Category: The Dish

Allergies

I wish I understood them. For much of my childhood, I was crippled with asthma the minute spring came. It wouldn’t relent until late summer. Exam time – which in England was always at the height of June – was a battle between the water streaming out of my nose and the ink on paper in front of me. Yesterday I was fine and so thrilled with the cool sun, we took the dogs for a long walk. Then suddenly a few hours later, the floodgates in my sinuses opened. Unable to breathe through my nose for a few hours coupled with cartoon-like sneezes that had Aaron in stitches, I littered the apartment with various soaked remnants of paper towels. The CPAP is also fun when your nose is exploding within it. My daily trip to the office – a wonderful bike ride through Rock Creek Park – now beckons like an entry to hell. So I’m staying put today.

Churchill and Rumsfeld

Scott Horton responds to the obscenity of the Claremont Institute giving the war-criminal Rumsfeld an award in honor of the greatest Brit of all time. Money quote:

[I]n the end Winston Churchill was a great statesman, a man who valued diplomacy and knew the finite limits of the powers of arms. One of his greatest late speeches made this point, with the help of famous lines of Vergil’s Aeneid,

When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but, when they are weak, they become "better mannered." But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise. I have always been astonished, having seen the end of these two wars, how difficult it is to make people understand the Roman wisdom, “Spare the conquered and confront the proud.” I think I will go so far as to say it in the original: "Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos." The modern practice has too often been, "Punish the defeated and grovel to the strong."

I could not reread these lines, in Wyatt’s wonderful essay, without having the image of Donald Rumsfeld flash through my mind. His failings are, indeed, precisely what Churchill was warning us against.

Punish the defeated. That is indeed what Rumsfeld did. With the added twist that he tortured them as well.

Re-Thinking The War I

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Over the next few days, I want to raise a few questions that I think are worth exploring over four years into the Iraq war and almost six since 9/11. I raise them solely to ask whether we are pursuing the right strategy. I should say up-front what my assumptions are. I take as a premise that there is a group of religiously-motivated terrorists attempting to inflict massive damage on the West with minimal resources and maximal impact. I consider this, after 9/11, to be the pre-eminent challenge of the time. And the danger of their acquisition of very seriously destructive weapons is easily the most pressing threat we face. Regardless of their success in recruitment, getting WMDs leverages their fanaticism into a whole new paradigm.

The paradox is that their very strategy makes our response, for all our superior military might, extremely difficult. In many ways, al Qaeda is still basking in the success of 9/11. What they proved on 9/11 remains valid. It doesn’t take much skill or resources to inflict massive damage. And an unwise response to that damage can hurt us more than it hurts them. Whom do we target? And how?

Consider Iraq and consider this May 4 story from the NYT about Zarqa in Jordan, where many of the murderers hail from:

"Most of the young people here in Zarqa, [Jordan], are very religious," an Islamist community leader said. "And when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go to fight jihad. Today, you don’t need anyone to tell the young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs."

Iraq is their clear motivator. Yes, many would have entered Jihad anyway. But there can be no doubt that Iraq has increased Jihadist recruitment many times over. One failed suicidal mass murderer explains his hope to return to the fray:

"It is hard to leave our families," Abu Ibrahim said. "But it is our duty, and if we don’t defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?" He spends his days now in Zarqa at work with his brothers, then evenings with friends who share his convictions. They visit Islamic Web sites, discuss the news from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. "I still have the same aim, fulfilling the rules of God," he said. "I wouldn’t do the same mistakes the next time and hope that God would open the way."

The president now insists that Iraq is the front-line in the war on al Qaeda. That’s true – but only because we chose to make it so. The gamble was that a massive military and reconstruction effort could so win over Iraqis that a democratic state in the region could be the antidote to growing radicalism. But the result of the botched war has been the opposite: a failed state with porous borders that has become a magnet for a new generation of Jihadists. Worse: the street battles against excellent U.S. soldiers have honed the Jihadist skills and made them smarter, better terrorists. Moreover, alliance between some terrorists and Iran could exponentially increase their destructive capability. And the war in Iraq has limited our ability to tackle Iran in profoundly dangerous ways.

