terrorist blackmail. Reagan and Thatcher had a similar relationship. One was a big-picture dreamer; the other was a shopkeeper’s daughter with a firm grip of accounting. But they united on ideology, and, despite (or perhaps because of) their personal differences, clearly had a profound affection for each other. In contrast, Bush-Major was a match of overly-similar cautious Tories, and it is their failed international legacy, based on a shared lack of imagination and boldness, that the next generation of leaders is having to deal with. Good relationships, it seems to me, require enough similarity to make them work (i.e. a common goal, or common values) but also enough difference to make them broad-based and supple. Bush and Blair have this, I think, which is good news for all of us. People close to both have told me how well they get along, despite Blair’s up-tight persona and Bush’s laid-back bluntness. (It’s Cherie who finds Bush hard to deal with.) Could it be that both men see in the other something they miss in themselves? Whatever the reason for the bond (which is stronger, I’m told, than that between Blair and Clinton), it couldn’t come at a more propitious moment.

THAT ANGLO-AMERICAN MAGIC II: The interview between the wife formerly known as Madonna, her husband, the movie director, Guy Ritchie, and the New York Times’ Alan Riding was a classic. Mr and Mrs Ritchie are another Blair-Bush, Thatcher-Reagan miracle of trans-Atlantic complementarity. You can see what Madonna sees in Ritchie – that working-class gruffness, the testosteroned good looks, the utterly un-p.c. and therefore almost exotic machismo. And you can see what he sees in her: amazing bod, loadsa cash, pop-cultural genius. But what’s so great about their marriage is how it plays with old stereotypes. The Ritchie household merges the Hollywood power-couple phenom with an old-fashioned husband and bloody wife from London in the 1950s. Ritchie is always calling Madonna, the “missus,” or “the wife.” And, like many British husbands, he can also degenerate into the role of put-upon teenage boy at a moment’s notice:

MADONNA: There are elements in the movie that I would say are reflective of the politics in our relationship. [She speaks to Mr. Ritchie, who is putting on Madonna’s reading glasses.] Don’t stretch out my glasses, Guy, you have a very big head.
RITCHIE: That’s all right, they’re already stretched.
MADONNA: No, they’re not. Take them off.
RITCHIE: All right. Come on, concentrate on the–
MADONNA: Anyway, yes, Guy’s a real macho and I’m a real hardnose, too. And sometimes we come to blows – not physically, but mentally and emotionally. And there is an element, a tiny little element of that in there. I’m attracted to men who are going to stand up to me.

Amen, Madonna. The great thing about Mrs Ritchie is that she’s a feminist woman who still thinks men are hot. She understands essential gender difference, and doesn’t try to erase it, but to celebrate and enjoy it on an equal footing. This is what some contemporary feminists miss – that scorning men for being pigs should not in any way be a barrier to loving them. Madonna wants equality with men, but she sure as hell doesn’t want them to stop being men, testosterone, beer, and all. And in Ritchie, who has the Brit-male-“I’m-gonna-go-down-the-pub-with-me-mates-while-you-do-the-hoovering”-schtick down pat, she has struck gold. He’s got a sharp tongue as well:

MADONNA: I just think I have to be clever about picking the right parts.
RITCHIE: [Reading from a list of Madonna’s movies] “The Tulse Luper Suitcases.” Remember that?
MADONNA: No. But Guy, are you going to read that or do the interview?
RIDING: [To Madonna] Here you can demonstrate your powers of getting him to cooperate.
MADONNA: Guy.
RITCHIE: Yes, darling.
RIDING: We were going to talk about how the two of you work together, and I’m seeing an example of it.
MADONNA: Yeah, well, this is an example of it. I try to exert my power and it doesn’t work.

“Yes, darling.” Two words that help sum up the British male’s essential attitude toward “the missus:” world-weary coexistence. Madonna’s brilliance is to find all that schtick absurd, funny and sexy at the same time. As always, her taste is impeccable.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Not everyone will be greeting September 11 in a somber mood. Some will be celebrating.

