Category: Old Dish

The media was full of panic stories over the weekend. We’re losing! Bin Laden is still alive! Abdul Haq was killed! Quagmire! The usual panic-mongers – poor Maureen needs a vacation – are having cows. The cynics, like Frank Rich in Saturday’s Times, can’t wait to get back to lambasting the president for his corporate ties and the mess that’s pretty evident in our attempt to mount a homeland defense. Some of such criticism is valid and important. The administration does need a kick in the butt on its passivity and disorganization in the face of bio-warfare. But much of the rest is so September 10. Look, this is going to be a long, long war. To his great credit, president Bush told us as much weeks ago. The Washington Post gets it right today with another sane editorial (the Post is fast becoming the essential national newspaper in this conflict). Sure, we need to adjust. More ground troops and fiercer attacks on the Taliban are necessary, as John McCain has argued. Military considerations – acts of self-defense, remember – should take immediate precedence over diplomatic coalition-managing. What Powell doesn’t seem to understand is that there’s no more persuasive diplomatic argument than military victory. So I’m sorry, but Ramadan should provide no respite for our war. And we have some good news. Much of the Taliban hard infrastructure is history. Much of the military machinery for an effective campaign are now in place. If Bob Woodward is to be believed, the anthrax campaign might have been pioneered by domestic crackpots. If this is true (and I still have my doubts), then it’s very good news. It means that whatever second strike al Qaeda was planning against us has either failed or been postponed. It means that the gruesome logic that would have meant massive escalation in response to a foreign government’s bio-terror can be avoided. We’ll see. But I’m an optimist on this war. We’ve already taken a much-delayed strike at al Qaeda’s network; we have revamped our laws to get a better grip on them; we have cut off their financing; we have set up a credible if still imperfect international police effort to track them. Let’s keep our perspective and keep our nerve. These are very early days. And the cause is just.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The London “Left” intelligentsia are now completely defeatist, look on the situation as hopeless and all but wish to surrender. How easy it ought to have been to foresee.” – George Orwell, July 1940. It took the left intelligentsia almost a year in 1940 to submit to defeatism. It has taken them three weeks to get there today against a far less formidable foe. I was reminded of this quote by a terrific piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Sunday’s Observer. Orwell also got something else uncannily right: “These people live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events, not even the turning out of a single shell.” Orwell: now more than ever.

SONTAG REMEMBERED: Mercifully, no professor ever forced me to read Susan Sontag and the only things I had really read were “Illness As Metaphor,” which I read when I got HIV and found completely useless, and “Notes on Camp,” a slight attempt to posture as someone who’s hip enough to understand gay subculture. (To be fair, she made several good points.) I hadn’t read any of Sontag’s other work, and so was surprised to find how deep her hatred of America is. No-one should have been surprised by her knee-jerk blame-America-first reaction to September 11. Here’s a quote sent to me by a reader from the penultimate essay in “Styles Of Radical Will,” first published in 1966. It speaks for itself: “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization? The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the “Mongol” hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.” Now, the question is this. When someone hates this country that much – and in a dark, racist way – how is one to interpret her ambivalence about a war for the survival of American and Western freedom?

I have to say that V.S. Naipaul, the new Nobel laureate, has some very arresting things to say about September 11 in the New York Times Magazine. Since they resonate with my own views – but from someone with an infinitely vaster knowledge of the subject, I’m particularly struck. Here’s a selection of the interview:

“Q: What makes Islam’s appeal so potent?
A: I’ll tell you something from the eighth century. The first province of India to be conquered was the province of Sindh, which is today part of Pakistan. The king of Sindh resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people. That idea of brotherhood is very powerful.
Q: What about nonfundamentalist Islam?
A: I think it is a contradiction. It can always be called up to drown and overwhelm every movement. The idea in Islam, the most important thing, is paradise. No one can be a moderate in wishing to go to paradise. The idea of a moderate state is something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and there.
Q: What do you think were the causes of Sept. 11?
A: It had no cause. Religious hate, religious motivation, was the primary thing. I don’t think it was because of American foreign policy. There is a passage in one of the Conrad short stories of the East Indies where the savage finds himself with his hands bare in the world, and he lets out a howl of anger. I think that, in its essence, is what is happening. The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach. The oil money in the 70’s gave the illusion that power had come to the Islamic world. It was as though up there was a divine supermarket, and at last it had become open to people in the Muslim world. They didn’t understand that the goods that gave them power in the end were made by another civilization. That was intolerable to accept, and it remains intolerable.”

