Category: Old Dish

An Osama limerick; Blair’s balance; a liberal agrees with me!; and other earth-shattering moments.

Smart and helpful piece by Richard Miniter in the WSJ today, taking us through the extraordinary missed opportunity of 1996 when the Clinton administration refused a Sudanese offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Sandy Berger turned the Sudanese down. If I were him, I’d have trouble sleeping at night.

CENSORING HEROISM: The Houston Chronicle strikes a blow for p.c. censorship. In running a piece from the San Jose Mercury News about Mark Bingham’s life and death, the Chronicle took pains to remove any references to Bingham’s sexual orientation. Bingham, a gay Republican rugby player, was one of those who almost certainly wrestled the plane destined for Washington to the ground in Pennsylvania. Gay people as American heroes? Too much information for the Chronicle’s squeamish editors. I guess they’re just following the policies of the Air Force.

The saddest fact of this war so far is how luke-warm the Arab states have been. In the Gulf War, many Arab states were terrified by Saddam’s belligerence and fully backed the military alliance over a period of months. This time, there is no real unanimity and only token support after only a few days. We cannot even use the American-built Saudi bases! And the Saudis have helped foster and finance the Wahhabism that gave birth to al Qaeda. Arafat is doing what he can to avoid either being killed by his own people or siding with the losers, as he did last time. Mubarak gave a terse word of support yesterday. But no major Arab regime has given unqualified backing to the strikes in Afghanistan and the Pakistani leader is walking a tightrope. So what on earth is the point of Colin Powell’s marvelous alliance? The answer is obviously propagandistic. Any sign that this is a Western assault on a Muslim fundamentalist threat is rightly resisted in Washington because it would give bin Laden a propaganda coup and perhaps deepen the conflict unnecessarily. But the idea that we can keep this broad coalition going for much longer – or anywhere near as long as this effort will require – seems to me to be far-fetched. As each day goes by, as the public opinion of the Arab street makes itself heard more defiantly, and as the corrupt regimes in the Arab world get even more scared of the masses, something will crack. At some point, we will be forced to do something the Arab states will have to condemn: an attack on Iraq (I wish); an encounter with Hamas; a collateral destruction of something that can be made out to have some religious significance; or something simply unpredictable. What do we do then? That will be the moment of truth for Powell, Bush, Cheney and Blair. My bet is that we will continue with a fractured coalition and a widening conflict, at which point the two sides are going to look an awful lot like a Sam Huntington nightmare. No, we have no quarrel with Islam itself. No, we don’t want to unite the Arab world against the West. But we sure do have a problem with radicalized political Islam of the Wahhabist strain; further terrorist acts will only intensify our resolve; and we cannot and will not abandon Israel. Therefore some Western-Muslim conflict is close to inevitable. I think the chances of this conflict restricting itself to Afghanistan with this coalition intact are next to zero. At some point, we will have to decide whether to win this one and walk right into a clash of civilizations; or walk away and merely postpone the clash for an even bloodier future re-match. Meanwhile, our two most important allies are Britain and Russia, the last two conquerors of Afghanistan. How very reassuring and unnerving at the same time.

THE POINT OF HUMOR: During all this horror, I’ve found it a great relief to laugh. It took a while, since I spent most of the first week bawling. But my first smile came on September 12, when some friends and I rented a video of twelve Bugs Bunny classics because we just couldn’t bear reality for much longer. Cartoons transport you to another world – and Bugs’ is about as calming and uplifting as one could find. Can you imagine Bugs versus the Taliban? No contest. A few days later, we watched six episodes of AbFab, another outside-the-box spirit-lifter. And as the weeks went by, it became increasingly possible to laugh not at the event but at our responses – as the Onion triumphantly showed. As to finding humor in the conflict itself, I don’t think we’ve made enough fun of bin Laden himself yet. Like Hitler, bin Laden is not just evil, he’s ridiculous – and seeing his absurdity is a critical part of overcoming fear. Maybe it’s because I’d just seen (for the umpteenth time) “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” but that video of the turbaned maniac surrounded by characters out of central casting struck me as faintly hilarious. Where are the knights that say “Ni!” when you need them? I see no reason why we shouldn’t laugh at bin Laden’s preposterous medievalism, with that microphone perched in front of him, like a cross between Phil Donahue and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Laughter is a vital response to terror: it neutralizes fear. I remember that from the AIDS years and it kept many of us alive. Besides, one thing that separates the civilized world from these religious thugs is that we have a sense of humor. Let’s use it. And let’s start by occasionally laughing at the monstrous spectacle of these bearded beady-eyed bullies on a rock.

