Category: Old Dish

“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 Schlesinger Jr., wrong yet again, the Independent, November 2.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “General Van Tien Dung, 84, lead strategist of the victory of North Vietnamese forces against the Saigon and U.S. regimes, also expressed his doubts about a U.S. victory over Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. “I’m certain that they will fail,” declared the ex-defense minister, who brought the North Vietnamese troops to a lightning-fast victory during the Ho Chi Minh campaign that ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War. “War doesn’t end the hate. It just adds more gasoline to the fire, provoking more hate and a harder vengeance, above all on the part of those who have sworn to die for their religion,” added General Van Tien Dung. “How will the United States put an end to this war? How will it get out of it? Its soldiers will find themselves with geographical difficulties that the Soviets could not surpass before,” the general concluded.” – Agence France-Presse, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it’s already in one. The United States is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it. Soon, a new credibility gap will emerge as the Pentagon attempts to massage the news.” – Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “”I don’t know how long this was supposed to take but it’s certainly going a lot worse than expected. We have leading opposition figure captured and executed … defections from the Taleban not happening on any large scale .. Afghan support for the Taleban appears to be on the increase and, if anything more was needed to dim the support of our allies for this whole adventure here we have another Red Cross warehouse has been bombed because of what is called human error. This is a war in trouble.” – Daniel Schorr, NPR Weekend Edition.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “You can spend so much time defending the moral legitimacy of bombing Afghanistan and damning Noam Chomsky to hell that you never need to get around, really, to the question of what the real-world consequences of this war are likely to be. Five and a half million Afghans starving, as predicted by Oxfam, if the military campaign prevents delivery of humanitarian relief? Thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American suicide missions? A protracted war with a determined, hardy foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later?” – Katha “Your Stammering Is Eloquent” Pollitt, The Nation.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word “quagmire” has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad…A week ago, the Pentagon said the military capacity of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan had been “eviscerated” by allied bombing raids; now ranking officials describe those leaders as “tough characters” who remain full of fight… The Northern Alliance, whose generals bragged for weeks that it was about to capture the pivotal city of Mazar-i-Sharif, has failed to do so. Nor have its tanks made any progress toward Kabul.” – R.W. Apple, New York Times, October 31.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Many of the Afghan women who have been warning us about the Taliban for years say that bombing would be the surest way to unite most Afghanis around them.” – Gloria Steinem, Village Voice.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “It now looks, with 20/20 hindsight, as though we should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar baby that is Afghanistan. We’re running out of time for three reasons: winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.” Molly Ivins, November 4.

V-H AWARD NOMINEE: “Having found refuge in places that America cannot or will not bomb, it appears the Taliban will rule Afghanistan through the winter, thereby handing the United States a humiliating and gratuitous defeat … Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be the least prepared to attain America’s battlefield objectives… [The Alliance] remains far weaker than its adversary, it boasts far fewer troops, and lacks the determination of its foe … Its forces lack fuel and ammunition, remain pathetically divided, and seem in no rush to march to an American timetable.” – The New Republic, November 8.

“Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. It was also obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more Bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too.” – Christopher Hitchens, the Guardian.

SELF-PARODY DEPT: This is a news story from the Boston Globe! Let’s just say that the phrase “appallingly slanted” doesn’t only apply to the Washington Times.

Well, I’m not the only one to notice the gloom and doom at NPR.

That’s my basic response to the scenes from Kabul. And it’s the subject of a great editorial today in London’s Daily Telegraph. But the most astonishing news is that late last night, according to the New York Times, “United States intelligence agencies reported … that members of southern tribes opposed to the Taliban were massing near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. In the strategic eastern city of Jalalabad, residents reported that the Taliban had announced they were pulling out and turning the city over to its previous civilian administration.” Could the Afghanistan war be over this quickly?

