The Dish

by David Weigel

My approving link to Brendan Nyhan’s Charles Krauthammer takedown has inspired e-mails like this:

Oh, c’mon!  Read again what Krauthammer said: he didn’t compare anyone to Hitler.  Since you seem to have missed the point, here it is:

There are those who think that every problem can be solved if everyone will just get together and talk.  However, there are some extreme cases, such as when dealing with a real nutcase like Hitler, when such an attitude is just foolish.

I was definitely a little glib in the original link: Krauthammer didn’t directly compare all those foreign leaders to Hitler. What he did is best explained by Ross Douthat’s brilliant Wall Street Journal column of a few weeks back, which grouped schools of thought on foreign policy into five categories, based on what year people thought the current crisis could be compared to.

Over the last year, though, many conservatives have been peeling away from [1942]ism, joining the "1938ists" instead, for whom Iran’s march toward nuclear power is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1930s brinkmanship. While most ’38ists still support the decision to invade Iraq, they increasingly see that struggle as the prelude to a broader regional conflict, and worry that we’re engaged in Munich-esque appeasement. This camp’s leading spokesmen include Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol and Newt Gingrich. If you hear someone compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, demand a pre-emptive strike on Iran, or suggest that the Hezbollah-Israel battle is a necessary overture to a larger confrontation, you’re listening to a 1938ist.

The point I took from Nyhan’s Krauthammer compilation is that the columnist goes several steps beyond his fellow 1938ists. He does not simply see Iran as a gathering storm and people who would deal with Iran as appeasers. He thought the same of Iraq. And North Korea. And China. And…

by Michael J. Totten

SOUTHERN ISRAEL, NEAR GAZA – Israel’s other war-without-a-name in the summer of 2006 is eerily similar to the one in the north, the one that got all the attention, against Iran’s proxy militia Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.

Palestinian terrorists kidnapped the young Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit just across the border from Gaza and ramped up their Qassam rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel.

Shika Frista and his friend Zvika took me to Kibbutz Alumim, where Zvika lives with his family, and showed me some of the rockets that landed in and around the community recently.

read the rest over at michaeltotten.com »

by David Weigel

Doesn’t it seem like Charles Krauthammer compares America’s enemies du jour to Hitler with frequency approaching self-parody? Brendan "Spinsanity" Nyhan did some digging and found that not only does Krauthammer repeatedly compare foreign leaders to Hitler, he repeatedly uses the exact same quote, from Idaho Sen. William Borah, to do so. Reading through them really takes you back to the Chinese invasion of Israel back in 1992.

Talk about hack column writing – these read like a parody of lazy conservative opinion journalism.

Um. "Like" a parody?

Scotts Valley, California, 10 am.

by David Weigel

Chandrasekhar has now ended two consecutive films with Willie Nelson pot jokes. Do I smell an auteurist motif?

Blogger Tim Brayton, trying valiantly to find the artistic core of the uniquely inartistic comedy Beerfest.

by Michael J. Totten

TEL AVIV — You never know what, really, to make of official rhetoric coming out of Beirut unless you‚Äôre inside Lebanon and know what the ‚Äústreet‚Äù thinks. The Lebanese government often makes public statements that are designed strictly for public consumption in foreign capitals, primarily Washington, Damascus, Paris, Tehran, Cairo, and Riyadh.

Last week Prime Minister Fouad Seniora said he was interested in peace talks with Israel. Today he said Lebanon will be the last country to make peace with Israel.

Who is the real Fouad Seniora? I’m in Tel Aviv right now, not in Beirut, so it’s hard to read the geopolitical tea leaves and entrails. I suspect Seniora got himself in a bit of, um, trouble in certain quarters and felt the need to “clarify” his position. Lebanon’s government is only slightly stronger than the governments of Somalia and Colombia, and is under constant pressure from foreigners to join the West, the pan-Arabists, and the jihad.