IRAQ WATCH: There are signs that the Bush administration gets the Iraq problem. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Negroponte, marched into the Iraqis’ U.N. office and told them to keep their heads down in the coming days and weeks. The anthrax attack in Florida might well have an Iraqi connection. As the Washington Post reports, “Czech officials said that Mohamed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the commercial airliners that slammed into the World Trade Center, met in Prague with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, a former consul and second secretary at the Iraqi Embassy in Prague, before traveling to the United States in June 2000. Al-Ani was expelled from the Czech Republic last April for what the Czech foreign ministry described as activities ‘incompatible with his diplomatic status.'” There’s no sign yet that we’re preparing an attack on Iraq, but every sign that this is still an option – if one that Colin Powell seems sure to oppose. Lets hope events make this second phase possible; and that Colin Powell sees the light.

CORRECTION: Only one poor fellow has died of anthrax in Florida.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “A further reason for my hatred of National Socialism and other ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s power, optimally by killing somebody – a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost.” – Eric Voegelin, “Autobiographical Reflections,” (dictated 1973, published 1989).

A NEW WORLD ORDER CTD.: Tunku Varadarajan has a good little piece on the complementarity of the British and American expeditionary forces in the Wall Street Journal today. He’s also right about the extraordinary usefulness of the British alliance right now – diplomatically, rhetorically and militarily. But I’d go one step further. It seems to me that crises like the current one tell you something about underlying geo-political realities. One of those realities is that Britain is now and has been for the better part of a century far closer in culture, interests, and economics to the United States than to Continental Europe. When push comes to shove, the British elites know this, use this, rely on this. But in calmer times, they gravitate toward the often tortuous goal of immersion in a pan-European super-state. In Tony Blair’s speech last week, you saw this tension in full force. On the one hand, he gave one of the most pro-American speeches in the history of British politics. In the same breath, he reiterated his support for British entry into the euro. What gives? In the aftermath of this war, one thing that could and should be revived is an attempt to add more political heft to what Churchill understood as the deep connection of the English-speaking
peoples. Why not counter the lure of the euro by inviting Britain to join NAFTA? Instead of pegging the pound to the euro, why not link it to the dollar? The EU will of course object. But in some ways, NAFTA membership for Britain would be a great way to call the EU’s bluff. If the point of the EU is in part free trade, why does an expansion of free trade between an EU member and the U.S. represent a threat to anyone? If Britain’s membership in NAFTA were to lead to a further opening up of European markets to Americans and vice-versa, what’s the harm? Except to French hopes that Europe will eventually become not a vital partner for America, but a menacing rival.

SCHEER MADNESS: An overdue hit-job on the insufferable and mendacious Los Angeles Times columnist, Robert Scheer, by the often sharp and fair website, Spinsanity. Ben Fritz is particularly acute in pointing out how Scheer first invented the notion that the United States had given $43 million in aid to the Taliban and so was hypocritical in turning on the mullahs in Kabul and Kandahar after 9/11. In fact, that $43 million was food aid, dispensed through the U.N. and non-governmental agencies, bypassing the Islamo-fascist leadership. Well, we all make mistakes. What’s truly troubling about Scheer is that even after this was revealed, he continued disseminating the lie. In fact, he larded it up, hedged it with new spin, and fomented its repetition in such places as The Nation, The New Yorker, The Denver Post and Salon. Read this piece and never read Scheer again.

Just an update to apologize for the absence of the Dish for a few hours. My bag was searched at Dulles; it was emptied and taken away and then returned. I assumed they put my laptop back in it. They hadn’t. I found out it was missing on the airplane to Chicago. Happily, it was not detonated. I was told I could pick up my trusty Dell Inspiron when I came back through Dulles – and used the computer of a friend of my boyfriend’s while I was in Chi-town. But when I returned, the police station and the Lost and Found were – of course – closed. Today, I hired a Dulles courier to track the thing down for me, and after shuttling between various offices for half a day, he found it. Anyway, it’s a boring story and I need to get a back-up. But the lesson is: traveling seems to be extremely safe but incredibly boring and frustrating. It’s a worthwhile trade-off, but I’m sure glad to get my laptop back. Normal service should resume shortly.

