The Dish

My friend Lawrence Kaplan had a terrific little piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Terrific because it put its finger on how quickly a cultural and political divide emerged in the war on terror. By and large, the Democratic party is now opposed to continuing this war, as currently envisaged, and want to wind it down as fast as possible, seeking diplomacy over force, denying the nexus of terror in the Middle East, eager to undo the new mechanisms law enforcement has to prevent future terrorist attacks, while engaging in Dowd-like attempts to embarrass and infantillize the men and women with the dreadful responsibility for our security. Listening to the Democratic debate earlier this week, I was amazed at how few had any strategic plans for taking the war to the enemy, how the very concept of ‘enemy’ seemed to unnerve and embarrass them. Similarly, the New York Times, a paper that witnessed first-hand the terror, now prefers to use the occasion of the anniversary for a classic piece of moral equivalence, comparing the murder of 3,000 innocents to the U.S. complicity in a coup in Chile thirty years ago. For these people, the first instinct is always, always, always, that the United States is morally suspect. They haven’t changed. The moral clarity after 9/11 terrified them. They wanted it to go away so badly so they could switch the conversation back to the faults and evils of America.

CLARITY FATIGUE: And they have, of course, partly succeeded – not because they managed to inflate, say, Enron’s collapse into the greater event (though that was one of the more comic Raines-Krugman gambits). They succeeded in the end not by argument but by the effect of sheer fatigue. No democracy wants to believe it is under dire threat; no one wants the abnormality to endure; no one wants to absorb the truth that the war is still in its infancy and that greater atrocities lie ahead, unless we act forcefully to pre-empt them and build the kind of societies in the Middle East that are alone guarantees of our and their future peace and stability. I have made plenty of criticisms of this president; and will do so again. But he’s currently the only leader in this country who actually gets the depth of our predicament and the need for innovative, enterprising and ruthless action to improve it. The paradox is that the more he succeeds and the more the threat of terror recedes, the more his opponents will take the calm as evidence that nothing much has to be done, that nothing much has been done, that America, by acting, is the real source of world conflict, and that retreat and amnesia are the cure-alls. I don’t think most Americans believe this. I think they are still angry and still afraid and still determined. But they will suffer more than a thousand cuts from the September 10 brigades in the coming months and years. I remember thinking two years ago that support for the war was easy then; but the real test would be in a few years when forgetfulness would set in and complacency revived. Which means, of course, that the real test of our mettle is now. So the question is not, once again: what have we done wrong? It is: Where are we going to hit those bastards today?

“How much I must criticize you, my Church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone, and yet I owe more to you than anyone.-I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.-You have given me much scandal, and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.-Never in the world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous, or more beautiful.-Countless times I have felt like leaving you, my Church; and yet every night I have prayed that I might die in your warm, loving arms.” – Carlo Carretto, 1910 – 1988.

“Blair Gets A Pass from Iraq Intelligence Panel” – New York Times.

“UK Parliament Clears Blair Over Iraq Arms” – Financial Times.

“Blair ‘overrode terror warnings'” – BBC News.

BAATHIST BROADCASTING CORPORATION II: This recollection from a reader who only just avoided a car accident:

Here’s a BBC classic, heard while driving on September 11 listening to BBC World Service in car… Sorry couldn’t write down exact words. Was around 10.25 Greenwich Mean Time – roughly 6.25 in USA…:
“At the one extreme you have George W Bush, at the other Osama Bin Laden..”
Just as I was choking on this one the presenter went on to say and…in the middle, President Musharaff is pointing out that relations with the Muslim world have deteriorated since 9.11 etc etc…

Ah, yes. Bin Laden and Bush. Just as bad. Aren’t they, Noam?

I found this section from London blogger “Belgravia Despatch” very moving.

SQUANDERING SYMPATHY?: Blog-Irish scans the Irish press two years ago for evidence of the huge amount of sympathy and support for the U.S. after 9/11. Not much there. The U.S. was hated and resented before 9/11. And America’s effrontery in fighting back had an absolutely predictable response. How can we be expected to please people who refuse to be pleased?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Why bother with Iraq? Why fight terrorism? Try this from Richard Hillary’s classic WW2 autobiography written after months of surgery following being shot down.
In a train compartment on the way to Scotland Hillary asked Peter Pease, another young pilot, his reasons for fighting. ‘Well, Richard,’ he said, ‘you’ve got me at last, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know if I can answer you to your satisfaction, but I’ll try. I would say that I was fighting the war to rid the world of fear – of the fear of fear is perhaps what I mean. If the Germans win this war, nobody except little Hitlers will dare do anything… All courage will die out of the world – the courage to love, to create, to take risks, whether physical or intellectual or moral. Men will hesitate to carry out the promptings of their heart or brain because, having acted, they will live in fear that their action may be discovered and themselves cruelly punished. Thus all love, all spontaneity, will die out of the world. Emotion will have atrophied. Thought will have petrified. The oxygen breathed by the soul, so to speak, will vanish, and mankind will wither.’ Peter Pease was killed in action.
Richard Hillary returned to the RAF and was killed in a plane crash during night training. He was 23.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Check out this cartoon in Le Monde. Nice timing, huh?