A SADDAM PRIMER: I found this summary of Iraq’s horrors useful and salutary. For the proper context. I still want to urge you to buy and read Michael Ledeen’s “The War Against The Terror-Masters,” the most concise description of the forces of evil we are now confronting. It’s our book club selection this month. Read it and join the argument with Michael himself later this month.

LETTERS: “I was raised to be a Guilty Southern White Boy, but it didn’t take. Real life in the South of the last 30 years has been too complicated for me to work up very much unadulterated “G.” One way you can see the drift of the traditional southern liberal into irrelevance is to read To Kill a Mockingbird, the GSWB’s sacred text. I love that book, but, as a high school English teacher in the Atlanta area, I’m glad that I no longer have to teach it (students in the grades I teach don’t read it). Year by year, that book becomes more and more obsolete as a picture of race relations or any other aspect of life in the South. The day has come and gone for Atticus Finch’s heroism and Tom Robinson’s martyrdom. The legacy of those days is still with us, but now we’re on to something different. Some folks haven’t figured that out yet.” This, more GSWB testimony, the new York Times as Pravda, and why there are only five cool English guys alive, all on the Letters Page this week.

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE:
“Meanwhile the popular expectation of a knockout blow against the Taliban has been cruelly disappointed. Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success – now that Milosevic has been defeated – of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, November 2, 2001.

“We Americans can learn to live with minor terrorism, as the people of Britain, Spain, India, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Sri Lanka and most of the world have already learned to do. By doing so, we will ensure that Sept. 11 will not lead to a Third World War and will not change our world forever… Unlike the Gulf War, which was essentially paid for by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan, we would have to pay for this war ourselves, and the impact on oil prices and on our economy could be disastrous. And we would wage this war largely on our own: Our supposed friends in the Middle East – King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Turks, the Egyptians and even many of the Kurds – oppose military action. Moreover, such a war might yet produce the vast enemy we currently lack. If we bomb and invade Iraq – surely killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians – if we destabilize the Arab countries, if we permit Israel to deny the Palestinians a separate state, we risk uniting the Muslim world against us and setting off that much-feared “clash of civilizations.” This could lead to a Third World War, a ghastly conflict employing biological warfare, chemical warfare, radiological warfare and even, heaven help us, nuclear warfare. If these consequences ensued, Sept. 11 would indeed be a date that would live in infamy.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, September 8, 2002.

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN’S NIGHTMARE: Masculine, Mid-Western football fans – and they’re gay.

TIMES WATCH: In yesterday’s Week In Review, under a picture of Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, under arrest for espionage, the caption reads:

The United States forms the House Un-American Activities Committee to root out Communist Spies. Alger Hiss (left photo) was accused of espionage, and perjury charges were brought against him when he denied being a spy before a grand jury. He was convicted in 1951. It was later learned that some evidence supporting his claim of innocence was covered up.

It is also now public knowledge, thanks to decoded Soviet transcripts, that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and traitor. Only a few nutcases at the Nation believe in Hiss’s innocence any more. Oh, and the editors of the New York Times.

If Saddam Hussein “fails to comply [with U.N. inspections], and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction… If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow… Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.” – Bill Clinton, February 18, 1998. How soon they forget. And some of them accuse president Bush of cynicism?

GOOD NEWS: The administration seems to be following the strategy I wrote about last Tuesday. Use the U.N. – but don’t be used by it. The case is so strong we can afford to exhaust every single peaceful avenue, as long as we don’t leave open the possibility of Saddam wriggling out of his obligations.

John Scalzi has a very smart piece on how or if blogs can ever make real money for writers. Bottom line: he thinks they’re inherently loss-leaders. I fear I agree with him.

It seems the brutal tyrant in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has lost his head p.r. guy. Never mind. With puff-pieces like this one, who needs p.r.? “A Hero To Many!” Whoever Rachel Swarns is, she’s clearly a Rainesian. I love this paragraph:

Mr. Mugabe is criticized in the West for encouraging blacks to invade white-owned farms, for hounding journalists and judges, and for jailing opposition party leaders. But to some leaders, particularly in Africa, he is a hero. To them, he is the guerrilla who ended white rule here in 1980, the statesman who expanded access to education and health care and the revolutionary who is returning land stolen from blacks during the British colonial era.

