Category: The Dish

"We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do," – Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

This blog, with the help of a research assistant, is working on a project about the reasons for the Iraq war. I hope to post something soon. But in the meantime, a British reader sent me this email this morning about the British side of the equation, which seems pertinent. The link is fascinating – and shows how high the level of debate is in the British House of Lords. The reader writes:

At the time Lord Butler completed his report into Iraqi WMD, it was largely reported as a critique of Blair’s style of government, but more less vindication of the Blair pronouncements on WMD and his so-called dodgy dossier.

I actually felt Butler’s report was pretty strident criticism of the government, especially coming from an experienced mandarin. And now we know that it was. From a recent House of Lords debate – which went wholly unreported in the UK media until it got a passing mention on the BBC last night – Lord Butler had this to say:

I have always believed that our Prime Minister had good reason for wishing to support the Americans in removing Saddam Hussein. But he had a problem. He had the clearest legal advice that military intervention solely for the purpose of regime change could not be justified in international law. The only justification for military intervention was to enforce the Security Council resolutions at the end of the first Gulf War prohibiting Iraq’s possession or acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

I have also always accepted and continue to accept that the Prime Minister sincerely believed that Saddam possessed such weapons and was bent on acquiring more. Our intelligence community believed that, as did other countries’ intelligence communities, as well as Hans Blix when he first took UN observers back into Iraq. But here was the rub: neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that. The United Kingdom intelligence community told him on 23 August 2002 that,

"we … know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988".

The Prime Minister did not tell us that. Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that the picture painted by our intelligence services was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.

There’s some further commentary on the lack of post-war planning, but I thought you’d like to see this about Iraqi WMD in particular. That in August 2002 – shortly after the Downing Street Memo and shortly before the pre-invasion PR exercise went into overdrive – MI6 was telling Blair they had next-to nothing. And apparently the CIA was saying the same.

I’ve kept an open mind about the motives for this war. My own support was based on more than WMDs, but WMDs were a central part of my own argument for the war. The world now divides between those who believe the whole thing was a complete con, and those who think it’s preposterous to accuse Bush and Blair of lying to the British and American publics. The more we find out, the more plausible it is that the truth lies in between: that they knowingly misled themselves and thereby us – with good intentions. But they misled us all the same. The bottom line is that we just didn’t know anything about Iraq’s WMDs for certain – and that was not the impression that Bush and Blair gave. If the president and prime minister had been honest about what they actually knew for sure and still argued for the invasion, they would have more public trust today.

An astonishing act of conscience and Christian witness from the leaders of the Episcopalian church:

"We proclaim the Gospel of what God has done and is doing in Christ, of the dignity of every human being, and of justice, compassion, and peace. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that stands against any violence, including violence done to women and children as well as those who are persecuted because of their differences, often in the name of God. The (Primates’) Communiqué is distressingly silent on this subject. And, contrary to the way (others) have represented us, we proclaim a Gospel that welcomes diversity of thought and encourages free and open theological debate as a way of seeking God’s truth. If that means that others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision."

Amen. Now schism?

We were kibbitzing about conservatism in the offices of the Atlantic yesterday, and Dwight Eisenhower came up. His shrewd handling of the exit from Korea was described as an example of conservative leadership in foreign affairs. No one could accuse Ike of not knowing what it was to serve or win wars. But he knew also the importance of restraint, withdrawal, cutting of losses. In many ways, history may judge him the best truly conservative president of the century. Reagan was conservative in a new, exhilarating but strange way. Given how far the U.S. had sunk, it needed radicalism to return to conservatism. But Eisenhower had no similar crisis of American confidence, and asked for no such idolization. And then a reader this morning sent me this quote from the two-term Republican. Can you imagine a Republican candidate saying the following today?

"Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."

Those were the days.

A reader writes:

I must take great exception to your endorsement of The American Conservative as "more intellectually alive" than the Weekly Standard or National Review. This is a magazine that echoes the kind of crude anti-Israel attacks recently waged by Nick Kristof in the NYT and by George Soros in the NYRB. Indeed, they often go beyond those. Kristof and Soros at least pretend to make an argument. But TAC has run crude and vicious pieces by Taki, that are openly anti-Semitic. Look at the back issues if you don’t believe me. Moreover, their analytical pieces in essence blame Israel for all the faults of US foreign policy, including going to war in Iraq. Most of us who follow Israeli politics and policy, in fact, realize that most Israelis did not favor the Iraq war, and were worried far more about Iran.

I didn’t say it was all good. There is a vast amount in it with which I strongly disagree. I find the occasional anti-Semitic undertones repellent; and I found the recent hit-job on Obama callously insensitive (but it still prodded me to read Obama’s first book). But TAC does seem to me to be able to think outside the box of recent conservatism (as in torture and the war). And that’s a good thing, mixed with bad things.

Sense from Robert Samuelson.

New Orleans, 7 am. If you look closely, you can still see the damage.

Marty Peretz comes to the senator’s defense.

One more reason to be depressed about what has happened to honest, empirical, inquisitive conservatism.

I agree with Daniel Johnson. Sontag’s disparagement of new media and technology was not a function of her erudition but of her ignorance. Technology can empower writing – and has done so:

All the evidence suggests that television and the Internet, far from rendering serious literature obsolete, have vastly increased its popularity. Indeed, the Internet has brought about a renaissance of some literary genres—the letter (email), the diary (blogs), the little magazine (webzines)—that had seemed to be almost endangered species. The advent of narrowcasting has allowed specialized TV channels to multiply, giving artists unprecedented access to their publics. And the insatiable hunger of all mass media for ‘content’ means that there are now more people earning a living by writing than ever before.