It seems certain that two Americans have now died in a terrorist biological attack in Florida. The first case of anthrax inhalation never struck me as a fluke. The second renders such a benign possibility extinct. Just as chilling as the attack itself is the fact that it was directed at a tabloid paper which has recently run the usual tabloid fare on Osama bin Laden. Who did this? I hope the current somewhat complacent attitude of the authorities begins to shift as we contemplate the next round of terrorist warfare on Americans. In some ways, a repeat of the massive toll in New York City is unnecessary. Random mini-attacks everywhere in the country could actually be more effective in creating the widespread panic and fear that al Qaeda obviously wants to foster. The FBI needs to throw as much effort into tracking down these suspects as into bombarding military targets in Afghanistan. And the perpetrators should not be treated as regular criminals with the usual rights. They are military forces, conducted by a military enemy. If captured, they need to be put in military detention centers, not regular prisons. We have to resist at all costs the trap of terrorists, which is that they can be treated as mere criminals while conducting a war.

LARKIN ON BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM:
“Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.”
– Myxomatosis, by Philip Larkin.

DID OSAMA CONFESS?: Bin Laden’s nauseating propaganda video seemed to me to come extremely close to acknowledging that he was indeed behind the massacre of September 11. Would he hail a “vanguard” of Muslim warriors if he were not directing it? If he were still trying to play the victim, would he not add to his condemnation of our initial attacks on “innocent” countries another assertion of his own innocence? I would think so. I was also struck by the intensely religious nature of his address. As I argued in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, we ignore the religious dimension of this war at our peril. The enemy is not Islam as such, but fundamentalism. And Islamic fundamentalism is of a particularly brutal kind.

LETTERS: Riffing on Caligula and Claudius; is Heidegger at fault?; leaving the far far left alone.

COLUMBUS DAY: The lite dish today is because of the holiday. I’m traveling back to DC from Chicago. Wish me luck.

SALON ON CLINTON’S FAILURES: Interesting interview with a special forces expert, Mark Bowden, in Clinton-supporting Salon magazine. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Q: Were they targeting Osama bin Laden under the Clinton administration’s executive order to track him down and, if possible, capture him?
A: The Clinton administration’s executive order authorized drawing up plans to go after bin Laden, meaning that his administration allowed the planning of an operation, training for it and putting special forces into position in that part of the world waiting for the green light, but it didn’t authorize the action to capture him. Someone’s conscience must weigh heavily that they didn’t authorize that mission. I expect that after the initial shock of our reactions to the Sept. 11 bombing wears off there will be a serious evaluation of who made the decision not to go ahead with this. It doesn’t take a genius to know that something bad would come of this. There were people preaching exactly this sort of attack. People will be asking a lot about policy failures. It’s not like we didn’t know that Osama bin Laden was planning to do something awful; he told us that he would do it and started doing it. He bombed our embassies, bombed the USS Cole and our forces in Saudi Arabia. Looking back we’re going to have to ask why we allowed this to happen: Was it that they thought they couldn’t have pulled it off or were inept?”
So when I raise this troubling idea, it’s a function of my pathological hatred of Clinton. What excuse do the Clintonites have for someone with expertise in this area in a left-leaning magazine?

A priest reader sends in what the Catholic Church, by coincidence, mandates as the first reading this coming Sunday: Hab. 1:2-3; 2:2-4.

“How long, O LORD? I cry for help
but you do not listen!
I cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not intervene.
Why do you let me see ruin;
why must I look at misery?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and clamorous discord.
Then the LORD answered me and said:
Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late.
The rash one has no integrity;
but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.”

Several joyful lefties have emailed me to say that the United People’s website is based in Denmark, not the U.S. Hence no fifth column. I wish. Check out the names and faces of the “committed organizers” – there are many Americans, on campuses and elsewhere throughout the country. Websites can be registered anywhere (the one you’re reading is written in D.C., Ptown and Chicago, uploaded in Seattle, managed in New York, and transmitted worldwide). What matters is the provenance of the people behind it. A core group of these people are indeed Americans, from, among other places, Minnesota, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Redwood Valley, and Albuquerque. One of them, Kevin Danaher, named as a “committed organizer” of this organization, just had an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Did the Post’s editors vet his credentials?

HERE THEY GO AGAIN: Fresh on the heels of the news that gay servicemembers risking their lives for their country will nevertheless risk expulsion at any time, come the pleasant remarks of Lou Sheldon, a major figure of the religious right. According to the Washington Post, Sheldon wants to bar any aid for the spouses or families of gay victims of the September 11 attacks. Do these people have any clue about the true meaning of the Gospels? Or any clue about the meaning of America?