“Criticized in the West.” This is a man who jails his opponents, rigs elections and is fomenting a famine in his country by brutal evictions of the only productive farmers. He’s viciously homophobic and reviled by any serious African analyst as a menace to any democratic trends in the region. But the Times sees his good side. Of course they do.

James Lileks’ stirring piece on why he’s still angry; and why we all should be. The ending made my stomach clench again.

I just took another look at Jeffrey Goldberg’s harrowing account of what’s been going on in Iraq, Iraq’s links with al Qaeda, and the record of this man, Saddam, whom so many wish to contain and appease. It’s about the best reality-check I can find.

PRE-EMPTIVE LOGIC: Hitch has a superb essay on then need to keep our sights on the evil of radical Islamism, as the anniversary of their massacre approaches. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.

Sorry, Hitch. It’s beginning to look as if we’ll have to wait for another catastrophe before we can carry this struggle forward.

GSWB SYNDROME: I was struck by a few of you who wrote in to berate me for bringing this subject up. You have, it seems to me, a good point (although, in fairness, a reader brought it up). Here’s one particularly tart email on the subject:

OK, enough. Accusing Howell Raines, James Carville, etc. of being liberals because they’re southerners and want approval from northerners is silly–just as silly as saying that Andrew Sullivan, a lower-middle-class Irish catholic lad and budding homosexual growing up in stuffy, class-obsessed England, was ashamed of his social class, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, and became a conservative in order to curry favor with his betters. People sometimes do things out of genuine moral and intellectual conviction, and being an open supporter of civil rights in the South of the 50s and 60s took a whole heap of moral conviction. Implying otherwise is just a cheap shot.

I think the guy has a point. I don’t think that you can reduce people’s political convictions to a pat analysis of their roots. There’s no reason a Southern white male might not come to be extremely liberal for his own good reasons. At the same time, there does seem to be something of a type among Southern liberal journalists and politicians, who often cite their own roots in explaining their political position. You only have to think of Ivins or Carville to see this. Raines constantly invokes this heritage to describe himself and his politics – he did so on the Newshour recently as well. In answering one question, he said, “I have to say that I think, you know, I often say the one thing that my part of the country learned from U.S. Grant is ‘concentrate your resources at the point of attack.'” This is the executive editor of the New York Times still talking about “my part of the country,” in referring to the South. Hard not to think it’s relevant and informative when he often says so himself.

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE: Jimmy Carter, a president whose foreign policy brought the United States to its weakest international position in the second half of the twentieth century, is – surprise! – against doing anything militarily against Saddam. A few days after September 11, he wasn’t quite so dovish. Even Carter could see the evil when it flew into this country. But even then – even then – he preferred some sort of collective, protracted muiltilateral solution that would not involve “bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan.” Here’s the text of his speech on September 15. No big news that he wants to keep appeasing today:

I have had discussions with the White House and I have talked several times with Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, as Americans, I know that you and I are interested in the response that President Bush is evolving with his advisors. There has to be a response of strength, of punitive action against those that are guilty of this horrible crime against our country, and against our people. That’s a decision that is inevitable and absolutely necessary. But I think it’s also very good for us to give thanks to our President that there has not been any precipitous action, no bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan. That he’s determined to identify the culprits in this attack and those that directly harbor them … We need to garner as much as possible the full support of our natural allies, NATO obviously, Canada sure, Mexico of course, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, even China and Russia, who fear the same kinds of terrorist attacks that we have just experienced. But it’s also important for us to reach out to the moderate Arab countries and Muslim countries who have been known [even our best friends] to have permitted terrorist groups or cadres to exist in their own countries, and then to focus our attention on the punishment of the guilty and not the innocent.

The great thing about Carter is his consistency. He may well be an admirable man, but he’s also been consistently wrong about everything since the day he took office.

