Category: The Dish

If you’re in DC, there’s a lunch forum at Cato today for Bruce Bartlett, author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." I’ll be commenting. It’s at noon.

"The Israeli bomb threatens nobody. An Iranian bomb does. India has transferred its nuclear technology to no one. Pakistan has. No one worries about India or Israel making the technology available to terrorists. Everyone worries about Iran doing that. These are distinctions with great differences. They are, as critics charge, double standards, but to apply a single standard to both friend and enemy, while it might be fair, would be singularly stupid," – Richard Cohen, making abundant sense, in the WaPo today.

These reports are among the most depressing to come out of Iraq. What if we have replaced one torturing regime with another? And what if our own example contributed? Money quote:

"Many cases of torture and ill treatment of detainees held in facilities controlled by the Iraqi authorities have been reported since the handover of power in June 2004," the [Amnesty International] report said. "Among other methods, victims have been subjected to electric shocks or have been beaten with plastic cable. The picture that is emerging is one in which the Iraqi authorities are systematically violating the rights of detainees in breach of guarantees contained both in Iraqi legislation and in international law and standards."

The full report is here.

Remember when the conventional elite wisdom was that racial difference was entirely a social construction and had no basis in genetics? Those days seem distant just a few years later. And the distance may be growing …

Is there a connection? The murderer of Theo van Gogh was a sexual failure in Holland. Mohammed Atta went to a strip club before 9/11. The sexual repression in much of the Arab-Muslim world means a lot of frustrated young men, eager for some kind of escape. Ian Buruma has a typically fecund essay on the topic here. Money quote:

"Sexual deprivation may be a factor in the current wave of suicidal violence, unleashed by the Palestinian cause as well as revolutionary Islamism. The tantalising prospect of having one’s pick of the loveliest virgins in paradise is deliberately dangled in front of young men trained for violent death. And even those who are not trained to kill and die often live in authoritarian societies in which sex before marriage is strictly forbidden, in which women outside the family home are not only supposed to be untouchable, but invisible. Access to MTV, the internet, DVDs and global advertising reinforces the notion that westerners live in a degenerate garden of sinful delights. This makes the lot of millions of young Arab men even harder to bear, and can provoke a mixture of rage and envy."

I cannot believe that a culture in which half of humanity is essentially in slavery to the other half, and in which all sexuality is treated as potentially damning, is a culture at peace with itself or the world.

Several of you have objected to the email posted yesterday about Biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, and his evolution from fundamentalism to agnosticism. Here’s one email that is similar to many others:

"I went to UNC, and Ehrman was often talked about. Each semester, he would use the last lecture to tell about his spiritual journey and his reasons for his ultimate beliefs. You ignore a large part of his spiritual journey, which was mentioned but not focused on in the article, a point with which any of his students are forever impressed. The suffering. I really think this is the final blow for Ehrman: the endless, needless, often arbitrary suffering experienced by mankind. Ehrman finally saw a human world unconstrained by even the simplest of moral logic, and this is what broke him. I think it’s not so much that Ehrman doesn’t believe there is a God (he does say he’s agnostic), but that he simply doesn’t want to believe in a God that doesn’t care. This is a question that religion has never addressed with anything but the most hollow and strained assurances."

My own Catholic response to that existential dilemma is simply the cross. I remain a believer because I believe that the divine did not stop suffering but instead chose to embrace and thereby transcend it. Does that somehow end human suffering? Of course not. Does it logically solve the problem? Not without faith or an encounter with Christ himself. But it doesn’t avoid the problem, it seems to me, either. It places it at the center of Christian faith.

Jason Zengerle and Jim Sleeper take turns bashing the latest crusade of one of contemporary conservatism’s establishment pundits. Ouch.

Barry Posen’s strategy for Iraq.

Mohammed wakes this morning in Baghdad to the sounds of mortar shells – insistent sounds, not intermittent ones, the sounds of civil conflict. He talks with his father:

"Me: How is this mess going to resolve dad?

Dad: It is not.

Me: Are you positive? Why?

Dad: People find solutions only if they wanted to and I think many of the political players do not want a solution.

Me: Is there a chance the situation will further escalate?

Dad: Most likely yes, we are a state still run by sentiments rather than reason which means it’s a brittle state and any sentimental overreaction can turn the tide it in either direction.

Me: What kinds of challenges can make things worse?

Dad: Virtually anything … assassinating a leader, a fatwa, attack on a shrine like last time; we do not possess the institutions that can abolish the effects of severe sentimental reactions.

Me: Is there going to be no role for politics?

Dad: What politics are you talking about?! We are dealing with deeply-rooted beliefs … Yes, in politics everything is possible but with religion you find yourself before very few options to choose from and our people have mostly voted for the religious."

The old problem: religion versus politics. Mohammed’s father is wise: "America is a super power but it’s not superman. These are our problems now and America has nothing to do with it. We have to fix our mess or no one will."

John Roberts’ unanimous ruling in the military campus recruitment case is a good omen, I’d say, of his future on the court. The distinctions he makes seem sensible enough (I’m with Bainbridge). On the substantive matter, I appreciate the efforts of many in universities to highlight and expose the stupidity and bigotry of the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers. But we are at war, and the gap between military and elite culture needs bridging, not widening. Let them recruit; and let others debate. And, for Pete’s sake, let’s change this dumb policy.