The Dish

“Dean said he wouldn’t withdraw any of the American troops now in Iraq. But, he said it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq, and Bush should have focused his energies on building democracy in the Middle East instead.” And what does Dean think we’re trying to do in Iraq? Does he think democracy could have been built with Saddam in power? Jeez.

If there’s one truly pathetic anti-war line being peddled right now, it is that the Bush administration tragically “blew” the world-wide sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11. How did they DO this? By allegedly refusing allied support in Afghanistan and Iraq, sidelining the U.N., acting all “unilateral,” and … well, you’ve probably listened to enough NPR to finish the sentence. Fred Kaplan in Slate lays it on with a trowel this week. After European sympathy two years ago, he claims,

the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures – and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

Excuse me, but who exactly was excluded from helping us in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Does Kaplan believe that Chirac and Schroder were just desperate to help America win the war on terror in Iraq and that if we’d been so much nicer they would have come around? Puh-lease. They cared more about their own petty prestige than about supporting the U.S. after the atrocities of two years ago. But then it’s always America’s fault, isn’t it? Even when America has had war brought to its own cities and has the temerity to respond in kind. He goes on:

An American leader could have taken advantage of that moment and reached out to the world, forged new alliances, strengthened old ones, and laid the foundations of a new, broad-based system of international security for the post-Cold War era-much as Harry Truman and George Marshall had done in the months and years following World War II.

Blah blah blah. Does Kaplan mean that the administration didn’t bend over backwards to win the support of, say, Pakistan? That it rejected peace-keepers and troops from many nations to help police Afghanistan? That it spurned British, Australian, Polish, Spanish, Italian support – militarily and diplomatically – in order to go it alone?

COME OFF IT: To put it bluntly, Kaplan’s piece amounts to a series of wild stretches and utter fabrications. The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight. And militarily speaking, there wasn’t much the Big Europeans could have done anyway. Kaplan claims the Prague NATO summit wasn’t deferent enough to the allies; and the U.S. should not have been so determined to go to war against Iraq. But he surely knows that deference to Germany and France would have meant one thing: no war. He surely knows that it was the French who scuttled any chance for a compromise on Iraq in the last days at the U.N. He knows that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to bring the U.N. around. So how can he say the following:

Over the past couple of weeks, as the fighting persists in Baghdad, as the Taliban attempts a comeback in Afghanistan, as Saddam and Osama Bin Laden remain on the prowl-in short, as the light glows dimmer, the tunnel stretches longer, the budget piles higher, and the desert-swamp gets deeper-President Bush seems to have realized he took a wrong turn back at the 9/11 junction. He has been persuaded to go back to the much-loathed United Nations, for assistance and legitimacy… He has extended his hand a bit late in the game.

Almost a year ago this week, the president extended his hand to the U.N. Or doesn’t that count? It makes you wish that the Bush of Kaplan’s fevered imagination had simply ignored the U.N., gone into Iraq a few months after Afghanistan, given Saddam much less chance to prepare, and our rivals in Europe less of a chance to keep the terror-masters informed. At least then Bush would have deserved some of this now fashionable obloquy. But no good strategy goes un-attacked, does it? A useful lesson, this, about some foreign policy liberals. Ignore them: they’ll attack you. Do what they want: they’ll attack you anyway. If it means a grotesque distortion of history, so be it.

After over 32 separate entries and even more links in a single day over fourteen hours, Glenn Reynolds announces at 9.20 pm: “Sorry for the light blogging.” I think that’s a cry for help.
UPDATE: Between writing and posting this item, Glenn has added four more posts. Intervention, anyone?

BLAMING THE LAITY: Well, they tried blaming the homos. Now Cardinal Dulles goes after even alcoholics and gossips:

The immoral behavior of Catholics, both lay and clergy, is a cause of scandal and defections. Under this heading I would include not only sexual abuse of minors, which has been so extensively publicized in recent years, but sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, alcoholism, the use and marketing of drugs, domestic violence, defamation, and financial scandals such as falsification of records and embezzlement. The morality of Catholics all too often sinks below the standards commonly observed by Protestants and unbelievers.

Anything to distract from the real scandal, I guess. Dulles’ proposals for reform of the Church amount entirely to greater obedience to Rome, subservience to ecclesiastical authority, maintenance of the existing structures, and penance from the laity. I.e. more power for him. Funny how that happens, doesn’t it?

The left-wing gay groups and Stonewall Democrats are doing what they can to highlight the Terminator’s use of the word “fag” in the past to paint him as a bigot. He’s obviously nothing of the kind. The man was comfortable with gay men long before the culture was; he backs civil unions; he’s loathed by the anti-gay religious right. Matt Welch nails it pretty convincingly here.

REPUBLICANS FOR DEAN: Extreme rhetoric, maybe, but legit. One Dennis Sanders runs the site. He’s so far out there he’s barely a Republican, but, hey, I’m for a big tent, aren’t I? Still, what’s a Republican doing writing for TomPaine.com?

