SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE

“Yesterday’s [Guardian] front page describing the crimes of the US military in Iraq and the Israeli military in Palestine denote [sic] for me, late in the day, a crossing of the Rubicon. I have until now, perhaps foolishly, been prepared to admit that in both situations one could agree to differ with the apologists. But no longer. These are not “military actions”, but crimes against humanity. The occupations in both cases have no basis in law. They amount to the brutal repression of civilian populations. As a British citizen I am ashamed to be party to all that. Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French Resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.” – Canon Paul Oestreicher, in the Guardian. Oliver Kamm deconstructs.

KERRY STILL BEHIND

The Fox News poll has got to depress Democrats. The president is still beating Kerry easily in the battleground states. Then there’s this piece of news:

The beheading of American civilian-Nick Berg-by Muslim terrorists was a much more upsetting news story to Americans than the prisoner abuse scandal (60 percent and eight percent respectively), with 29 percent saying both news reports were equally upsetting.

The blogosphere understood that. The mainstream media didn’t seem to. Why? Here’s part of the answer:

[S]ince 1995, Pew found at national outlets that the liberal segment has climbed from 22% to 34% while conservatives have only inched up from 5% to 7%.

We knew that, didn’t we? Maybe someone could let Eric Alterman know.

THE BIG STORY

After a while, you get to know how to read the major media about Iraq. Much good news will be reluctantly produced and buried within the paper. All bad news will get banner headlines. But today, the Washington Post leads with the Coalition’s successes in Kufa and the Times publishes this story by Edward Wong, whose reporting has been excellent. The Mahdi Army, Moqtadr al-Sadr’s gang, has essentially withdrawn from Karbala under fire in part from Iraqi soldiers, trained by the U.S. Special Forces. The militia has also withstood terrible casualties in Kufa, and may be on the verge of collapse. Fallujah, for the time at least, seems relatively pacified (if by worrying means). We are, in other words, seeing some modest military progress in Iraq. Politically, we are just at the beginning of a critical period, but, again, the signs are not so awful. The jostling for positions in the new government is surely a sign that Iraqis are beginning to battle politically for new power. Better than a civil war:

A spokesman for Mr. Brahimi said in a phone interview from Baghdad that the United Nations envoy was shuttling among Iraq’s various factions and constituencies, including many of the 400 political parties that have identified themselves since Mr. Hussein was overthrown.
“There’s still a lot of maneuvering going on,” said the spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi. “There’s still shuttling back and forth between all the parties and players. We’re not there yet.”

But you can begin to see the shape of a future settlement. I chart the administration’s arguments for guarded optimism here.

NOT IN THE PAPERS: Jeff Jarvis does a useful summary of the Iraqi blogs. Big surprise: they’re not as gloomy as the Western press.

THREE NEW POSTS: Opposite are three recent pieces: on the integrative promise of May 17 in Massachusetts, the deployment of the Eucharist in the 2004 campaign, and the Bush administration’s strategy in post-Abu Ghraib Iraq.

THE WEDDING SINGER

Allegedly killed by U.S. forces, he seems to have two names.

ROMNEY HAS A POINT: A while back, I referred to an obscure 1913 Masscahusetts law, designed to prevent inter-racial couples using Massachusetts to leverage marriage rights in their home states. Mitt Romney wants to deploy that statute today to prevent out-of-state gay couples from doing the same thing as their multi-racial forebears once tried to do. I’m no fan of the statute (or of Romney), but it seems to me that the governor is right. It’s the law. And it should be enforced or repealed – not ignored or violated. Marriage rights advocates will be making a serious error if they try and use Massachusetts to coerce other states into recognition. Gay couples from states which specifically ban marriage rights for gays should therefore be prevented from marrying in Massachusetts: that’s the deal of federalism. If, however, the couples come from states that have not banned such marriages, and whose attorneys-general have said they will recognize such marriages, then I see no reason to prevent them. But the law should also be applied to those heterosexual couples who fall under its purview. As blogger John Aravosis points out,

Massachusetts permits an 18 year old to get married, no questions asked. Nebraska and Mississippi, however, require that same 18 year old to have a notarized consent form from their parent before conducting the marriage. If the Massachusetts clerks weren’t presented with those consent forms, then the out-of-state heterosexuals weren’t legally married (or so it would seem). There are lots of other requirements that vary by each state. If any of those were not met when an out of stater got married in Massachusetts, their marriage could be invalid.

