The Dish

My book isn’t out for a month and yet the far right is already attacking it. I find that a good sign. They’re worried. In an astonishingly dishonest passage, Mark Steyn, who has not read the book, purloins a couple of sentences to imply that I represent Western weakness against Jihadism. Money quote:

If you’re a Muslim, the video [of two Western journalists mouthing fealty to Islam] confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling – that the West is weak, that there’s nothing – no core, no bedrock – nothing it’s not willing to trade. In his new book The Conservative Soul, attempting to reconcile his sexual temperament and his alleged political one, Time magazine’s gay Tory Andrew Sullivan enthuses, "By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live – now, which is the only time that matters." That’s almost a literal restatement of Faust’s bargain with the devil:

"When to the moment I shall say
‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway
Then to the abyss will I depart!"

Actually, the passage he quotes is from a gloss on the Martha and Mary story in Luke’s Gospel (pages 206 – 209 in the book). It’s about Jesus’ admonition of Martha to stop fussing in the kitchen, worrying about a future meal, and his urging her to be with him now in the manner of her sister, Mary. It is in a theological section about some core concepts in Christianity and has nothing whatever to do with the fight against Islamism. The book as a whole, moreover, is a full-throated defense of the free, skeptical West against its enslaved, fundamentalist foes. Steyn doesn’t know that because he hasn’t read the book and I’m guessing he grabbed that quote from Derb – but what does Steyn care if the context disproves his smear? To go further and interpret a Gospel reading as a Faustian pact with the Devil is hackery beneath even Steyn’s usual standards. Memo to Steyn: attack the book’s contents if you want. But read it first, will you?

(Pre-ordering is available now. It’s out in four weeks.)

It’s truly heartening to read one small story of success in Iraq, where much larger numbers of U.S. and Iraqi troops actaully succeeded in bringing a modicum of tenuous order to a Baghdad neighborhood called Dora. How did they do it? Money quote:

In a country long on disappointment and short on hope, Dora represents only the embryo of progress. It was the first of several violent neighborhoods covered by a new Baghdad security plan — which seeks to create walled-in sanctuaries where economic development can grow in an environment of safety — and American and Iraqi officials are still struggling to make residents feel safe enough to let their children play in the streets.

The local progress is coming as death tolls across the country have been soaring, up more than 50 percent in recent months, according to the latest Pentagon assessment. And in Baghdad as a whole, the toll has been high, with the city’s morgue reporting more than 334 people killed or found dead from Aug. 24 to the end of the month.

Most of those deaths occurred in areas without a reinforced military presence.

My italics. Even now, after three years of spiraling anarchy, sufficient troop levels can provide the security and order without which democracy and progress are impossible. Can you imagine what we might have achieved if this president had actually committed the resources to win in Iraq? Can you imagine how a secure and democratic Iraq could now be isolating Iran, rather than the other way round? Last week, in an intellectually barren and politically vile speech, Don Rumsfeld accused opponents of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy of being "appeasers." The truth is the opposite. Rumsfeld is the true appeaser, along with the president and vice-president: men who faced a defeatable enemy and chose to send just enough troops to lose. They are the true Chamberlains of our time: too weak to commit to victory and too proud to let others do the job instead.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti/Time.)

Trey Ratcliff took portraits of yours truly, Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Amsterdam a week or so ago. His photo-blog is beautiful.

Jon Rauch is, as always, thinking realistically and imaginatively. In my view, an aggressive U.S. domestic effort to move away from oil-addiction toward biofuels would be one of the most effective weapons against Ahmadinejad we could deploy. And only a serious increase in gas taxes will do the trick. Hence what amounts to Bush’s appeasement of Iran: until he tackles our energy policy and upsets his big oil base, he’s enabling Islamist terror. Olivier Roy’s essay of a couple weeks back is also worth re-reading.

The moon-landing – as transcribed by the Onion. The audio is obscene, so don’t click if you have problems with the f-word.

Before I left for Amsterdam, I’d written several posts about my skepticism with respect to the London terror plot, a plot described by Michelle Malkin’s blog as "imminent," and thereby warranting torture. The posts can be read here, here, and here. The British officials also spoke of the plot in near-apocalyptic terms at the time. Now we find out something a little different:

In addition to Mr. Stephenson’s remark that the attack would have been "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," Mr. Reid said that attacks were “highly likely” and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an "unprecedented scale."

Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate. As more information was analyzed and the British government decided that the attack was not imminent, Mr. Reid sought to calm the country by backing off from his dire predictions.

So there was no imminent threat at all. And, although, as I wrote, the plot was real, it was being monitored very closely with secret police cameras in the room where bomb materials were to be assembled at some point. The decision to shut down Britain’s airports was made out of some kind of fear of another, completely unsubstantiated and alleged plot. Money quote:

British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said.

Hmmm. No tickets; no ready-for-use bombs; no passports for some; close surveillance … then panic. Could it be that torture in Pakistan produced false evidence (as it almost always does) and so ended what might have been a more effective counter-terror operation? We’ll never know. I just hope that the premature action against these Jihadists has not jeopardized the chances of prosecuting them. If torture was integral to their arrests, then they may have to be released. I await a retraction from the Malkin blog; and an apology from Jeff Goldstein who accused me of "dementia" for doubting the original official line. It was not dementia prompting my doubts. It was the evidence, something some on the far right seem uninterested in. If we want to win the war on Islamist terror, we need to be as reality-based as possible.

(Photo: Michael Dwyer/AP.)

Paris, France, 7 am.

"I had the opportunity this afternoon to be part of a relatively small group who heard President Bush talk, extemporaneously, for around forty minutes. It was an absolutely riveting experience. It was the best I’ve ever seen him. Not only that; it may have been the best I’ve ever seen any politician. If I summarized what he said, it would all sound familiar: the difficult times we live in; the threat from Islamic fascism – the phrase drew an enthusiastic round of applause – the universal yearning for freedom; the need to confront evil now, with all the tools at our disposal, so that our children and grandchildren can live in a better and safer world. As he often does, the President structured his comments loosely around a tour of the Oval Office. But the digressions and interpolations were priceless. The conventional wisdom is that Bush is not a very good speaker. But up close, he is a great communicator, in a way that, in my opinion, Ronald Reagan was not. He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. His persona is very much that of the big brother," – John Hinderaker, hailing the Great Leader, and the need to be on guard against bourgeois counter-revolutionaries suffering from false consciousness.

I promise I didn’t insert or invent the analogy to Big Brother. That must be one of the most revealing Freudian slips comrade Hinderaker has made in a long time.

The antidote to Rove?

Cawsand, Cornwall, England, 10 am, in peak summer.