The Dish

Desperate to prove the notion that the administration did too call the threat from Saddam “imminent,” Josh Marshall, becoming ever more stridently anti-Bush, came up with a contest. He asked his readers to send in the best administration “imminent threat” quote. Well, you can judge for yourself. But, to my mind, he comes up completely empty. No administration official used that term. None. The best Marshall can come up with are reporters’ off-the-cuff formulations in questions to Ari Fleischer which evinced the response “yes.” He links to Rumsfeld testimony in which the secretary of defense specifically spells out the core of the administration’s case:

So we are on notice: An attack very likely will be attempted. The only question is when, and by what technique. It could be months; it could be a year; it could be years. But it will happen, and each of us need to pause and think about that. If the worst were to happen, not one of us here today would be able to honestly say that it was a surprise, because it will not be a surprise.

So we have no administration reference to an “imminent threat” and a chief spokesman saying that the threat could be as much as years away and, at the least, months. We have the president himself saying explicitly that “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.”

THE DEEPER ISSUE: We can fight over words in this way, but the fundamental reality also undermines Marshall’s case. The point about 9/11 is that it showed that we were in a new world where we could be attacked by shadowy groups with little warning. The point about Saddam is that he was a sworn enemy of the U.S., had been known to develop an arsenal of WMDs, was in a position to arm terrorists in a devastating way, and any president had to weigh the risk of him staying in power in that new climate. The actual threat hangs over us all the time. It is unlike previous threats from foreign powers. It is accountable to no rules and no ethics. We know it will give us no formal warning. But we cannot know it is “imminent”. If we had such proof – that the U.S. was under an imminent threat of attack – there would have been no debate at all. Of course a country has the right to defend itself when it is faced with an imminent threat. The debate is over how seriously to take the threat we now face. The strongest argument of the anti-war crowd is that we now know that the WMD threat from Saddam was much less than almost everyone (including most of them) believed. They’re right – at least from the evidence so far. But that doesn’t resolve the question of what we should have done before the war, when we had limited knowledge and information. Josh implies we should have risked it, and kept Saddam in power, with fingers crossed. But then Josh wasn’t president. He wasn’t responsible for guessing wrong. The question we have to answer is a relatively simple one: do we want a president who will veer on the optimistic side when it comes to Islamist terror, or do we want a president that will veer on the side of caution and aggression? Do we want one who will hope for the best or one who will act, assuming the worst? I thought 9/11 ended that debate. It clearly hasn’t. But it’s the central debate of the coming election.

This non-story story is getting weirder and weirder. On Thursday, the Prince of Wales’ office put out a statement denying as completely untrue an allegation that no-one in Britain or the U.S. has yet published. This might be a first. The idea that you quash a rumor that no one has yet published by publicly referring to it is not exactly a brilliant P.R. initiative. If you’re also the heir to the British throne, it guarantees putting the story on the front pages. The allegation of a witnessed “incident” between Charles and another man which the Guardian elegantly refers to as “not a boating accident” may well be completely untrue. But it is now a story, with details in the European press and even – for twenty minutes or so – in the New York Times. I can’t help but concur with the Guardian:

[Y]ou would need a heart of stone not to feel some sympathy for the House of Windsor at the end of such a week. The pay’s good, the hours are hardly onerous and the perks – free travel, lavish accommodation and hot and cold running servants – are to die for. But the near daily humiliations involved in being a Windsor at the start of the 21st century must surely be starting to outweigh the purely material benefits of the royal life.

Poor Charles. The days when monarchs got their heads chopped off are beginning to seem preferable to today’s privacy-free Internet sewer.

That John Derbyshire. What a card. He gets to put a caption on the moment when Gene Robinson became a bishop – “Pass the Miter, Sweetie!” – and now gets to make fun of the way some African-Americans speak: “Al [Sharpton]: We’re all fine, Aunt Eustacia, just fine. I just wanted to ax you about cousin George.” When conservatism becomes mere mockery of black people, you really don’t have to ask why so few African-Americans vote Republican, do you? (There’s also a riff on the Liebermans which veers on anti-Semitism, and the whole post drips with cheap 1950s gags about fags – they all go to fashion school and make tchotchkes for their mothers.) Congrats, NRO. Give a bigot the run of the place and you’ll soon tarnish yourselves. Well, you already have, haven’t you? Does no-one there wince at this know-nothing drivel?