THE PRESS AND THE WAR II: An addendum. It’s also true, as a correspondent suggests, that the reporters and pundits and editors simply cannot bring themselves to admit they’ve been almost completely wrong about the war so far. First, Bush is an idiot who cannot run anything. (89 percent ratings and a secure grasp on scripted oratory, diplomacy and military strategy). Then, airpower wouldn’t work. (Tell that to the people of Kabul). Then Afghanistan would be a quagmire. (Tell that to the Special Forces). Then winter would destroy us (in fact, it will help us). Then the Northern Alliance is useless. (Until it won.) Wolfowitz is a madman. (He’s the guy behind a strategy that’s actually working). Hard to feel great after all that, so we should perhaps forgive them a little glumness.

TAKE AN ORWELL AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING: During this ordeal, I’ve been bucked up no end by reading Orwell’s only recently published war diaries. (They’re in the massive twenty-volume complete works set published in 1998 by Secker and Warburg.) I was up the other night till 3 am and couldn’t put them down. A few things: it’s clear that in Britain in 1939 and 1940, large swathes of the left-wing intelligentsia were deeply defeatist, just as they are now. Equally, large numbers of far-right upper-class types were willing to cave to Hitler, just as a few crackpot rightists are as well today. The disconnect between ordinary Brits and their elites was just as pronounced. I can just see Orwell being accused of being a fascist by David Talbot – Orwell was throwing around accusations of treachery left, right and center. Here’s one sentence: “The unconscious treacherousness of the British ruling class in what is in effect a class war is too obvious to be worth mentioning. The difficult question is how much deliberate treacherousness exists.” (That’s from his diary on June 27 1940.) Then there’s this wonderful passage in an April 1940 review of Malcolm Muggeridge: “It is all very well to be “advanced” and “enlightened,” to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognize it under strange disguises, and also sympathize with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Agnes Ortiz said her son is not a terrorist. ‘No way, he’s Navajo — Native American — from this country. We were here before all you people,’ she said.” – Washington Post. This is the funniest part of a pretty funny story about some poor schmuck who got arrested by air marshalls when he tried to go to the bathroom 15 minutes before landing. The unfunny part is that the guy, first released, has subsequently been charged with alleged weed possession. I think that’s called insult to injury.

BETTER NEWS FROM FRANCE: Baudrillard, mercifully, is not the only member of the French intelligentsia. In fact, in many ways, intellectuals in France have long abandoned the tortured nihilism that now infects many American campuses. An inspiring essay in today’s “Le Monde” is as clear a defense of this war as one can imagine. The authors compare civilian casualties in Afghanistan with those during the Anglo-American liberation of France in 1944 and 1945. They decry the extreme left position of moral equivalence between the Taliban and the West: “In fact, Bush and Blair are the elected leaders of the two oldest democracies. Their two countries share an unimpeachable commitment to liberty. Neither country was infected with the totalitarian virus, red or brown, which accelerated the decline of the European continent in the twentieth century.” Yes, the world turns.

Reading through the New York Times today over lunch was a truly weird experience. The paper is full of details about the stunning success of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance but the tone is of unremitting gloom. There is a grim photo-spread of a revenge killing by the NA troops against a Taliban soldier. There is much hand-wringing over the difficulties of winning over the Pashtun. There is worry over Pakistan. As I noticed last night, there isn’t a sentence of celebration in the editorial. The same mood prevails at NPR and the BBC, according to several emailers to me today. The question is why? I don’t think the Times, the BBC or NPR are actually hoping that the West loses in Afghanistan. I don’t think any of the major opinion-writers or reporters actually favor the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals, the extermination of Jews, the repression of any free press, or the promotion of world-wide terrorism. So why does left-wing NYT-BBC-NPR opinion essentially lament victory? Yes, there’s good reason for the press to ask hard questions about the war – but that doesn’t fully explain the gloomy mood among many, especially on the left. One thought I’ve had is that these characters are depressed because they feel disempowered by this war. They are used to determining – or believing they determine – critical events in national and international life. Their predecessors believe – with good reason – that they were critical in ending the Vietnam War and bringing down president Nixon. They like to be the arbiters of our fate, and for the current boomer generation controlling the media, this was a critical reason for their choosing this career path. But in fact, the real arbiters of our fate at moments like these are not liberal media-types. They are warriors from barbaric places in distant continents, hard-headed generals and airforce pilots, commanders of Special Forces units, and elected officials. In this war, the pundits and editorialists and cable news executives have been knocked down a few pegs in the social hierarchy. They have much less power than they had before September 11. And so, even though their minds tell them that they are glad we are winning, their self-interest perpetuates a kind of gloom not felt by anyone else. Of course, their (our?) social and political disempowerment is a very encouraging development of this war, and may well intensify. But in response, the media gloom may also intensify. My prediction: the media elites will get even angrier about this and will soon step up initiatives to throw doubt on the war, undermine it, and generally disparage it. Ignore them.