MBEKI’S MADNESS: Much of the world has long criticized South African president Thabo Mbeki’s criminal lack of response to the AIDS epidemic in his country (although some would rather hammer the pharmaceutical companies who have made HIV a manageable disease). Many, including me, have also hoped that Mbeki would soon see the light. Recent speeches suggest otherwise. Last Wednesday in a speech to parliament, Mbeki called anti-retrovirals a plague in themselves: “I’ve said to the Minister of Health, have we looked at the radically revised guidelines from the US government issued at the beginning of this year, about treatment with anti-retroviral drugs, where they have said that these drugs are becoming as dangerous to health as the thing they are supposed to treat.” A few weeks before, he played the race card against those South African doctors who dissented from their government’s dangerously negligent policies. “And thus does it happen” Mbeki argued, “that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.” This is just kooky – an attempt to dispel Western medicine as equivalent to bigotry. And it would be merely absurd if it weren’t leading to the early deaths of millions.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “In the West, we have become habituated to a certain picture, according to which puritan zeal had accompanied the early stages of emergence of a modern economy, but in which its culmination was eventually marked by a very widespread religious lukewarmness and secularization. . . .The virtue inculcated by puritanism leads to a prosperity which subverts that virtue itself, as John Wesley had noted with regret. In the world of Islam, we encounter quite a different situation. Though long endowed with a commercial bourgeoisie and significant urbanization, this civilization failed to engender industrialism; but once industrialism and its various accompaniments had been thrust upon it, and it had experienced not only the resulting disturbance but also some of its benefits, it turned, not at all to secularization, but rather to a vehement affirmation of the puritan version of its own tradition. Perhaps this virtue has not yet been rewarded by a really generalized affluence, but there is little to indicate that a widespread affluence would erode religious commitment. Even the unearned oil-fall wealth has not had this effect.” – Ernest Gellner, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion” (1992).

I’ve spent the last couple of days in New York City and I must say it’s cheered me up no end. Apart from friends, the great pleasure has been the frustrating, irritating, grungy normality of it. I was stuck in traffic on Madison Avenue today and I almost felt happy to be there. A new friend even said she felt relieved to see people having fights on the sidewalk again. It reminds me of a button designed by my friend Art Carlson, the philosopher king and opera queen of C.F. Folks’ diner on Washington’s Nineteenth Street. He got it made a couple of weeks after September 11 so he could wear it on an upcoming trip to the Big Apple. In red, white and blue, the button screamed, “We’re Tourists! Act Normal. Jerk Us Around. We Love You, New York.” Well, it was great to see New Yorkers jerking people around again – uplifting actually. The place seems far calmer than D.C. My pet theory is that it’s because most people in this city have real jobs and don’t have to think about the war all day long. In D.C., everyone is thinking about it all the time. It’s enough to give you nightmares. But New York’s hustle has helped me banish some of those. And then just when you think you’ve got your life a little integrated again, you smell that weird breeze of burnt plastic and molten metal from as far away as Chelsea, and the dread begins again.

My friend Robert Wright writes a typically incisive piece in Slate about why he believes Islam hasn’t become as tolerant of other faiths as modern Christianity. Read the piece to see his arguments in full. His basic point is that economic and social development – by sheer chance in some respects – encouraged a more individualistic and tolerant form of Christianity after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The monolithic rule in non-European parts of the world didn’t allow for these experiments in democracy to take root and flourish, and so the Islamic world remains mired, for the most part, in economic stagnation and religious intolerance. I buy some of this, but not all. Here’s where I differ. Wright argues that the Islamic texts and Christian ones are virtually interchangeable with regard to the use of violence, and that therefore social and economic context is the primary way to understand why they developed differently. I think this is demonstrably untrue. The call to war and intolerance in Islam is strikingly more pervasive than in Christianity. And although there is plenty of war in the Old Testament, the call to peace – even turning the other cheek to violence – is the principal message of the New Testament, which is the central text for Christians. I think it’s impossible to read the Gospel of John and the Koran and not believe that they represent not just different but radically different views of morality. This is particularly true when you realize that Islam came about several centuries after Christianity’s moral and spiritual revolution. The fundamental meaning of the Cross is the paradox of triumph through surrender – a thought far, far less prevalent in Islam. That’s why the critical argument for social peace in the 17th century – the argument that won – was not just about social peace but about Christian morality itself. Locke argued that forcible conversion was a violation of Christ’s teachings – and so should be abandoned. It would have been and still is extremely difficult to make such a Lockean argument from the texts of the Koran as a whole. That’s not to say that socio-economic factors weren’t involved in Christianity’s softening, as well as the sheer experience of gruesome religious wars. It is to say that the meaning of the faith was also central to the shift.