JFK AND GWB: During the primary season (the last go-round) I wrote a speculative (and somewhat hostile) piece comparing then-candidate George W. Bush with former president John F Kennedy. I meant it as a useful mind-exercise, but as time has gone on, I think the analogy strengthens. The backgrounds are similar: unruly scions of political families, young men who got their start in politics through pure nepotism. Their frat-boy garrulousness, their effortless patriotism, their family loyalties – it all works until you get to the moment when GWB gave up the wild life at 40 and JFK kept his going. But on policy, they’re also much more similar than either the right or the left is comfortable conceding. They both came into office in a disupted election after a two-term president who presided over a major boom. President Kennedy fought an election on hawkish foreign policy; the current President Bush walked backward into hawkishness through the drastic orientation of 9/11. Both cut taxes and unleashed periods of economic growth. And both argued uncompromisingly for democracy across the world. Some boomers may also see in Iraq the same pattern as president Kennedy’s early foray into Vietnam. I’d disagree strongly, but history will surely judge in due course. Perhaps more tellingly, both used powerful and moving rhetoric to assert the exceptionalism of the United States at a time when it was being attacked. President Bush’s speech Thursday at the National Endowment for Democracy was perhaps the highpoint of this president’s transformation into an old-style Democrat in foreign policy. Too bad the Democrats can neither see this nor profit from it.

I screwed up the link to Bob Wright’s excellent adventure, The Meaning of Life. Here it is.

I’m astonished that a university like George Washington U is hosting Stephen Glass on a panel today to discuss “”Pressure, Plagiarism and Professionalism: A Panel Discussion Concerning Ethics in Journalism.” And I’m mighty outraged by the way this panel is being spun:

The panel will discuss current ethical issues facing journalists and professionals including: how organizations facilitate and sometimes promote unethical behavior; whether it is appropriate for professionals and others to profit from their unethical behavior; and the role of educational institutions in instilling integrity in future professionals.

Is Glass trying to play the victim here? Let’s put it nicely: yes, there’s pressure in journalism. Yes, twenty-somethings making a name for themselves can get stressed out. But there’s a difference between forgivable screw-ups and a conscious, sociopathic attempt to break every ethical rule in sight.

Victor Davis Hanson is particularly impressive this morning – because he criticizes as well as praises. This point strikes me as critical:

If we are outnumbered in particular theaters, it is only through laxity, not through an absence of resources. This is a country, after all, that bickered over the cost of a single destroyer in 1937 and then built over 87,000 warships less than a decade later when it was at war. If we are convinced that Iraq must be stabilized, and Syria and Iran must cease aiding and abetting the terror and killing of Americans, then surely we have the resources to defeat our enemies in short order. The problem is not might, but will – or perhaps worry about our affluence, gas prices, and self-image.
In the last two years, on each occasion when the United States finally said “enough is enough” and began to apply itself in earnest – after the fourth or fifth week in Afghanistan, pouring it on through a sandstorm in Iraq, or rounding up terrorist cells here at home – the enemy was impressed and faltered. And in contrast, each time we caught our breath and thought we were done – allowing the Taliban to sneak back into Pakistan in droves, watching looting with impunity, concerned more about immediate reconstruction than the destruction of the Iraqi Baathists, or worried about pressuring neighbors not to allow terrorists into Iraq – our enemies became emboldened. We are all products of the Enlightenment and value sobriety and moderation, but that ensures neither that our enemies share such confidence in reason nor that predictability is a virtue in war.

At this point in the war, we should be enraged by Baathist counter-attacks, not rattled.

We’ve been waiting for this speech. Critics of the war in Iraq and a huge change in American foreign policy in the Middle East will no doubt play up the negatives. They will argue that the president is changing the subject from the difficult occuation of Iraq, the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But the case for war both in Afghanistan and Iraq has always been a complex and varied one, despite the attempts of the cynics to reduce it to one issue (and then blame the administration for simplisme). The fundamental lesson of 9/11 seems to me to be the following: it was no longer possible for the West to ignore or enable the poisonous and dangerous trends in the Middle East. The combination of autocratic fragility, huge wealth, new technology, and an Islamist ideology modeled on the National Socialism of the past was and is an enormous threat to the world. The odd cruise missile strike; diplomatic initiatives to failed despots; appeasement of terror; and acquiescence in Euro-cynicism about the Arab potential for democracy – all these were made moot by 9/11. They were no longer viable options. We either aggressively engaged or we hunkered down and prayed that a calamity would not at some point strike us all. To its historic credit, the Bush administration resisted its own early isolationist impulses and took the high road. To their eternal shame, the French and Germans, the far rights, the far left, and many (but not all) of the Democrats opted for inaction or a replay of the failed policies of the past. What this president did was radical, progressive, risky.