Would anyone have guessed that the Taliban would have essentially abandoned Kabul by now? Or that Washington would be trying to rein in military success? So much for the New York Times’ prediction of “quagmire.” (I notice that the Times today cannot bring itself to celebrate this success. Why not? What’s their problem?) What we are dealing with now is the first class conundrum of sweeping success. The most pressing task, as the Washington Post argues, is the use of the opportunity to inflict real damage on the fleeing Taliban forces and to find and kill as many terrorist leaders that we can. Yes, we also need to ensure order in Kabul. And yes, very little Pashtun territory has yet to fold. But to control almost half the country within a month can hardly be deemed a failure – and by airpower and special forces alone. Moreover, the psychological and propaganda impact of taking the capital cannot be under-estimated, as Charles Krauthammer powerfully argues today. Let’s take Kabul now. Then on to Kandahar and, at some point, Baghdad. Yes, Baghdad. We have a job to finish.

LETTERS: Dismay at victory at the BBC; why I was too kind to Gore; etc.

ISLAMIC CORRECTNESS: In what seems to be an editorial gaffe, the Guardian just published a superb and – yes! – liberal article, arguing for an honest inspection of the intellectual decay of modern Islam and a brutal investigation of what now passes for Islamic thought. Among the reasons Ibn Warraq cites for the West’s squeamishness in this regard are, as he puts it, “plain physical fear; and intellectual terrorism of writers such as Edward Said. Said not only taught an entire generation of Arabs the wonderful art of self-pity (if only those wicked Zionists, imperialists and colonialists would leave us alone, we would be great, we would not have been humiliated, we would not be backward) but intimidated feeble western academics, and even weaker, invariably leftish, intellectuals into accepting that any criticism of Islam was to be dismissed as orientalism, and hence invalid. But the first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth.” Wow. Such a simple statement. And in the Guardian, of all places. Are we really seeing a shift among the intellectuals after September 11?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Some intellectuals still don’t get it. For those of you who read French, here’s Jean Baudrillard’s dollop of evil pretension about September 11 in Le Monde. It’s endless, of course. It makes no real sense, and in so far as it does is repulsive. Baudrillard’s main point is that our uni-polar technologically-adept world somehow wants to be destroyed by terrorism. Here’s a classic bit: “Because with its unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing. That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic – that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it’s a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up. To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it.” At its best, I think, this is projection – a pseudo-intellectual gloss on French schadenfreude at the attack on America. Yes, that resentment and hatred is real – and I guess we all have some small nihilist part inside us. But to say it is definitive of all of us in this matter is obscene. What we have here is a classic example of an intellectual confessing that deep inside he loves murder and chaos and destruction. But we knew that already, didn’t we? Check this sentence out: “The allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is fortunately universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center, the perfect twins, precisely embodied such a definitive order.” Notice that “fortunately.” This is a man infatuated by murderous anarchy. He describes not our moral bankruptcy but his own.

KRUGMAN: Several of you have wondered if my revulsion at Paul Krugman’s increasingly hysterical attacks on the good faith of this administration is equivalent to supporting the pork-laden, corrupt and unnecessary “stimulus” package recently passed by the House of Representatives. You can infer from that sentence that the answer is no.

We’ve added a new section to the Greatest Hits. It’s called, simply, “The War,” and contains all my finished public pieces on the war against terrorism. The Dish archive contains all the other commentary. Check it out.