Romney should enforce the law, acknowledge that it was designed to stop inter-racial marriages, and apply it equally to straights and gays today. My fundamental belief is that the right to marry is unalienable. But it was for inter-racial couples in 1913 as well – and they were still denied it for decades. Social change takes time and persuasion. Federalism requires and prudence dictates that we restrict marriage rights to those few states that enact them or recognize them elsewhere. Pushing for a national decision right now would be unwise and foolhardy. We have won an amazing victory. Let’s not throw it away with extremism.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“I try not to use multiple punctuation marks, and keep it temperate, but ‘Bush Gets It’?!?! That’s the headline you choose when the President of the United States finally, lamely, far, far too late actually deigns to speak directly to the American people with the details of how he will try to salvage some honor out of what is becoming a world-historical debacle?
It must be nice to be a president for whom expectations of seriousness, policy grasp, and communicative ability are so low that when he offers a press conference or actually takes time to describe his policies to the people he “leads”, this is news, for which we are meant to be grateful.
If by ‘Bush Gets It’ you mean ‘Bush realizes he is in serious danger of actually losing to a lackluster central-casting Democrat who can barely be bothered to campaign, and this after winning two wars and giving half the treasury back to the people in pandering tax cuts, and he knows it’s high time he actually be the president and stop just saying ‘freedom’ and ‘stay the course”, you’re right. I guess, maybe, three and a half years into his job, he finally gets it.” More new feedback on the Letters Page.

ANOTHER WRINKLE: Here’s another fascinating little nugget that proves nothing – except that the hysteria of some on the social right is misplaced. To hear some social conservatives, you’d think that all sorts of bad social phenomena are related to tolerance of gays – from illegitimacy rates to divorce and even abortion. But none of this pans out. In fact, we know that divorce and abortion rates are often higher in those regions where the religious right is strongest. But I was not aware of the following:

The Netherlands – which are also very gay-friendly – has the lowest abortion rate of any country in the world (6.5 per 1,000) – much, much lower than in the USA. Belgium has extremely pro-gay laws and an abortion rate nearly as low as The Netherlands (6.8 per 1,000). The other countries in the world with gay-marriage or marriage-lite laws – Germany (7.6), Denmark (16.1), Norway (15.6), France (12.4), and Canada (15.5) – all have significantly lower abortion rates than the USA (and also lower than most countries in the world).
Meanwhile, Eastern Europe – the least gay-friendly place in the developed world – has an incredibly high abortion rate: 90 abortions per 1,000 women age 15-44. Overall, it’s clear that gay-friendly countries have fewer abortions.

No, that doesn’t mean they’re linked. I don’t share the social science methods of Stanley Kurtz. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

A reader comes across an old essay by Susan Sontag, whose latest indictment of America will be published this weekend in the New York Times Magazine:

I came across the December 1968 Esquire. Its cover flap touts the big story: “Exclusive: Trip to Hanoi 28,000 Word Report by Susan Sontag.”

Much of the article is little more than a travelogue with discussions of how she got there, what the airport was like, how well-mannered the Vietnamese are, the fact that their babies don’t cry, what they serve for snacks (“overripe green bananas, Vietnamese cigarettes, damp cookies….”), how much they like individual Americans.

However, it quickly becomes clear that she is more than just a Communist sympathizer: She is herself a Communist who not only advocates U.S. defeat in Vietnam but also Communist revolution here.

