The Dish

Thanks so much to the response to my “bleg” about comparisons between our current heroic attempt to rebuild Iraq and the Marshall Plan. The best source I’ve found so far is a Rand comparison between the first two post-war years in Germany and the first post-war year in Iraq. Since the Marshall Plan only kicked in in 1948, this isn’t a direct comparison. But from 1946 – 1947, the U.S. spent $266 per capita per year in West Germany (in 2001 dollars). If you assume we will spend the full $20 billion in the next year in Iraq and that Iraq’s population is around 24 million, then our current commitment is something over $800 per capita. That strikes me as a real and extraordinary commitment. (A genuine comparison to Marshall won’t be possible for a couple of years, which is also revealing. Back then, people seemed to understand it would take time to resurrect a viable democracy and economy in devastated Germany. Why do people expect it to occur overnight in Iraq? Hitler’s economic skills were a lot better than Saddam’s.) So here’s a question worth asking: Why is it that this is not more fully acknowledged by those critics of this administration? I for one was worried that Rummy’s penny-pinching would mean no real nation-building in Iraq. It’s clear now that that isn’t going to happen. And when you consider we’re also going to be spending around $2400 per capita on security, it’s an astonishing act of generosity (as well as a vital piece of self-interest). Where are the Democrats praising this initiative instead of seeking apologies and political advantage? Bush has done exactly what hawkish Democrats were afraid he would punt on. Good for him.

“Showtime, the cable network, boasts that no fewer than three journalists, including the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, were involved in assuring the accuracy and balance of the docudrama “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,” first shown last Sunday while the actual George W. Bush was addressing the nation. But this film, made with full Bush administration cooperation (including that of the president himself), is propaganda so untroubled by reality that it’s best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl.’ – Frank Rich, New Tork Times, September 14.

Finally a criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror from the real right. It doesn’t add up to me, but it’s worth a read. Mark Helprin is a beautiful writer and a sober analyst of Arab political culture. He thinks we haven’t been tough enough on the Arab world, and its broader complicity in the politics of resentment that led to 9/11:

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over. But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

I’m not sure what such a coup de main would have meant. Nuking Mecca? Presumably not. But Helprin’s argument helps us remember that the American response to a declaration of war has been measured, patient and, now, extremely generous. I also think he’s right about the need for much bigger military expenditures than we now have. We are dangerously vulnerable to a real threat from North Korea, while we are engaged in the Middle East. But if the American political class has been so divided over even the modest measures we have taken to fight back so far, what hope would there have been for a more ambitious campaign?

I used to read and respect Hugo Young, a journalistic titan in Britain. He loathed Thatcher but gave her her due. But he has become in recent years a pathological Europhile, eager to merge Britain into a new European power to balance or rival the U.S. In that context, reading his latest work is saddening. Even from that distance, George W. Bush is driving him nuts. He’s headed for Krugman territory. Check out this column. There are the formulaic protests that he loves America, Americans, etc. And he’s a good liberal. But he says he “loathes” this war. Loathes? I certainly respect pragmatic liberals who opposed the war and still do. But even they – especially they – can also see the benefits of releasing a people from a terrible and grotesque police state and removing Saddam from power. To lose sight of these things is a sign of a warped and increasingly unbalanced perspective. He refers to the American government as “Bush’s gang” to which his country is in “abject thrall.” And then he comes up with this assessment of Tony Blair’s foreign policy:

For Blair, in his Bush-Iraq mode, [foreign policy] has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention in a third country’s affairs, for moral purposes, at the instigation of the power whose hyperdom he cannot resist. What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. … What it means to be an independent nation is a question that touches the wellsprings of a people’s being. Yet it is one that our leader, as regards this war, has simply disguised from his people, egged on by sufficient numbers of North American papers and journalists who seem to be wholly delighted at the prospect of surrendering it. I do not believe this obtuseness can last for ever. If there is one virtue in the unfinished history of the Iraq war, it is that the British may finally wake up to what the special relationship is doing to their existence.

Their existence? Suddenly this left-liberal sounds like the most fanatical of Tory Europhobes. And yet not an iota of sovereignty has been lost to the United States in this conflict – certainly not a smidgen of the degree to which British sovereignty has been surrenderd to Brussels. Young also seems to believe that tackling the new nexus of terrorism and WMDs has nothing to do with British interests. How? Does he think Britain is somehow immune from the threat? Does he remember how many British citizens were murdered on September 11? There is, it seems to me, a poison out there, infecting minds that were once clear, blurring argument into a welter of hatred for the United States. And it’s not just in Britain.

