The Dish

In a sign of how extremist some of the elements behind the upcoming “anti-war” demonstrations in New York and San Francisco are, Rabbi Michael Lerner has been banned from speaking. Now Lerner is a really, really liberal Jew. He group-hugged with Hillary Clinton on the “politics of meaning.” On the Arab-Israeli dispute, Lerner is a peacenik’s peacenik. He’s been vociferously in favor of leaving Saddam in power rather than using military force for months now. But because he publicly complained about some of the extremist elements behind the “anti-war” movement, he’s been blackballed. David Corn has all the details. But one deeper reason for Lerner’s banishment from “progressive” company may be that the liberal rabbi, although a hyper-dove, actually favors the existence of the state of Israel. Imagine! ANSWER, one of three groups organizing the demos, does not. As David Corn notes, the media director for ANSWER said on a January 28 radio show in New York that “I know that the ANSWER coalition would not have a pro-Israel speaker on its platform.” As Corn also shows, ANSWER has given speaking slots in the past to some of the most militant anti-Semites around, including some who believe that Israel was behind 9/11. There’s now a petition to support Lerner’s ability to speak, signed by some of the saner lefties in then “anti-war” brigade. Worth signing. But not if it means papering over the intolerant, extremist and reactionary forces behind an unhealthy amount of the anti-war movement. Corn and other principled leftists are right to worry about this taint – on moral as well as simply tactical grounds. Here’s my medium-term prediction: the Afghanistan campaign dealt a terrible blow to the American far-left and far-right. A successful Iraq war could marginalize them for decades. Here’s hoping.

“If Saddam bows to the UN’s demands and co-operates promptly, what is the need for greater numbers of inspectors? If he maintains his refusal to cooperate, how will higher numbers help? Lethal viruses can be produced within an area the size of the average living room. In the absence of Iraqi cooperation, even a thousandfold increase in the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission’s capabilities will not allow us to establish with any degree of confidence that Iraq has disarmed.” – Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, yesterday. Exactly, which is why the Franco-German-Russian gambit is based on nothing but a desire to oppose the United States.

It’s obviously a multi-faceted phenomenon, but at some level I think its roots are pretty clear. The basis of it is resentment. The U.S. is what other nations wish they could be. It has a vibrant economy, a dynamic society and irrepressible popular culture; it absorbs more immigrants than any other society; and dominates global ideas and cultural images in ways that have simply never been experienced before. When you add to this overwhelming military superiority, you can see why many people around the world chafe in envy and resentment – especially when there’s no rival superpower to frighten the allies back into American arms. It’s human nature. Human interaction won’t prevent that. Here’s an extract from the Washington Post yesterday:

The irony, says Alain Frachon, a senior editorial writer for Le Monde newspaper, is that in many ways the French and Americans have never been closer. Trade and travel between the two countries are at an all-time peak. “More Frenchmen speak English, travel to the U.S. for vacation or to do business,” he says. “The practical understanding of what the United States is has never been greater.”

But that is surely the point. Europeans know how American society is equalling or besting theirs’ in almost every field, from technology to medicine through literature and the arts. They know that demographically, America is still booming, while they are in decline. Yes, they can reassure themselves that economic inequality is lesser in Europe, but only because the market has been restrained from rewarding talent, the same restraints that guarantee lower levels of economic growth for the Europeans. Moreover, the days when Germany or France actually mattered as great powers are long over, and the United States’ intention to engage more aggressively in the world since 9/11 merely rubs this in.

AGAINST THEIR OWN INTERESTS: Perhaps we’re reaching a point where, whatever the actual interests of Europeans are, they cannot psychologically acquiesce to them. From any rational point of view, the end of the Saddam regime in Baghdad cannot be a huge blow to European interests. In fact, it’s pretty much a no-brainer, a necessary international police action to remove an obvious potential threat from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is the easy case, not the hard one. So why the intensity of the opposition – even to the point of wrecking NATO and splitting Europe in two? Resentment, I posit. Resentment. And that resentment – which is not manufactured by European leaders, merely tolerated by them – is bound to have a deep effect on the future of international relations. This current crisis is just the beginning of a realignment that could be profound. The first casualty? My candidate is the European Union. Old Europe cannot live with its growing impotence. They will not rearm out of Euro-pacifism, which would be one way to express their desire to restrain the U.S. So they wil stew and stew, engaging in the kind of pure obstructionism we’re seeing today. But Britain, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe may not be so resentful. American foreign policy in the next few years should be concentrating on this split, and doing what it can to deepen it.

More evidence of what Vladimir Putin said was more cooperation from Saddam in the matter of disarmament:

One scientist who met with the inspectors this week was so frightened, it took an hour for him to stop shaking, according to U.N. sources. “Iraqi scientists and researchers are under a lot of pressure and influence by the Iraqi authorities,” the Iraqi defector told ABCNEWS. “They were scared and threatened in different ways, including threatening to go after their families if they leave Iraq to meet with inspectors and going after their relatives if their families go with them and going after them even if they were in exile. “For these reasons, the scientist or researcher becomes scared to tell the secrets, even though he knows it’s a way to lift the difficult, miserable conditions the Iraqi people are living under.”

There will be no disarmament so long as the thug from Tikrit is in power in Baghdad. After twelve years, there can be zero doubt about that.

“We really haven’t made up our minds,” confesses Arthur Sulzberger Jr, about the New York Times’ editorial position on a war against Iraq. Then he goes out on a limb: “What we have made up our minds about is unilateralism vs. multilateralism. We are fully for multilateralism.” I assume by this, he means the implementation of U.N. resolutions. So he is for war, no? The coalition is multilateral – the U.S. and two dozen other nations, backed by an unequivocal U.N. resolution. Or does he mean universalism – the notion that military action cannot happen without unanimous world support? Who knows? My bet is that the Times will only take a position when events have made such a position unavoidable. Profiles in courage, and all that. If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now.