Here is the money quote:

“And the revolution that remains to be made in this country [the United States] must be made in American terms, not those of an Asian peasant society … Life here [in America] looks both uglier and more promising … Increasing numbers of [Americans] do realize that we must have a more generous, more humane way of being with each other; and great, probably convulsive, social changes are needed to create these psychic changes … The wide prevalence of unfocused unhappiness in modern Western culture could be the beginning of real knowledge – by which I mean the knowing that leads simultaneously to action and to self-transcendence, the knowing that would lead to a new versions of human nature in this part of the world … Just possibly, the process of recasting the particular historical form of our human nature prevalent in Europe and American can be hurried a little, by more people becoming aware of capacies for sentiments and behavior that this culture’s values have obscured and slandered.

Sontag is urging on America “convulsive” social change to produce “new versions of human nature.” Lenin, anyone? No wonder she has found members of al Qaeda to be more moral than American soldiers.

CONTRA COLE: Juan Cole, stung by criticism that he directy equated Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein, tears me a new one on his blog. I should repeat for the record that Cole’s blog is well worth reading and a font of information and analysis. But it is also beset by a hatred of the Bush administration that mars its credibility. Cole lambastes me for a column I wrote before the war complaining about Howell Raines’ explicit camaigning against the war in the NYT. I would think by now that the question of Raines’ abuse of the NYT is largely settled. But Cole understandably loved Raines’ polemicizing in the guise of journalism. Then he attacks my column on several grounds. Firstly, that I dismissed predictions that the war would wreck the American economy. But I was right. If anything, war spending has juiced the economy, now predicted to grow at around 4.7 percent this year. Then he argues that paranoia and skepticism about the Bush administration’s motives, as exemplified by Raiunes, were rational. I beg to differ. I still see no evidence that the Bush administration’s motives were insincere. You can criticize them, as I have, for all sorts of things. But the insistence of the far left that it is an administration of deliberate lies and deception seems to me overblown and shrill. And even if such paranoia were defensible, the man running the most authoritative paper on the planet should try and rein his biases in, not give them full expression through news reporting. That was my point. Cole subsequently describes my description of possible motives for opposing war in 2002 as “character assassination.” Again, he exaggerates. It is perfectly fair to notice that Brent Scowcroft might be seeking to defend his past in opposing a new Iraq war. When your policy of keeping Saddam in power led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands, you have a good reason to make the case that you were nonetheless right. Cole then says my description of some military brass as “gun-shy” implies I am impugning their courage. Please. I’m merely describing the U.S. military’s long-held aversion to difficult conflicts.

TAINTED BY EXTREMISM: Cole then concedes that his posting was prompted by my criticism of his moral equation of Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein. Here is what he wrote:

“Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.”

Cole defends this obscenity by saying the following:

There is an enormous difference in scale between what Saddam did to them and what the Coalition has done since the beginning of April. But it is early days, after all. And in issues of ethics and hypocrisy, scale is less important than principle… “Saving” the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn’t been discredited. Since April 2 they haven’t been saving them any more. They have been killing them.

Notice that Cole has accused me of character assassination because I criticized an editor for being biased. But I haven’t accused anyone of deliberately following the genocidal policies of Saddam Hussein. Cole now steps back a bit and concedes that the Marsh Arab casualties in the insurgency cannot be compared to Saddam’s attempted wholesale destruction of an entire people. But he’s still vicious with regard to Wolfowitz. “Crowing” about the liberation of an entire sub-population? How about “celebrating”? And does Cole honestly believe that the Shiites now freed from Saddam haven’t really been saved? Notice also what Cole doesn’t take back: his vilest assertion that Wolfowitz, a decent and honorable man, is deliberately killing Shiites for the same reasons as Saddam Hussein. Does Cole really believe that Wolfowitz wants to commit genocide to entrench his own vile police state? Cole strikes me as a text-book case in the virtues and merits of today’s academic elite. They can marshall great scholarship and knowledge; but their ideological extremism taints it all.