I was struck by an aside in Fareed Zakaria’s typically sane op-ed in today’s Washington Post. he says that the $20 billion to be spent on Iraqi infrastructure in the next year amounts to one half of that country’s GNP. The scale of generosity boggles the mind – especially since the lion’s share of the damage was done by Saddam Hussein, not by the war. I wonder how it compares to the sums spent in, say, Germany after the Second World War? Maybe someone out there has an analysis.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: Who says we can’t keep an award for a legend in media bias? Here’s the Guardian today on the Israel-Palestinian impasse:

The militant groups abandoned the truce on August 21 after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in a missile strike that followed a suicide bombing which killed 22 people in Jerusalem.

Wouldn’t that chronology suggest that the truce was ended first by the suicide bombing – or would that imply that Israel isn’t always at fault? (For a summary of this blogs various awards, click here.)

There’s a correction to the Dowd Award nominee below. Good for the Post. The New York Times is, apparently, too wedded to Maureen Dowd’s ego to do the same thing.

I haven’t blogged much on the California recall because others have that market niche. (Can you imagine the howls of protest if I devoted as much space to gay rights as Mickey does to the intricacies of a California recall? But I digress…) Still, it’s a good question whether I think the court has the right to intervene to prevent an electoral fiasco. I answered that in 2000. I’m not changing my mind now that it (probably) benefits a goddawful Democrat. The real question is: why has it taken them so frigging long to replace those chads? Or, as Mickey suggests, why not have a paper ballot instead?

The big macher at the BBC, Greg Dyke, told the Hutton inquiry a couple of devastating things yesterday. First, he admitted that he had denounced criticisms of the BBC’s journalism without even checking whether the sourcing was accurate or fair. Internal BBC emails worrying about the sloppy standards of reporter Andrew Gilligan’s journalism were unknown to him at the time, he said. He also conceded that it was “unacceptable” that Gilligan had leaked the name of the late scientist David Kelly as the source for another reporter’s work. In another piece of good news for the government, the head of MI6 said he stood by the intelligence that had suggested that Saddam could have had WMD capacity within 45 minutes – the key piece of evidence that the BBC said had been politically inserted into the Iraq war dossier. Advantage Blair.

ANOTHER HIV BREAKTHROUGH: Hey, I could have a kid, after all.

Herewith a new occasional award given to writers, columnists or pundits who deliberately distort, elide, truncate or garble quotes for ideological purposes. The first nominee for this prestigious award goes to Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus for a spectacular performance in the Washington Post yesterday:

Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia’s ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. “I don’t want to speculate,” he said, adding that Sept. 11 is “over with now, it’s done, it’s history and we can put it behind us.”

As Ramesh Ponnuru noticed, this is, er, misleading. The transcript of the show goes as follows. After Tim Russert asked Cheney about “reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public,” Cheney replied:

I don’t want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. At some point, we may be able to declassify it, but there are ongoing investigations that might be affected by that release, and for that reason, we kept it classified. The committee knows what’s in there. They helped to prepare it. So it hasn’t been kept secret from the Congress, but from the standpoint of our ongoing investigations, we needed to do that.
One of the things this points out that’s important for us to understand-so there’s this great temptation to look at these events as [discrete] events. We got hit on 9/11. So we can go and investigate it. It’s over with now. It’s done. It’s history and put it behind us.
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there. We learn more and more as we capture people, detain people, get access to records and so forth that this is a continuing enterprise and, therefore, we do need to be careful when we look at things like 9/11, the commission report from 9/11, not to jeopardize our capacity to deal with this threat going forward in the interest of putting that information that’s interesting that relates to the period of time before that. These are continuing requirements on our part, and we have to be sensitive to that.

Maybe it was the editing that did it. The New York Times refused to correct Dowd’s quote garbling. Will the Washington Post? Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for future Dowd Award nominations.

“Thanks for posting my email comments regarding Hirschman’s rhetoric of reaction. I consider myself a left/liberal–I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life and I even wrote a book on race relations that David Horowitz branded as “anti-American, anti-white, and astoundingly ignorant.” But my comrades are blind to the fact that George Bush has liberated more people than the EU, the UN, and ANSWER put together. How depressing. I feel the same way about the left that you do about the Catholic Church.” – that guy gets two in two days. There’s more feedback on the Letters Page.

CLINTON LIES – SHOCK HORROR: Will Saletan has another example of something Maureen Dowd has also mentioned in the past – that the Bush administration tried to increase the levels of arsenic in the drinking water. Who repeated that hoary old canard? None other than former president Bill Clinton at the Iowa State Fair, saying that the Republicans “tried to put more arsenic in the water.” He knows that it was his administration that delayed new, tighter arsenic standards for eight years, and that all the incoming Bush administration did was to review the last-minute directives from the Clinton White House, before enforcing a standard that was stricter than was the case for all of the Clinton administration. But, hey, who’s listening any more to that incorrigible old rogue? The blogosphere, that’s who.