If a war has ended up creating the problem it was designed to solve, only a fool would continue in it without serious and swift signs of new progress. I’m prepared to wait till September to give Petraeus and Maliki one last chance for some light at the end of the tunnel. But the longer the greatest superpower is essentially forced into a draw with Jihadists on territory the Jihadists know best, the more terrorism we are spawning, and the less security we have. What the war has done and is doing to the US military is another huge factor (and one I hope to address in a subsequent post this week).

But if we withdraw? No one should under-estimate the slaughter that will ensue. But it will not be a slaughter primarily directed by Muslims against the West. The narrative that bin Laden and Bush have jointly crafted for the past five years – the West vs Muslims – would be changed swiftly to Muslims vs Muslims. From the same, depressing piece about the Jihadist factory in Zarqa:

Mr. Salah counts Shiites among the non-Muslims. He joined the recent call for retribution against them, which gained fervor well beyond Zarqa after Shiite executioners were videotaped jeering as Saddam Hussein was hanged in December.

In his home he showed visitors a newly released video titled "The True History and Aims of the Shiites." It portrays Shiites deriding the first three caliphs, or leaders of the ancient Islamic world, and saying that the youngest wife of the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha, had been a prostitute. "You see, they hate our caliphs and they hate the Sunnis," Mr. Salah said. When the video showed scenes of Sunnis tortured and killed by a Shiite militia in Iraq, he added, "We didn’t see the Shiites like that before, but now in Iraq they showed their real face."

We have to ask ourselves: at what point does staying in Iraq without measurable progress hurt us in the war on Islamist terror? And: what benefits to the West could accrue from a brutal Sunni-Shi’a war in the Middle East? Yes, I know a withdrawal from Iraq will lead to statements of victory from al Qaeda. That would hurt. But ask yourself: what does bin Laden fear more in private? A continuing stalemate in Iraq that brings new recruits to his cause, exhausts the U.S. military, divides the American people, and keeps the narrative as one in which the "crusaders" are slaughtering Muslims in their own lands? Or a chaotic regional war in which the Muslim world is rent apart by sectarian warfare and in which the US and Israel are mere bystanders?

(Photo: An Iraqi boy stands in front of a wall riddled with bullet-holes after a pre-dawn rain on the Baghdad Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, 6 May 2007. Iraqi police, as well as local eye witnesses, reported that there was at least one fatality and up to eight people wounded, and several houses were damaged in what they described as an "air strike". Clashes erupted in the hour-long operation that involved Iraqi special forces and appeared to be part of a series raids targeting members of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s powerful Mahdi Army militia who have been implicated in the sectarian attacks on Sunnis. By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)

Do Atheists Envy Christians?

Or are they just condescending? Ross and Matt debate it. I must say I always thought that Karl Rove at least pretended to be a born-again. Fred Barnes wrote in "Triumph of the Will" "Rebel-In-Chief" that:

Bush has surrounded himself in the White House with fellow Christians. His four most influential advisers – Rove, Gerson, Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – share his faith.

Who knows Rove’s religion best, do you think? Fred or Hitch?

Dissent of the Day

A reader writes:

I think you’re right that religion will be always with us, and I fear with Harris that the "moderates" among you believers give intellectual cover to the "fundammentalists". But you may also be right that the lack of moderates would strengthen the fundamentalists. There are so many variables in the equation, its solution cannot be predicted with any certainty. So, in that sense you may have wound up in a draw.

But, then, you start again: "to practice the faith that alone can save our world." Nothing will "save" our world, but your version of faith and Harris’s (and my) version of humanist atheism, together, may ameliorate conditions enough for survival. Enough.