Here’s a translation of Howard Dean’s favorite song. It’s in Haitian creole (my bad). The full lyrics ( Marie Scala Louis, Andrew Madhere & Shamaha Richemond) are:

This is what the world was waiting for
Wyclef who came from the Fugees
Jeremie, Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Flatbush…

Jaspora doesn’t respect Jaspora (repeat 4 x)

Ever since I was little, I left Haiti
There’s some that went to Brooklyn there’s some that
went to Miami
Why do Jamaicans always say they are Jamaicans,
But Haitians are afraid to say they are Haitians?
Why? Are you scared to say your name is Samuel?
Why? Are you scared to say you’re with Israel?
Why? Every night you are sleeping with Jezebel!
You’re scared to say Haitian girls are beautiful!
Beautiful girls are beautiful…

I respect your name just like I respect the angel
Gabriel
Here, Diaspora men want to take you to hotels,
Start talking English, turning to playboy channel
They do not respect Israel.

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight we’re going to disarm
you

Diaspora ha ha o, put your hands up!
I am going to take them and throw them in prison
I will make them know who is Toussaint
I will make them know who is Dessalines
After, we will let them go and send them back to
Brooklyn
So he could go to his mother who is cooking in the
kitchen
His mom looked at him and said “Man, you’ve changed”
She said I changed because I am Haitian
They taught me a lesson, they put me in prison.

I see Diaspora women and Diaspora men
There are people who are not going to make it because
they will sleep with the fishes
They lost their knowledge just like a priest without
religion

Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora I am going to give you to sharks
Diaspora do not respect Diaspora
If you are a Diaspora tonight were going to disarm you

Port-au-Prince do not respect Diaspora again
Men Flatbush do not respect Diaspora
Men Canada do not respect Diaspora
Men Miami do not respect Diaspora

Pa Kayos do not respect diaspora
Papa Djoume do not respect Diaspora
Refugees do not respect Diaspora
Men Florida do not respect Diaspora
Wrong things done are going to finish worse
If you disrespect native-born
Done wrong things are going to finish worse
Disrespect Haitians you will get hit…

Jaspora has to respect Jaspora
Jaspora has to respect Jaspora

Reads like a screed against assimilating Haitian immigrants to me; and theatens violence against those who assimilate a little too thoroughly. This is Howard Dean’s favorite song?

On this anniversary, the tritest thing to feel is mere grief. Not that grief isn’t justified. But grief is a natural response to unforeseen tragedy, to random events, to things beyond human control. And what happened two years ago today wasn’t merely tragedy. It was a conscious atrocity, an act of war. The free West was attacked by a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip. And the very forces that tried to destroy us then are still trying to destroy us – as that grotesque videotape yesterday only underlined. Any attempt to hide that fact, minimize it, gloss over it, or complicate it into vagueness is an insult to memory. In an attempt to recall the rage of that day, I went back to this blog’s second entry – at 9.46 pm on September 11, 2001 – to revisit the emotions that this massacre unleashed:

I have been unable to think of anything substantive to write today. It is almost as if the usual conventions of journalism and analysis should somehow remain mute in the face of such an event. How can one analyze what one hasn’t even begun to absorb? Numbness is part of the intent of these demons, I suppose. So here are some tentative reflections. It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away. We are reminded that history obviously hasn’t ended; that freedom is never secure; that previous generations aren’t the only ones to be called to defend the rare way of life that this country and a handful of others have achieved for a small fraction of world history. The boom is done with. Peace is over. The new war against the frenzied forces of what Nietzsche called ressentiment is just beginning. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society. This means we must be vigilant not to let our civil liberties collapse under the understandable desire for action. To surrender to that temptation is part of what these killers want. And the other small sliver of consolation is that the constant American temptation to withdraw from the world, entertained these past few years by many, will perhaps now be stifled. We cannot withdraw; we cannot ignore. We live in a world where technology and hatred accelerate in ever-faster cycles, and in which isolation is not an option. Evil is still here. It begets evil. When you look at the delighted faces of Palestinians cheering in the streets, we have to realize that there are cultures on this planet of such depravity that understanding them is never fully possible. And empathy for them at such a moment is obscene. But we can observe and remember. There is always a tension between civilization and barbarism, and the barbarians are now here. The task in front of us to somehow stay civilized while not shrinking from the face of extinguishing – by sheer force if necessary – the forces that would eclipse us.