CONASON ON SULLIVAN: He errs, alas. Are you as tired as I am of these hysterical partisan screeds? Given the best-seller lists, I guess I’m the exception rather than the rule.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “To me the real lesson of September 11 is something that came out almost immediately – that the reason our airport security failed was because it was oriented toward detecting dangerous objects rather than dangerous people. Muhammad Atta and company were able to pierce our defenses because they had no “weapons”. But they didn’t need any – THEY were the weapons. Now apply that lesson to the broader world. Possession of dangerous objects (WMD’s) by Iraq was not what made Iraq dangerous – a lot of countries have WMD’s. What made Iraq dangerous was the dangerous person – Saddam Hussein – who ruled it. Saddam had definitely possessed WMD’s in the past, had definitely used them in the past, had attacked his neighbors without provocation in the past, was implacably hostile to the U.S., and friendly to terrorists and terrorism in general. Some evidence (inconclusive) indicated he might have a relationship with al-Qaeda. But most of these Middle Eastern terrorist groups have common or compatible goals, and formal and informal channels of communication. Saddam didn’t need to be tied directly and irrefutably to al-Qaeda to make him dangerous to the U.S.”

I saw this coming, didn’t I? Howie Kurtz buys into it today. But a close look reveals this site to be mighty suspicious. It’s full of far-left rhetoric, extremist Bush-hating, and generally lacks any real conservative or Republican philosophy. It calls the Bush administration a “failed regime.” If these guys are real Republicans, I’m a hetero. Someone should check who’s really behind this site.

BEEB-WATCH: Another media meme pioneered in part on this site. Good for the Telegraph.

RECOGNIZING IRAQ: File under “slow but measurable progress.”

WHAT EVIL? Disturbing last sentence in this story from the Washington Times. Hard-right Catholics were yesterday busy lobbying the hierarchy to retain vigilance against any Catholics who dissent from some of the Church’s teachings. Fair enough for this group, I guess. But then we get this quote from Robbie George, Princeton’s leading proponent of “natural law” theology:

These bishops showed “no resistance,” Mr. George said, to conservatives’ pleas to “call the evil by name” in terms of the clergy’s sexual-abuse crisis.

What does he mean? I think we know. The oly way to deflect attention away from the Church’s responsibility for these abuses is to find an “other” that is really responsible. The medieval campaign to elide all distinctions between gay people and child-abusers is now back in full swing. How full of the spirit of Jesus, no?

My friend Will Saletan rails against the Bush “flypaper” speech in Slate. Will is no starry-eyed liberal or anti-American lefty. But I still think he’s wrong, for a couple of reasons. First off, he argues that Bush’s case for fighting in Iraq – it’s part of the war on terror – is phony. Why? Because Iraq had no more connections to international terrorism pre-9/11 than, say, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria. But the point about Iraq was not that it was uniquely involved in terrorism, but that it was far more doable than any of the others. It was already in violation of umpteen international resolutions; no one could defend the regime (which was more brutal even than its neighbors); and the WMD issue was a real worry (one that has turned out in retrospect to be far less scary than we were led to believe). So, in the context of a truly aggressive war on terror, we went after the Saddam dictatorship first. We had to start somewhere. Sitting back, doing intermittent global police-work, playing legal niceties with terrorists, schmoozing with the French – all this, after 9/11, would have been a loud signal to the terror-masters that we were weak and worth going after even more. Will then says that we should have handed Iraq over immediately to the French after the war:

Having done the part of the job others refused to do – ousting Saddam – we should return the rest of the job to the Security Council. That means surrendering authority as well as responsibility…

Gee. And you think today’s chaos is bad? How about one eighth of the armed forces, a U.N. authority that had long protected Saddam, allies that bankrolled the Baathist dictatorship calling the shots, and on and on? Will cannot be serious, can he? Does he remember the joys of U.N. control in Bosnia? Saletan then tackles the post hoc, propter hoc notion that tyranny begets terror and therefore we have to counter tyranny. Such a notion, Saletan argues,

justifies any war in which, as a result of our actions, terrorists attack our troops. Imagine an invasion of Cuba, whose dictator has long rankled Bush and would be easier to topple than Saddam was. No doubt al-Qaida and other terrorist groups would send agents to try to kill the occupying troops. Bush could then defend the occupation as part of the “war on terror.” The second argument is equally fraught with implications. Yes, tyranny breeds terrorism. But if the “war on terror” requires us to overthrow tyrants just because they’re tyrants, we’ll be at war for the rest of your life.

Wrong again. Cuba – now that its Soviet sponsor has collapsed – cannot be seen as in any way as big a threat as the nexus of Islamist terror-tyrannies in the Middle East. And the terrorists now flocking to Iraq are not doing so as some sort of opportunity. They are doing so because they understand what a huge blow a stable and democratic Arab country would be to their ideology and power. Al Qaeda has to fight back in Iraq or they will lose even more thoroughly than they are losing now. So what are we waiting for? I hate to break it to Will but we have indeed been at war against tyranny for most of our lives. We thought we were at peace in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviets, but we now know that our new enemies were preparing and waging war, supported, as always, by the tyrannies that spawn and protect them. There is, in fact, no such thing as peace – merely arrested conflict, and the wars that arise when democracies get complacent. After 9/11, I’m amazed anyone could now advocate such complacency and withdrawal. But they still are.