THE SPEECH: And what he needed to do – as any leader needs to do in wartime – is constantly remind people of the context of the struggle, to bring their attention from the day-by-day exigencies of any war, with its casualties and battles and setbacks, to the bigger picture. We are fighting for the defense of liberty in the world – again. And we are now trying to bring it to the one region and culture which has been untouched by it for so long: the Middle East. Money quote:

In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has, and I quote, “barely reached the Arab states. They continue this freedom deficit, undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development.”
The freedom deficit they describe has terrible consequences for the people of the Middle East and for the world.
In many Middle Eastern countries poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling, whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead.
These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.

This latter is a critical point. Islamism is not a religion. Islam is. Islamism is a political ideology as dangerous and as evil as the totalitarianisms of he past century. It is abetted by tyranny; and requires a huge effort to defeat. What the president said yesterday was the first front in the task of spreading this message across the region. He didn’t pull punches. Nor should he have:

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems and serve the true interests of their nations.
The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long many people in that region have been victims and subjects; they deserve to be active citizens.

I particularly liked the following analogy: “As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test.” That’s precisely the right way to frame this battle. This isn’t a replay of Vietnam. It’s a replay of an earlier, nobler war that changed the world for the better. Those are still the stakes today. And we cannot let cynicism or partisanship prevent us from winning the fight.

He wants to engage the Baathists in Damascus and the Islamofascists in Tehran. He doesn’t want them to feel threatened. And he wants to “internationalize” a force, while few foreign governments have either the means or the will to help out. I’m glad he’s not moving toward Kucinich-style isolationism. But what this amounts to is an end to a war on terror, which targets states as well as terrorist entities. It’s back to the 1990s. Which means, in reality, back, at some point, to another 9/11.

I caught this throw-away in Maureen Dowd’s latest anti-Bush screed:

If [Bush] gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped coffins of fallen heroes to be photographed coming home, it will just remind people that the administration said this would be easy, and it’s teeth-grindingly hard.

More calumnies follow. Now the question is: can anyone find a statement from any administration official who said that the post-war reconstruction in Iraq would be “easy.” Notice she wrote: “said.” Not implied or hoped or suggested. Said. So here’s a challenge for all my anti-war readers or anyone else to find such a statement. If none shows up by next week (maybe I’m wrong and missed something), we should make a stink. In the meantime, I refer you to this posting of last week, where I laid out the many statements of the president predicting a hard post-war period in Iraq. One representative quote from the president:

The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.

That was February 26, a month before the war. They “said this would be easy.” Does she think we can’t read?

SHRINKING PENISES: Mark Steyn made a little fun about crazy Islamists claiming that Zionists were somehow shrinking their penises. The panic was spread by text-messaging, apparently. But the phenomenon is real and has the priceless name of “Genital Retraction Syndrome.” I kid you not at all. Big in the east.

“Coetzee doesn’t write realism: His novels cannot be pinned down to a history, be it apartheid South Africa or Bush’s increasingly authoritarian America. Yet it’s hard to believe that the Nobel committee, in coming to its judgment, wasn’t moved by the way Coetzee’s most astute writing speaks to this moment. A moment when an ill-conceived campaign against an ill-defined enemy risks creating in its wake a culture of surveillance, military hubris, anonymous internment, torture, more violence and counter-violence, and, among America’s citizenry, an immobilizing paranoia.” – Rob Nixon, in the ever-more leftward Slate.

THE MEANING OF LIFE: Yes – and all on a tv webpage. The irrepressibly astute Bob Wright launches an experiment of sorts. Listen to Steven Pinker talk about … his hair. And other things.

THE TRIPPI REVOLUTION: Noam Scheiber looks at what’s really making the Dean campaign take off.