Category: The Dish

Another reader (among many) writes:

I sincerely appreciate your ongoing comments on torture. Torture is wrong wherever it is done, and by whomever it is done. Keep the heat on those who now engage in the moral equivalency that was once so despised by the Right.

It is a sad period indeed when we must even discuss it in the context of creating or modifying laws to allow this to happen.  Senator McCain, I believe, said that our decision to torture has more to do with who we are than who they are. Perhaps my disappointment stems from my naive belief that we were the good guys in this global struggle, and my sadness from knowing that I am a citizen of a country that officially engages in torture. We are no better than they, now.

Another adds:

Please keep it up.  I am a firm believer that we must retain the moral high ground in this conflict.  Of course, we’ve probably irrevocably lost it …

But even for those who believe the ends justify the means (to whom morals are expendable) are making a grave error by supporting torture: we know that it is far from the case that every suspect brought into US custody is actually guilty of anything, let alone "fanatical mass-murder". Such people are simply subject to abuse in proportion to the extremity of our methods. From their perspective, we are the terrorists. Whether guilty or not, many will be converted to even more fanatical extremists by this extreme treatment.

It is a mistake to support the government in using such methods. We don’t really want the government to have this power. One day, dare I say, it could even be used against dissenters like us.

We are still better than them, of course. But if the torture bill passes, much less so. And that lost high ground makes this war harder not easier to win. We have surrendered one of our most powerful and important weapons: our soul and our principles. And once you have surrendered them, it is extremely hard to get them back.

His essential point was the resistance of Islamic thought to Greek conceptions of reason. It is indeed the crux of the matter, and reveals how hard it will be for Islam to have the kind of reformation it needs if it is to become compatible with the rest of the modern world. Here’s a great post on the subject. Money quote:

The high culture of Islam has been exposed throughout its history to the "blandishments" of Hellenistic philosophy and rationality.  Within two hundred years of the emergence of Islam (Sadr al-Islam) there was a fateful competition in learned circles over this very issue, the issue of whether or not Islam would be saturated with Hellenistic thought as Christianity was, and is. This contest was won by the pietists, traditionalists and scripturalists who in my opinion have bound Islam (especially Sunni Islam) in golden chains ever since. The losers in this struggle, and here I am thinking of the "Mu’tazileen," were variously disposed of and others of similar inclination toward "reform" were later exiled or marginalized.  That process continues to this day in one form or another although there is now some measure of debate in learned circles as to what it means to be Muslim in the 21st Century.

As a result of domination of the religion by the pietists, the view of Islam and the world that is held by a great many Muslims does not contain much of the traditions of freedom of opinion and discourse which have generally dominated much of our lives and history in the West.  (Yes.  I know about the Nazis and the Inquisition)  In the idea of Islam held by the masses, no one in Christendom (or anywhere else) has the right to say anything that raises the possibility that Islamic practise or past belief might have been in error theologically.  Such expressions are simply not acceptable to those who think of Christianity as the "house of war."  As a result, Benedict’s illustrative use of this ancient quotation in his argument in favor of Hellenistic thought became for them a declaration of hostility and disrespect by someone whom they think of as the "leader" of the "kuffar" (the unbelievers, the polytheists).

Hence the fact that offense is a one-way street for today’s Islam. This is ultimately a problem within Islam; but in son far as it may mean that the West is subjected to physical violence and attack, it is a question for us as well. And we must defend ourselves and our rational civilization. Like the old priest said.

(Photo: Wolfgang Radke/AP.)

Boulder, Colorado, 9 am.

The Onion has the latest.

A reader (among many) writes:

Oh will you shut up already?  Khalid Sheik Mohammed is not a veteran of the second world war, and nobody but you gives a crap whether or not this fanatical, mass-murdering thug is brought to the verge of suffocation in an effort to obtain information on the whereabouts and initiatives of other fanatical, mass murdering thugs.  That’s the only issue. 