THE “GRANDFATHERED” WAR: Blogger Baseball Crank has an interesting aside on policy toward Iraq. He goes back to the foreign policy debate in the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign and found the following exchange:

“MR. LEHRER: — how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: I haven’t heard a big difference right — in the last few exchanges.
GOV. BUSH: Well, I think — it’s hard to tell. I think that — you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better. I mean, we don’t —
MR. LEHRER: With Saddam Hussein, you mean?
GOV. BUSH: Yes, and —
MR. LEHRER: You could get him out of there?
GOV. BUSH: I’d like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. But we don’t know — there’s no inspectors now in Iraq. The coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be. He is a danger; we don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard to — it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
MR. LEHRER: Do you feel that is a failure of the Clinton administration?
GOV. BUSH: I do.”

My point? The point is that the president stated his hope of removing Saddam Hussein even before he took office. 9/11 showed that we were even more vulnerable to his weapons of mass destruction than we thought before. This war against Saddam is therefore not new nor improvised nor in any way “grandfathered” onto any other war. It is now and long has been a critical element in securing the safety of the citizens of the United States.

Check out my reading of Frank Rich’s latest accusation of treason against the president. Salon is running it. I’ll be contributing a weekly piece of left/liberal/whatever stupidity or malevolence to that online magazine. Good for them for having a diversity of views out there.

DECTER ON GSWB’S: A reader points to this July 1998 Commentary essay by Midge Decter on the Guilty White Southern Boy Syndrome. It’s about her experience as a young writer at Willie Morris’s Harpers. You can buy the full version here. She makes, as usual, some interesting points:

Willie’s Harper’s, “hot” though it may have been, was, for reasons of his own, brought to an end by its owner in the early 70’s. Little by little, the old office gang was broken up. By today, of course, decades later, all those up-and-coming Southern Boys I used to have beer with have long since settled into whatever they were going to be. I have not seen them in years. But one thing about them on which I would be willing to bet something of large value is that all of them have remained men of the Left. They have been locked into that posture most of all by the imposition on them of a new kind of entanglement with America’s blacks.

All their lives, to be sure, the Boys had been deeply bound up in the fortunes of black people. But the same civil-rights revolution that liberated Southern blacks from the oppressive thrall of Southern white men seems in some sense to have had the opposite effect on a decisive group of their former tormentors. To put it simply, the battle for civil rights that took place in the South was a dangerous struggle for the right and the good in which a group of Southern blacks acted with genuine heroism and, with only a couple of highly notable exceptions, the Southern Boys did not. Could educated, intelligent young Southerners at the time actually not have known where their duty lay? Of course they knew, but the combination of guilt and contempt they must all their lives have felt toward blacks no doubt made it impossible for them to participate outright in the action.

How they did ultimately respond to the death of Jim Crow was given expression in two separate ways, and unfortunately both turned out to be deeply influential. First, they staked their personal claim to decency by reminding us how much worse they could have been expected to be. Take the case of Tom Wicker, the former New York Times columnist and Southern liberal par excellence. In A Time To Die (1975), a memoir of his experience as a journalist during the famous riot at Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971, Wicker mused: “In 1946 [I] had made the great discovery that blacks were as human and individual as anyone. It was not much to learn, yet it was more than some people learn in a lifetime.”

What Wicker was really saying here was that, given where and how he grew up, to have discovered that Negroes were human made him a better man than those who had never doubted the proposition in the first place. Whether or not, in the dark night of his own soul, Wicker really got away with this piece of moral grandstanding, his notion of a special virtue attaching to the Southern liberal was accepted with enthusiasm, and taken up in a variety of ways, by a whole host of his fellow Southerners.

The second response of the Southern Boys to the disruption of their old social habits was contained in a formulation that, despite being quite untrue, again turned out to be not only psychically soothing to them but fateful for everyone else. What they commenced to declare in the mid-1960’s was that the experience of black people in the North was, in its own way, far worse than the experience of black people in the South. This claim, ridden for all it was worth, helped to create a whole new agenda for Northern civil-rights activists who had long been fighting the good fight in the courts – something it was, after all, possible to do in the bad old North – but had missed out on the defining experience of heroism that had been vouchsafed their Southern counterparts.

This time for blatant editorializing in what might appear to be a straight-forward news story. Here’s Reuters’ caption for a photograph of the WTC site as it is today:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11. REUTERS/Peter Morgan

I’ve cited the caption here in case they amend it.