POSEUR ALERT: “We’d abided so long in our shimmering impassive skins, sealed like airplanes ourselves, stationary airplanes: climate-controlled, with weather and pestilence and human frailty all sheltered inside. More than just the world’s largest filing cabinets, my other and I were bodies undertaking a long consideration of space, ticking off earth-rotations, swatting birds. When after so very long the new body entered mine I was accepting, more than I might have predicted. Though I shivered I tried to permit myself to learn what it had to teach me, this intersection of presences. Beside me was another struggle with the same knowledge: two brides, two grooms. But the marriages were brief. The lesson opaque. No, J.G. Ballard crap isn’t going to do it either, exaggerated empathy for the machines and buildings won’t help anything, won’t get me out of what I’m still trying not to feel.” – Jonathan Lethem, Rolling Stone. I think he’s talking about the WTC massacre.

Bush continues to surprise. The $300 million food drop into Afghanistan gives a whole new meaning to compassionate conservatism. I must say I’m cautiously impressed. If this stage in the campaign is designed to foster as broad a coalition for the destruction of al Qaeda and the Taliban, so far so good. If these actions are designed to minimize domestic and foreign opposition while preparing for a major and relentless attack on terrorism, so much the better. If Bush is handing over our foreign policy to Colin Powell now for the important task of diplomacy prior to a systematic campaign to wipe out terrorism and the states that still sponsor it, better still. But there’s a chance that something else is happening. There’s a chance that Bush is simply taking a minimalist approach to this war, after a rhetorical fusillade. If all this amounts to is a few commando raids against bin Laden, if Saddam is allowed to stay and prepare yet another counter-attack, if Hamas and Hezbollah are left intact, if the Saudis are allowed to continue their policy of fostering extreme Islamo-fundamentalism, then this policy is worse than nothing at all. Anything less than a full-frontal assault on terrorism and terrorist-sponsoring states would be sending a clear signal to bin Laden and his ilk. That signal would be that, for all our bluster, we are not serious, that we can absorb and accept an act of war upon us with mere minor retaliation as a consequence. The terrorists will understand from this that they can strike again with relative impunity, and next time, make it even bigger. I worry every time I hear president Bush tell us to get back to normal. Normal is the last thing we should feel. What happened on September 11 was a brutal invasion of this country. There is no normality after it. The only thing that follows should be an extermination of the enemy in all its forms – relentlessly, constantly, insistently. No, I’m not for rushing into an unfocused action. I’m not for alienating any friendly state we can find. But everything – everything – must be subordinate to the ultimate goal of extinguishing the terrorism that threatens the United States and the West. I still believe this is what president Bush is aiming for. But there are some signs that he is going wobbly. I’m hoping and praying that those signs disappear soon. Whatever the dangers of action, the dangers of inaction are now far, far greater. I pray to God the president understands this – and doesn’t let this unique opportunity slip between his fingers.

IF CLINTON IS CALIGULA…: Doesn’t that make B-b-b-Bush C-c-c-c-Claudius?

THE ENEMY WITHIN: The notion that there might be the chance among some enclaves of the decadent left for a fifth column during this war was roundly condemned when I mentioned it in an aside in a recent piece. Anthony Lewis called my suggestion a “disgusting diatribe.” Tim Noah called on me to retract it. Having attended the protests in Washington last weekend in which it was quite clear that many of these nihilists openly want a defeat of the West, I beg to differ. These people may not be many; they may be obscure; they may even be unhinged. But they exist – just as there existed, now beyond historical dispute, a cadre of Americans who worked actively for Moscow during the Cold War. Anyway, I hope Lewis and Noah take a moment to look at the following website, run by a group called the United Peoples. Among the contentions of this group is that the massacre was actually perpetrated by the U.S. government, that 4,000 Jews were given advance warning and stayed away from the WTC on September 11, that the U.S. military trained the terrorists, and that this whole event was orchestrated to foment new defense spending and a crackdown on the “anti-globalization” movement of which these people are an integral part. I quote: “[T]hese terror actions were precisely what Sharon and Bush at this particular moment needed to get out of their deadlocks, and ? hardly any other move could have brought about the present favorable situation for their genocidal policies. A very high percentage of probability therefore speaks in favour of the assumption that more than 6,000 working class people (NOT CEOs: they together with 4000 Jews had been warned beforehand!) of many different nationalities were killed by their host country in order to produce the present situation.” Yes, of course these people are cracked, and there are very few of them. But they exist, and they are Americans. If they do not constitute a fifth column, then maybe Messrs Noah and Lewis could tell me what does.