Yep, even their ombudsman cannot manage to defend the BBC’s “sexed-up” reporting about the Blair Iraq dossier. No sense that he gets that it was ideological liberal bias that was behind the black eye, of course. Bias? Nous? But at least we get this concession:

While many journalists around the world are quickly rallying around the BBC as an example of a grand old institution that remains the gold standard for all, this incident has unnerved many in the public broadcasting community — certainly in North America. Some colleagues have said that it shows that investigative journalism will always fail against a government or an industry with superior resources. Others say that the BBC was right to go after the Blair government. But by not being cautious enough, the BBC bungled it and brought the institution into disrepute. But the BBC, like The New York Times in the Jayson Blair scandal, may have succumbed to hubris and to the self-inflicted delusion that since it is the BBC (or The New York Times), it may allow itself to cut corners. This is an arrogant delusion and one that may have ill-served the BBC’s listeners while emboldening the BBC’s political enemies on Fleet Street and in Parliament.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: privatize the BBC.

WHAT BUSH SAID: “You falsely claim that Bush “gave the impression the war was over” by his landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. I guess, like the carrier’s namesake said, the world has little noted what he said there. Here’s a segment:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.
We are helping to rebuild Iraq where the dictator built palaces for himself instead of hospitals and schools.
And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done and then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

By any historical standards, the 70 or so combat deaths in the four months since that speech is small (insert mandatory disclaimer that each death is a tragedy, etc.). It is tantamount to hysteria to claim at this point that this effort is failing, or that these deaths are excessive and out of line with expectations. I expected more than have died thus far in the ENTIRE WAR to have died in the first week. Didn’t everybody?” – more insight on the Letters Page, newly updated by Reihan Salam.

What happens when a fundamentalist Christian wants to keep an idolatrous rock in the courthouse? Wall-to-wall coverage. What happens when a fundamentalist Christian uses the Gospels to advocate redistributing income from rich to poor? No-one bothers to write about it. Gregg Easterbrook has a point. And a new blog too. Welcome, Gregg.

KEYNESIAN BUSH: A decent defense of the president’s economic policies – so far. I agree that circumstances merited some increase in debt; that the tax cuts so far are no big deal; and that some spending increases might be justified on Keynesian grounds. I think Bush has engineered about as rosy an employment situation as possible for his re-election. The real issue is the long-term outlook. On that, the prognosis is horrifying; and the president doesn’t seem to mind.

HYSTERICAL KURTZ: Culture warrior Stanley Kurtz is all exercized by the fact that a hearing that reviewed the Defense of Marriage Act didn’t get much publicity. He fails to mention that only one Republican senator bothered to attend the entire proceeding; another one dropped by for a few minutes. The key question is: if even Republicans cannot be bothered to show up, why should the media cover it? This was a sop to the base. They got the message. So did the press.

Words fail me. But this is where I was yesterday afternoon.

The strategy came out of the closet last night. My take opposite.

MAGDALENE, AGAIN: I should add, I suppose, that the Church in which I grew up – mercifully post Vatican II – never demonstrated cruelty, barbarity or abuse, at least in my experience. Part of my anger – and I’d say that of many fellow Catholics – is due to our own dismay at our naivete and ignorance, helped in part by the deference that was second nature to us. And it’s important to note that the evils that we are now discovering are the sins of men and women, not of the faith itself. Here’s a more critical review of the movie. I disagree with it in some respects – I do think that Geraldine McEwen, for example, showed precisely how a nun came to choose brutality, rather than simply demonstrate it. On another angle, this letter to the Irish Times last Friday shows how this slave labor was also a way to enrich the Church financially:

It is also interesting to consider the unfair trading situation which pertained for most of that time. Ordinary commercial laundries throughout Ireland paid their largely female workforce the going rate of pay, and published annual accounts which were filed in the Companies Office. But they had to compete with Magdalen laundries run on slave labour which, as registered charities, had accounts closed to public inspection. And for those charities that may also have been limited companies, a special section of Irish company law allowed religious orders to file their annual audits at the Companies Office without any disclosure of turnover, profits or capital assets. This special exemption is still in place and used by a number of RC organisations.
Much has been made of the selfless devotion of the individual nuns who worked in these institutions, but even they would surely admit that they did so voluntarily as part of their religious vocation and could have left at any time, unlike the unfortunate women who ended up in their care. It was a sickening final insult that the High Park nuns, having sold the land for a considerable fortune, did not even grant these women individual graves: they were institutionalised even in death.
We can only speculate on what happened to the accumulated profits generated by these businesses, but one can be reasonably certain that the canny and able administrator nuns invested in buildings and land.

Perhaps some of it will now be used to compensate the hundreds and thousands of children abused and destroyed by the church hierarchy for so long.