The Dish

It took a while, but the president’s transformation seems to be almost complete. From a candidate who projected a smaller defense budget than Al Gore, who pooh-poohed “nation-building,” who spoke very modestly of the United States being a “humble nation,” we now have a president saying the following:

We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before – in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.

I’m a little troubled by the phrase: “not a day more.” It’s as if the president still believes that a real commitment to Iraq and to the region as a whole will be unpopular at home. It needn’t be – if the president makes Iraq a corner-stone of this country’s commitment to a freer and therefore more stable world. Not quite a neocon – but well on the way.

WILL THE FRENCH VETO? No firm statement yet either way. TF1 declares that France is putting aside the idea of a veto for the moment. The Communists and Socialists urge a veto, but Chirac’s party, officially repesented in the parliament by Alain Juppe, talks instead of looming “noises of mobilization.” Meanwhile, we have this odd statement from the increasingly erratic Chirac, after meeting with Spanish prime minister, Aznar: “We oppose all new resolutions.” Huh? I thought France was promoting a new one. Maybe Paris at this point just wants the whole issue to go away. I still don’t have a clue what Chirac is up to; but I certainly think there are many subtle signs that the French don’t want to veto – especially if the Russians and Chinese simply abstain. Solitary French isolation at the U.N., combined with encirclement of Anglospheric nations in the E.U. is becoming France’s nightmare. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch, could it?

The morality of ousting Saddam. My latest piece posted opposite.

GUTTING DELAY: Will Saletan does a beautiful job skewering Tom DeLay’s pirouetting on the subject of the war. During the Balkan crisis, DeLay was just as out there as Howard Dean now is – maybe more so. I’m happy to say that I strongly supported president Clinton’s intevention in the Balkans. My main criticism is that he waited far too long to do anything.

AFGHANISTAN HAS GONE TO HELL: You’ve heard all the nay-sayers. Now read a reporter.

If you’re interested, check out this photo from the Provincetown Banner of the arctic ice-floe that was once Cape Cod Bay. Much of it has now floated away but it was amazing while it lasted.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: After Amiri Baraka’s visit, a spirited and supportive op-ed was run in the Yale Daily News. Money quote about the newspaper’s opposition to an invitation to the anti-Semitic poet:

Monday’s editorial, and the Yale Daily News in general, is a case in point. Obviously, it’s one thing to be Jewish, and wholly another to support the Israeli occupation. That said, Jews tend to sympathize with Israel more so than non-Jews. And in my three years at the Yale Daily News, Jewish students have comprised a majority of management positions (namely, editor in chief and managing editor). This year, nearly half the editors are Jewish.
Am I pointing to a secret Jewish conspiracy aimed at promoting Israel at college dailies? Of course not.
But does the prevalence of Jews in American media, business and politics help explain America’s steadfast support for Israel, whose 35-year occupation of Palestinian lands is an affront to human decency? Of course.

Whatever next? Ideological diversity? Perish the thought.

A WAR DIALOGUE WITH THE ACADEMY: And you thought living in Manhattan was bad enough.

SEX, NOT DEMOCRACY: Is that the real gulf between the West and the Islamic world?

Radical poet, Amiri Baraka, visited Yale yesterday to elaborate on his view that the Israeli government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11. He was greeted with cheers and applause.

“House of Commons Backs Blair on Iraq” – Associated Press.
“Britain’s Blair Suffers Parliament Revolt Over Iraq” – Reuters.

Two words: Al Sharpton. And what he bodes for the Democrats.

By far the most depressing aspect of the debate over war to disarm Saddam has been how it has swiftly adopted the contours of the culture war. There is a solid and passionate base among many blue-staters that opposes this war at least in part because they oppose George W. Bush. At some point in the last few months, in fact, being anti-war clearly became a defining cultural moniker for an entire sub-population. Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war. Worse in fact: there is very little argument or debate going on in these sub-populations, simply an assumption that war against Saddam is wrong, and that all right-thinking people agree about this. Obviously, the polls suggest that this sub-population is not a majority, but they are a powerful and increasingly angry minority. If the war hits snags, they will redouble their efforts to humiliate the president. I don’t think their anger will be abated if the war goes well either. They will merely find a new reason to hate Bush. But I do think that an opportunity exists for Bush to neutralize and even co-opt some of these people by his conduct in the post-war settlement. He must commit real resources, real troops, real money to reconstructing Iraq and to building the beginnings of democracy there. No friendly new dictator; no cut-and-run; no change of the subject. He has to show the essentially progressive nature of the war against Islamist terror and its state sponsors – not just for the security of the West but for the future of the Arab world. Rescinding some future tax cuts to help pay for this may well be prudent – and even popular. Bush can’t reverse the tide of hatred on the far left. But he can try and reach out to the many liberals in the center who would support a proactive foreign policy, if they believed it was about more than mere national interest. That’s the real opportunity ahead: a fusion of Bush’s instincts and Blair’s hopes. I pray the president grasps it.

There’s a connection. Which is why we shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that Islamism is some kind of legitimate religious faith: it’s a murderous, suicidal, death-worshipping totalitarianism, built around the structure of a religion. It is our times’ Nazism and Communism. Drawing on Western notions of revolutionary violence and mass murder, it has tied itself, as Francoism did, to the trappings of traditional faith. But even atheistic communism needed religious fervor to keep it afloat. A reader sends in this wonderful comment from Malcolm Muggeridge, who observed the religiosity of the Soviet murder-cult in its early days. It’s from 7 June 1933:

I often used to think, when I was in Russia, that the general attitude towards the G.P.U. must be like the general attitude in the Middle Ages towards the Powers of Darkness – quite irrational; quite unrelated to knowledge or experience of its manner of working; yet somehow understandable, somehow in keeping with the facts of the case. There is, mixed up with it all, a kind of mysticism. I turned up once in a back number of “Pravda” an obituary notice of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka and first head of the GPU, written by his successor. It described Dzerzhlnsky as a saint, an ascetic, a man who rose above petty bourgeois emotions like pity, or a respect for justice or for human life; a man of infinite industry; a rare spirit whose revolutionary passion was unearthly and uncontaminated.
The very prose of the obituary notice was lyrical. It had a rhythm like a religious chant. I thought, and still think, that I had found in it the quintessence of revolution and I hated this quintessence because it is a denial of everything that has been gained in the slow, painful progress of civilisation; because it was beastly, because it idealised and spiritualised evil because it glorified destruction and destruction and, going beneath the animal, beneath hate, beneath lust, beneath every kind of appetite, founded itself on impulses which though they have in the past sometimes been organised into, abominable, underground cults, have never before held sway over a hundred and sixty million people inhabiting a sixth of the world’s surface.

We face the same threat today – except this time, on the verge of being empowered with some of the most dangerous weapons known to man. And we face the same response in the West today as well: widespread denial, cowardice, prevarication, and beneath the surface among some on the far right and left, an actual attraction to the murderousness and evil of the enemy.