Even so, there are many in Lebanon who really don’t want peace with Israel, who really do prefer the state of perpetual war. They are the ones who enable and allow pressure from the Syrian-Iranian axis. Now is the time for Lebanon’s other friends, its real friends, to ask Dr. Phil’s favorite question: How’s that working for ya?

by David Weigel

Justin Raimondo bases his latest column on my post about Dana Milbank’s coverage of Mearsheimer and Walt’s appearance at the National Press Club. Milbank saw a sloppy presentation and picked it apart; I called the column "brutal."

Milbank, "brutal"? Oh please ‚Äì the Washington political gossip   columnist’s sneering "review"   of the distinguished scholars’ performance consists of noting that Mearsheimer   pronounced two congressmen’s names incorrectly (a big no-no in D.C., where politicians   are akin to rock stars) ‚Äì and the same tired,   old accusations of anti-Semitism if anyone looks cross-eyed at the   Lobby or its partisans. Oh, but you see, Mearsheimer is claiming to be an   "expert" on how policy gets made in Washington, therefore not getting   two congressmen’s names right effectively debunks everything he has to say.   And that is what passes for "logic"   among the Washington cognoscenti.

Well, that wasn’t everything Milbank saw. And those weren’t the parts I played up. What I played up was Mearsheimer’s misrepresentation of a poll on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and the weird "Fight the Israel Lobby" button that he happily accepted after the speech. The bogus usage of the poll was, to me, Mearsheimer’s biggest mistake. Like I implied earlier, I take their arguments seriously and would love it if a serious debate broke out about the subject of their research. Curiously self-serving mistakes like this make it easier for the screeching Krauthammers of the world to dismiss Mearsheimer et al as anti-semites and frauds, and I absolutely don’t want that.

Raimondo links to the C-Span tape of the speeches, which is still worth a listen.

by David Weigel

In Venezuela, tough luck if you work on a golf course.

The mayor of Venezuela’s capital Caracas says he plans to expropriate two exclusive golf courses and use the land for homes for the city’s poor.

Mayor Juan Barreto has said playing golf on lavish courses within sight of the city’s slums is "shameful".

In Guatemala, tough luck if… well, if you enjoy having constitutional rights.

The Guatemalan government announced Tuesday that it had suspended some constitutional rights in five cities along Mexico’s border as it cracks down on drug growers and traffickers in the remote region.

A two-week order, called a state of prevention, allows the government to suspended the rights to carry firearms and hold demonstrations and meetings, while expanding authorities’ rights to conduct searches.

by Ana Marie Cox

Rumsfeld gave an endearingly retro anti "blame America first crowd" speech yesterday. VERY 2004, right down to a Hitler reference!

Someone recently recalled one U.S. Senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

"Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."

Think of that!

I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.

Also? The first rule of fight club is to never question fight club!

Any moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

In other words, if you have to ask whether we should torture terrorists, the terrorists have already won.

by David Weigel

In response to my Stanley Kurtz post, I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails like this.

Weigel has not explained how he would propose to "stop" a ballistic missile from JihadLand to NYC. Only a ballistic missile has a 6000-mile trajectory, and as far as I know, there is no operational ballistic missile defense for the east coast of the USA against a transatlantic attack. [There _is_ a nominal BMD on the USA west coast.]

From Navy Times:

By the end of the year, the Navy will have a total of six warships capable of tracking and shooting down ballistic missiles.

Three cruisers — Shiloh, Lake Erie and Port Royal — already have the capability to track ballistic missiles with upgraded Aegis radar. They also have the ability to hit a ballistic missile with an SM-3 missile, shot out of standard Navy vertical launch system tubes.

By year’s end, the destroyers Stethem, Decatur and Curtis Wilbur will also have ballistic-missile defense capability, according to Lt. Tommy Crosby, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon.

The ships patrol the Pacific right now, but I have no trouble believing they’d be redeployed to the Atlantic if we found ourselves in Kurtz’s future world, where Iran flings around nukes willy-nilly and soylent green is made out of people. Remember that Kurtz’s nightmare scenario – the one more dangerous than the Cold War – involved a rogue power firing a single nuke at the United States. I doubt we’ll soon develop the sort of missile defense that could have neutralized a MAD-style situation with thousands of nukes. But one nuke?