MORE LATER: Maybe it was the Norwalk virus. I’ll spare you the details, but I should be more functional by tomorrow morning.

“We really haven’t made up our minds,” confesses Arthur Sulzberger Jr, about the New York Times’ editorial position on a war against Iraq. Then he goes out on a limb: “What we have made up our minds about is unilateralism vs. multilateralism. We are fully for multilateralism.” I assume by this, he means the implementation of U.N. resolutions. So he is for war, no? The coalition is multilateral – the U.S. and two dozen other nations, backed by an unequivocal U.N. resolution. Or does he mean universalism – the notion that military action cannot happen without unanimous world support? Who knows? My bet is that the Times will only take a position when events have made such a position unavoidable. Profiles in courage, and all that. If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now.

MORE LATER: Maybe it was the Norwalk virus. I’ll spare you the details, but I should be more functional by tomorrow morning.

Some kind of food poisoning struck overnight. Posting will be light today.

“The reason Powell is now so adamantly pro-war is therefore no mystery and no surprise. He is not a former dove who has become a hawk. He is a multilateralist who is actually being consistent. His position is now what it has always been. He naively believed that the U.N. wouldn’t actually pass a resolution it would subsequently revoke under pressure. And the source of his anger at Paris and Berlin is not because of natural differences, but because they are the ones now threatening a complete collapse of international collective security. They are the cowboys now.” – from my latest column, posted opposite.

It’s the economy, smarty-pants. No, not the growth rate which the public is smart enough is not amenable to easy manipulation. Not even the unemplyment rate, which may well recover after the war. I mean the explosive rate of current government spending and the president’s utter insouciance about how to pay for it. I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his latest budget removes any. He’s the most fiscally profligate president since Nixon. He’s worse than Reagan, since he’s ratcheting up discretionary spending like Ted Kennedy and shows no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt.

NO WAR BUDGET?? His budget contained the following piece of illiterate flimflam: “The budget would be in double digit deficit if had there never been a tax cut in 2001. The budget returned to deficit because of war, recession and emergencies associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11th.” Up to a point. But as the tables in the budget also showed, the tax cuts have also contributed significantly to the deficit – and they’ve barely taken effect yet. I’m also staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable – but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget? Read David Broder’s evisceration of Bushonomics yesterday. Or Steve Chapman’s devastating recent column on the same theme. These guys are not Paul Krugman. They don’t hate the president whatever he does. They’re just noticing an awful legacy in the making. In the first three years of Bush’s presidency, Chapman notes, non-defense discretionary government spending will have gone up an inflation-adjusted 18 percent. In Clinton’s first three years, that number actually fell. Reagan reduced this type of spending by 13 percent in his first three years. Yes, a deflationary and recessionary period probably merited some spending increases. But 18 percent? If a Democrat had done that, the GOP would be all over him. And rightly so.

NO EXCUSES: But what really bugs me is that the president doesn’t seem to give a damn. He could say: look, we’re running deficits because I need to pay for a major war and tax cuts will help get us out of a recession. Instead, he told us last year that deficits would be temporary and this year that, er, well he didn’t say anything much about them in the SOTU, did he? Or he could say: Okay, I know I’ve turned the spigot on for the last couple of years but I’m going to be a hard-ass from now on. But on what grounds do we believe him? Even after the last two years of budget-busting recklessness, he’s still proposing spending increases far higher than the rate of inflation for the next year.

DEBT BE DAMNED: Then again, he might say: I’m deliberately creating new deficits because they’re the only long-term way to keep domestic spending under control. But what this amounts to is saying I’m going to spend your hard-earned money now in order to persuade other people to stop spending your hard-earned money later. What other people? You’re the government, Mr President. And your party controls all of Congress. There’s no way you can pass the buck for plunging the next generation into debt through excessive spending while blaming someone else. His final option is to say: I’m a big government conservative. I want to spend gobs of money on the military and defense, cut taxes, and splurge on social discretionary spending to prove my compassionate credentials. Deficits don’t matter. Debt doesn’t matter. Governments – at least while I’m president – know better how to spend money than individuals do. That would be the honest message. And it might even be a winning one. So why the flim-flam? Maybe because actual fiscal conservatives like me might wail. Well, sorry to disappoint you, Mr President, but I’m going to wail anyway.

No signs yet whether they’re actually serious about sending in thousands of inspectors, presumably with armed support. One attentive reader writes that the

official French radio news service, Radio France International, says that there is no German or French plan, only “elements for reflection,” or “les elements de reflection.” The news announcer also says that the “plan” previously revealed in Der Spiegel has dissolved in “cacophony.” The piece then goes on to note the French denial that there’s a plan at all. After that there’s information about a German domestic legislative presentation of the plan on Thursday, and a Security Council presentation of whatever there is to present on Friday. I listened at 5:30 p.m. New York time on Sunday. Really, three-card Monte would be easier to keep track of than all this.

I doubt it’s serious. The whole game now is to throw obstacles in front of the war preparation so that the window of operation – before April – is closed. France and Germany are not interested in disarming Saddam in any meaningful sense. They’re interested in the pretense of disarmament so that their trade ties with Saddam can recommence, and the United States can be rebuffed. I’ll believe the evidence of their commitment to Saddam’s disarmament when I see it.

A PEACE SIGN?: That’s how the New York Times is describing the Churchill “V for Victory” sign, as featured on a fashion week sweater. The reporter is lucky Winston is not still alive.