“How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?” – Raymond Aron, “The Opium of the Intellectuals” (1955).

ALICE WALKER’S PBS SOURCE: Yesterday, I wondered how Alice Walker could refer to any “good works” Osama bin Laden can be credited with. A reader reminds me of a PBS documentary in which the following was said: “NARRATOR: In the Sudan, bin Laden set up a host of businesses, among them a tannery, two large farms and a major road construction company, and he reportedly paid for 480 Afghan vets to come work with him. The Sudan liked this wealthy Saudi who was enthusiastic about investing in their fledgling Islamic state. When bin Laden finished a major road construction project, President al-Bashir treated him like a national hero. ” Ah, the moral achievement of road construction. Where have we seen that before?

CLINTON’S REGRET: In last Friday’s New York Times, an anonymous close friend of Bill Clinton’s reflected on the former president’s mixed emotions after the WTC Massacre: “He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great presidency. He didn’t have one.” A reader points out how similar these feelings are to another character in history as captured by the Roman historian, Suetonius: “He even used openly to deplore the state of his times, because they had been marked by no public disasters, saying that the rule of Augustus had been made famous by the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity, and every now and then he wished for the destruction of his armies, for famine, pestilence, fires, or a great earthquake.” To whom was Suetonius referring? Caligula.

As each new story comes in about the scale of the intelligence failure before the September 11 massacre, the clearer it becomes that a large amount of anger is the appropriate response. Bart Gellman’s piece in the Washington Post actually shows that the Clinton administration had a chance to nab bin Laden as he was being expelled from Sudan. The reason they fumbled the ball was that the Saudis were unwilling to take custody of bin Laden, and the Clintonites decided they didn’t have enough evidence to indict bin Laden in an American court. Indict him? Why wasn’t he killed? Such are the fruits of treating terrorism as a simple criminal offense, rather than an act of war. Thanks to former national security adviser, Tony Lake, and to the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, bin Laden escaped to Afghanistan to plot the further murders of Americans. The Post also has a damning article about Clinton’s lame cruise missile strike against bin Laden after the embassy bombings. As one expert put it, “I think that raid really helped elevate bin Laden’s reputation in a big way, building him up in the Muslim world. My sense is that because the attack was so limited and incompetent, we turned this guy into a folk hero.” In other words, the Clinton administration let the guy go, then succeeded in cementing his reputation. Way to go, guys. A similar sorry tale is told by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker. If any of you think George Tenet has any reason to be still running the CIA, you should read Hersh’s article. Yes, the first Bush administration needs to take a hit. But the largest responsibility for running our intelligence services into the ground must be the Clinton administration’s. “From Bush to Clinton, what happened [in Afghanistan] is one of the most embarrassing American foreign policy decisions, as bad as Vietnam,” says Bob Kerrey. “We also had a half-baked Iraqi operation and sent a signal that we’re not serious.” Amen. Yes, I know this is hindsight. But accountability matters. When will Tenet resign? And when will Clinton himself fess up to his record of appalling negligence? In the last resort, the only ultimate responsibility of the president of the United States is the security of its citizens from foreign attack. Yes, both Bushes share part of the blame for our intelligence collapse. But Bill Clinton shoulders by far the most.

SPECIAL CLINTON-BASHING EXTRA: On the plane to Chicago today, I was busy reading the New Yorker and came across Nick Lemann’s piece on Hillary Clinton. Nick’s reporting on this administration has, I think, been easily the best out there, so I hope he doesn’t take this personally. But Senator Clinton’s response to a question Lemann posed is simply jaw-dropping. In the context of the World Trade Center massacre, he asked her “how she thought people would react to knowing they are on the receiving end of a murderous anger.” Clinton’s reply: “Oh I am well aware that it is out there. One of the most difficult experiences I personally had in the White House was during the health-care debate, being the object of extraordinary rage.” She talks about hecklers and the threat of violence and the rhetoric spewed by radio talk show hosts. I’ve no doubt these things hurt. Heck, I’ve had my fair share of the same kind of thing. But to equate that with the murder of thousands of innocent people by terrorists is simply deranged. Or rather, it’s just another sign that this woman adds whole universes of meaning to the word narcissism. Even after a massacre, it’s still all about her.