War began that day. We didn’t choose it. But we are still waging it.

WAGE WAR: When you remember this thoroughly, you might still want to argue and debate about the accuracy of WMD intelligence in Iraq or the merits of the post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan or the nuances of U.N. and U.S. control in post-Saddam Iraq. Those kinds of fights are what democracies relish and do well. And it’s equally true that anger is not an emotion that lasts. Human beings simply cannot live with that kind of fear or that kind of fury for very long. But we can still nurture what might be called the cold rage of reason: the calculated and calm recollection of what was done and what we can still do to prevent it again. And the key resolve I felt that day was not to let this act of war become in our minds an isolated occurrence, separate and apart from all the regimes that foster Islamo-fascism and seek to harm the West. In fighting back, we had to stop the defensiveness and ad hoc approach of the late twentieth century (both in the Clinton and early Bush administrations) and go on the offensive, tackle this nightmare at its roots, get our hands dirty, risk failure and aim for real success. That’s the difference between police work and war. That’s why the astonishingly humane wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just the beginning of a long attempt to bring the Middle East out of the dark ages. Some are now arguing that there is a dimmer light at the end of this tunnel. They’re wrong. We have accomplished a huge amount, both in weakening al Qaeda, destroying Saddam and bringing flickers of democracy and pluralism into a region long victimized by tyranny and theocracy. These are real achievements. They are the platform for the next phase: in building a free society in Iraq, toppling yet more tyranny in Iran, removing the Saudi dictatorship, and bringing some kind of settlement to Israel. We cannot disengage now. And standing still is to move backwards. Wars are dynamic; and we are in a war. Still. Two years later. With work to be done.

“Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war – a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway).” – Jonathan Schell, saying out loud what many on the Left believe, and have long believed. Good that some of them are finally being more honest about their loathing of the West.

MORE REVISIONISM: Here’s Harold Meyerson, another left-liberal who seems to have become unhinged by the Bush administration:

So much for American unilateralism. As our strategic doctrine of choice, unilateralism had a one-year run, from one Labor Day to the next. A year ago the administration announced we had both the right and the might to run the world free from the constraints of entangling alliances or multinational accords.

A year ago, in fact, the president went to the U.N. to bring that world body into a multilateral attempt to prevent terrorism. Does Meyerson remember nothing?

HOW THE FRENCH SEE 9/11: Another sick excuse for bashing the United States and free trade.

Thanks for your emails on the depressingly stale Fred Kaplan column in Slate. More to add. The notion that the Bushies were too arrogant – even though they went to the U.N. over Iraq and dealt multilaterally and with considerable patience in Afghanistan – comes down to something different. Some emailers said the Bush administration’s mistake was to have made up its mind on Iraq before going to the U.N. Quelle horreur! Think about what this argument entails. What it argues is that when war has been declared on a country, when it cdredibly believes it is at risk from the nexus of WMDs and terrorism, it can only act if its friends (and envious rivals) agree. If that’s Kaplan’s view, he should say so more formally: that the U.S. can only conduct foreign policy if the French are part of the actual deliberation process. You think Paris would do the same for Washington? Second, a large part of the pro-American sentiment in the immediate wake of 9/11 was emotional, shallow and phony. Check out the irrepressible Fouad Ajami in Foreign Policy. He’s particularly sharp about the most famous of all such sentiments: Le Monde’s headline “Nous Sommes Tous Americains”:

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde’s publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani’s column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its “cynicism”; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to “our American friends” and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani’s United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can’t, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one’s own schools; one can’t strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can’t denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can’t do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani’s sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.

Just a little reality check. The French today do little intellectually but constantly circle the drain of complete ressentiment. They have no other guiding political philosophy but envy and regret. The notion that they would ever engage in a U.S.-led campaign against global terror (when they are close to the tyrants that spawn such terror and dedicated to the immiseration of Israel) is a presposterous fantasy. Far from being criticized for not being sympathetic to such opportunists and frauds, the Bush administration should be congratulated for trying to deal with them honestly at all.