You will not address it … not seriously, anyway. Instead, we get a never-ending series of eye-rolling rants (and accompanying photographs) about how everything from waterboarding to sexual humilitation is "torture" – and about how our civilization depends upon whether or not we put panties on the heads of of fundamentalist troglodytes who are suicidally intent on destroying humanity. What a shocker: You lost that debate. Do yourself a favor and move along.

"I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate. Because nothing will energize my (constituency) like Hillary Clinton. If Lucifer ran, he wouldn’t," – Christianist Jerry Falwell. Notice that these remarks were made at a "prayer breakfast."

How America became a torturing nation – and how the English language was the second victim. My Sunday Times column can be read here.

"The national representatives of the social conservative movement used to be sophisticated and tolerant. Today, they are sophomoric and angry. It’s an embarrassing spectacle seeing leaders bullied around by the likes of James Dobson, or watching the Christian Coalition team up with MoveOn.org in support of bigger government.

Even more embarrassing is Tom Tancredo and his hot, hateful rhetoric against immigrants. Such demagoguery feeds the worst instincts of nativists and blocks a serious solution to our nation’s border security problems. Reagan, conversely, understood that America is a country of immigrants, and he famously demanded that big government’s walls be torn down," – Dick Armey, defending real conservatism in the Wall Street Journal (sub req.).

I’d say it’s a long shot. But it tells you a lot about America that an openly gay presidential candidate for either party is still all but unthinkable.

Back in the early days of the invasion of Iraq, the sudden news that 170,000 priceless items might have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad was terrible. Today, Frank Rich (TimesDelete) says I was one of the administration’s "enforcers" back then and dismissed the rumors. In fact, on my blog, I wrote that if such things were true, they were damned near unforgivable. I was appalled from the get-go by the chaotic occupation. But I knew details were sketchy and 170,000 items seemed somewhat excessive. So I waited for the facts to come in. Rich didn’t.

Today, he bloviates:

Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld’s critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled ‘Idiocy of the Week’ (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about ‘the alleged ransacking’ of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? ‘Rummy, of course. He almost always is.’

Actually, I was only trying to get the facts right. And they were extremely murky at the time Rich wrote. That didn’t stop him from the following hyperventilation:

"There is much we don’t know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country’s gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?"

Almost two months later, the New York Times itself corrected its first reports. The new reality was the following:

Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the "fog of war" for creating the impression that the majority of the institution’s 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.

A carefully prepared storage plan, used in the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf war, ensured that tens of thousands of pieces were saved, they said. They now believe that the number of items taken was in the low thousands, and possibly hundreds… Donny George, research director, said: "There was a mistake. Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost."

"Shoddy reporting." I thought Frank Rich was about correcting that, not practising it. So between Rummy’s callous dismissal and Rich’s pre-packaged hysteria, who was more accurate? Rummy. In my column, I cited a Washington Post story and a Channel Four report that noted in fact that:

"’There are only 33 pieces from the main collections that are unaccounted for,’ [Donny] George [the director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities] said. "Not 47. Some more pieces have been returned.’ Museum staff members had taken some of the more valuable items home and are now returning them … "They won’t talk about it, but almost everything was saved," John Russell, an Iraq expert at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art, told the Washington Post.

So on the matter at the time, Rich was wrong, basing his column on facts subsequently debunked by his own paper. Has he been proven right since? The original figure of 170,000 is no longer believed by anyone. Wikipedia puts the final loss as follows:

Officials said that of the 170,000 items initially believed missing, just 3,000 remained unaccounted for. And, of those, 47 were main exhibition artifacts.
In November, 2003 Coalition officials reported a few dozen of the most important items remained missing from the museum’s public galleries, along with another 10,000 other items – most of them tiny and some of them fragments.

So that’s where Rich got his final figure from – and, as often with him, it’s misleading. The bottom line is that around 47 major items were looted, along with several thousand minor fragments. The truth is: I deplored the looting; but waited to get my facts right. Rich knew the truth already.

(For some weird reason, his original column won’t appear in the NYT search engine, and isn’t linked in his online column. If anyone digs it up in full, please send it to me. My original blog post is also unfindable, since my old archives are still being transferred to Time’s server. If anyone can trace either piece, I’d appreciate it.)