BACK-EDDIES OR TIDE?: The secondary problem with Wright’s argument is that modernity is not necessarily the cure for religious fanaticism. You might even argue, as I have, that the withdrawal of Christianity from warfare ironically paved the way for worse, secular fanaticisms from 1789 to 1989. In fact, the alienation of modern life can actually intensify such fanaticism, religious and secular. Wright may be right that in the long run, this might soften. And he fairly concedes that the process could be wrenching. But quite how long the long run is I don’t know. Looking at many Muslims in the West – in Northern England and parts of America, for example – one sees a dogged resistance to assimilation by many, as well as integration among a few. The Muslims of France also seem radicalized by their presence in a modern state. What I was trying to explore in my New York Times essay (“This Is A Religious War,” posted opposite) was the drama of this relationship between modernity and fundamentalism. I guess, my doubts about a happy resolution stem from my far less optimistic view of world history than Bob’s. I don’t see faith withering away as the world ages. I see it resurgent and permanently dangerous when allied to political and revolutionary goals – prone to emerge at any time and place. Look at the rise of some fanatical fundamentalism in America in recent years. Only our constitution – not our socio-economic success – keeps this at bay. In the Middle East, we also have a couple of examples of secular democracies dealing with religious fundamentalism, in Israel and Turkey. In both countries, modernization has brought with it less cultural secularism and more militant fundamentalism than, say thirty years ago. You can argue that these are mere back-eddies in a larger tide. But that’s scant comfort to those who drown in the meantime.

“We’ve heard this song before, right? In the fifties there was a blacklist, and it ruined lives. If you’re anything like me, when you watch any of the dozens of films that have been made about the blacklist, you look at that and think, my God, if I could only transport myself back in time to this period and knock a couple of heads together and say, are you out of your mind? Well, we’re there, right now. It’s happening all over again.” – Aaron Sorkin, West Wing creator, at an Occidental College forum. Thanks to Mickey Kaus for catching this one first.

You tell me to calm down (okay, I’m trying, I’m trying); why NPR is driving some of you nuts; and why the Canadians aren’t so bad after all.

After Joe Biden’s dumb-as-a-doorpost comments about the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth taking a look at an excellent piece, published just a tiny bit too soon, by my friend Michael Crowley at the New Republic. It’s as good an account of Biden’s recent silliness as you’ll find.

A BIN LADEN-ANTHRAX LINK?: An interesting report in the Times of London. I agree that we should not jump to conclusions about the source of this anthrax. At the same time, I don’t think we should deny what is obviously the likeliest explanation. And we certainly shouldn’t stick our heads in the sand because we cannot bear to contemplate what the consequences can and must be.

PATENT NONSENSE: A credible and important study has just come out from a usually liberal source, the Kennedy School of Government (my alma mater) at Harvard. The study was designed to find if restrictive patents on anti-retroviral HIV treatments in Africa were a critical part in preventing an adequate response to the problem. The study found that patents were actually rare in most of Africa, and the main problem was a lack of Western government finance to pay for unpatented medications. Take a look at this interview with Amir Attaran and follow the link to the study itself. The key sentence: “Of the 795 patents we might have found only 172 actually exist, or about 21%. What that means is that in nearly all countries patents are not frequently a barrier to treat people with several of the antiretroviral regimens today. Lack of money explains why the many HIV-positive Africans living in countries with ZERO patented antiretrovirals are not being treated.” Ah, but it’s so much easier to blame the pharmaceutical companies.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius that they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.” – Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead.”

This following awful scenario keeps occurring to me. If we shortly prove that biological warfare has indeed been launched upon the United States from a foreign source, what will our response be? In the past, we have had a doctrine that a biological attack upon American citizens would open the possibility of nuclear response. But against whom? How? Where? This is the bluff that the terrorists have just successfully called. By starting the biological war piece-meal, they have been very smart. Because the casualties are as yet minuscule, and the horror diffuse, the terrorists have managed to both break a previously unthinkable barrier in warfare and yet also avoid anything like a commensurate response. The micro-war we are witnessing is designed to avert the mass outrage that followed September 11, an outrage that has obviously hurt the terrorists badly. So they have tried a sneakier approach and, because of this, they have gotten away with one of their key objectives: to normalize the use of biological weapons. As of now, the government has said nothing coherent about this epochal event, except to continue a war that was launched in response to a separate, conventional attack. The terrorists have therefore won something big, and the Bush administration doesn’t even seem to know how to respond. I can see why. If the White House were to say explicitly that it believes this weapon has been used by a named enemy, there would be enormous pressure for an appropriate response. So the administration has been confused in its public utterances, barely able to grasp what has been achieved by the enemy, seemingly unable to articulate a credible response. It seems to me that this passivity must end soon. After all, the White House itself has now been targeted with a biological weapon! We need the president to tell us what exactly the government believes about this anthrax attack, who is behind it, what it means, and what we are going to do in response. If we continue the current, passive strategy, we are not only sowing fear across this country. By our lassitude, we are almost inviting a far larger attack. Perhaps the administration is waiting for some truly huge horror before taking further action. I can see the public relations reasons for this. But isn’t it their duty to prevent just such an outrage by retaliating distinctly now? This need not mean nuclear weapons, but it should be separate from our current strategy and fiercer than anything we have yet unleashed. What I’m saying is that the response to this new assault should not be measured by how many people it has killed, but by the new and terrifying means that have been deployed. We must draw a line now, or we will have normalized barbarism for the foreseeable future.

SCHEER MADNESS: “To understand the limits of government-sponsored “unity,” we might ask the soldiers of the old Soviet Union. They marched with their pledges and anthems into the treacherous terrain of Afghanistan two decades ago, while at home the dissent that could have saved them from military and economic disaster was systematically squelched.” – Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times. This, of course, is the reductio ad absurdum of the far left’s inane cries of censorship, by which they mean immunity from sharp and pointed criticism. Scheer is honestly equating the fate of dissent in the United States today with the fate of dissidents under the Soviet Union. He does this while preening in a mass circulation newspaper. Go figure.

IF WE ARE AT WAR: A superb analysis by Victor Hanson in National Review Online. He gets what we need to do and the challenge our president must urge us to rise to. I know this country is ready. But the last few days have seen worryingly diffuse and reactive signs from our leaders.

THANKS, DAVID TALBOT!: Sunday was our biggest Sunday ever; Monday was our biggest Monday ever. Last weekend was also a quiet step forward for the site. We moved to a whole new server, thanks to your donation dollars. We got too big for the old one. On Monday alone, we had 27,000 visits and 123,000 page views. Thanks.

As my readers know, I’ve been deeply skeptical of past IRA maneuvers in the “peace-process” and have always believed that an actual – not promised – destruction of real – not potential – weapons was necessary for peace. From everything we hear, that day has now come. It is the first piece of truly great news I’ve heard in weeks. What it confirms to me is that the Unionists were absolutely right to insist on this move as a prerequisite to a devolved government in Ulster and absolutely right to leave that government in the absence of real IRA “decommissioning.” It’s a vindication of those of us who resisted accommodating the IRA until they explicitly rejected violence in deed, not just in word. That said, Sinn Fein deserves credit for their stand, and the IRA should now be taken seriously as partners for peace. I cannot help feeling that this is also related to the events of September 11. In that context, the terrorism of the IRA must have seemed even more appalling and petty. And I’m sure that many American financiers of this terrorism began to tell their IRA friends after terrorism struck home in New York that enough was enough. This may have turned out to be the critical reason for the turn-around. In which case, the war against terrorism has just had its first clear victory. May it be one among many to come.

THE NEW YORK TIMES PLAYS CATCH-UP: Interesting piece today in the New York Times about someone the rest of us have been reporting on for some time. The Times is baffled by the notion that an allegedly moderate Imam at New York’s Cultural Center, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, might have been responsible for the usual anti-Semitic poison that characterizes much of fundamentalist Islam. Oh, well, they get it now. It’s just another sad example of how the Times’ politically correct view of the world means they have been consistently scooped on this story.

A reader points out that it is now a commonplace notion that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Well, America has been mugged.

MORE ON AL AZHAR: I’d missed a recent Smartertimes posting on al Azhar. As is often the case, Ira Stoll, who runs the site, is ahead of the curve. Take a look at the statements of what the New York Times has called the repository of moderate Islam, “the revered mosque, the distinguished university, the leading voice of the Sunni Muslim establishment.” Its leading sheikh is an unreconstructed anti-semite who endorses suicide bombings and believes that “there is not a single Egyptian that maintains the normalization [of relations with Israel] and whoever does so is a traitor to his religion and his nation.” This is the voice of moderation. Can you imagine what the extremists are like?