The Dish

I’m not sure why Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest superb piece in the New Yorker hasn’t made more of a splash. yes, he has some mini-scoops on Saddam’s links with al Qaeda. But its real merit is in helping us understand what levels of empirical evidence are required in the matter of espionage and intelligence. Or to put it another way: the question to be asked of Saddam and al Qaeda is not do we have clear evidence of their connections; but why wouldn’t they be connected? You can look at intelligence entirely inferentially, looking through the myriads of signals and signs and hints and guesses to find hard evidence of, say, a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. Or you can use your common sense, assume such a link and then go back to the intelligence data to see if such an assumption is backed up or disproven.

CONNECTING THE DOTS: This is not the same as making stuff up. It’s simply recognizing the nature of the information available. Here’s a sample of what you get:

In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda operative – a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi-was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi’s mission was successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists. (Training in hijacking techniques was also provided to foreign Islamist radicals inside Iraq, according to two Iraqi defectors quoted in a report in the Times in November of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda operative, the Iraqi-born Mamdouh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liaison in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intelligence. Salim, according to a recent book, “The Age of Sacred Terror,” by the former N.S.C. officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden’s chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons development in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and was extradited to the United States.

This is what is called a proof of principle. It has happened; therefore it can happen. If the consequence of that is a biological or chemical attack on the West, then Western governments have a duty to act sooner rather than later. Given the new risks, containment isn’t an option.

THE PROS GET IT: Goldberg also talks to Robert Gates, former CIA director:

Gates, who was C.I.A. director under George H. W. Bush, said that the evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaeda is not irrefutable, but he noted that ambiguous evidence is an occupational hazard in intelligence work. Gates suggested that the current debate over Iraq’s ties to terrorism is reminiscent of a debate about the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Then, he said, “you had analysts in the C.I.A. who said, ‘Absolutely not, it would be contrary to their interests to support unpredictable, uncontrollable groups.’ There were other analysts who said, ‘Baloney.’ They had a lot of good history, and circumstantial reporting on their side, but they didn’t have good evidence. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and we got hold of the East German Stasi records, we learned, of course, that both the East Germans and the Soviets were supporting Baader-Meinhof and other terrorist groups.” Gates continued, “I have always argued, in light of my fairly detailed knowledge of the shortcomings of our intelligence capabilities, that the fact that we don’t have reliable human intelligence that proves something conclusively is happening is no proof at all that nothing is happening. In these situations, the evidence will almost always be ambiguous. On capabilities, it’s not ambiguous. Can Saddam produce these weapons of mass destruction? Yes.”

If he can produce them, our enemies will get them. And what we found out on September 11 was that if our enemies get them, they will use them. Unless we get them first. Is that really so hard to understand?

It’s an old story, but I once had dinner with, among others, Elizabeth Taylor. The excruciating conversation eventually found its way toward AIDS. I soon found out she didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Not even the faintest. So I wasn’t all that surprised by her interview with Larry King last night. Her little dog-thingy was perched between her and the suspendered reptile asking the hard questions. Here is a Hollywood classic about Herb Ritts, the photographer who recently died of AIDS:

KING: What got you into the perfume business? That was a beautiful spot, by the way. He died much too young, of AIDS. TAYLOR: Oh, God. That was so beautiful, wasn’t it? KING: It was AIDS, wasn’t it? I mean everyone… TAYLOR: It was pneumonia. KING: OK, pneumonia.

There you go, Liz. Raising awareness and countering stigma as always. What would we do without you?

P.S.: If Larry King and Elizabeth Taylor can get married ad infinitum, why can’t gays get married even once? Answers on a postcard, please.

Like many former apologists for Soviet terror, the British lefty, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, has a soft spot for Saddam Hussein. His interview with the monster will surely rank high up there in the annals of moral obtuseness along with Jimmy Carter’s fellatial interactions with various mass murderers. Will Benn get a Nobel next? Maybe he should just get an Oscar. How, after all, do you keep a straight face when Saddam says, “Most Iraqi officials have been in power for over 34 years and have experience of dealing with the outside world. Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trustworthy.” And how do you have an interview with the big guy from Tikrit without mentioning the invasion of Kuwait? Still, it was good to see Saddam embrace the “peace movement,” and send them his encouragement. He knows their usefulness to his barbarism. The best antidote is the following spoof in the Guardian of all places. Even they can’t take this old aristocratic Stalinist seriously. Here’s a taste:

TB: America goes to war where there’s an oil interest, as we did in the Falklands, because the Falklands was an oil war – there’s more oil around the Falklands than there is around the United Kingdom. And, of course, some companies are now bigger than nation states. Ford is bigger than South Africa. Toyota is bigger than Norway.
SH: Bigger than Norway?
TB: Bigger than Norway. And I do not want a world which is safe only for oil companies and motor companies, but which is dangerous for my grandchildren. SH: I too am a grandfather. I too think of my grandchildren, Raghda and Rana’s fatherless children.
TB: Fatherless? What happened to their fathers?
SH: I shot them. But there were others I didn’t personally shoot, you understand. Family gatherings in our country can sometimes become, how do you say, over-exuberant.

Irrational exuberance, Saddam-style.

“Vidal has a good word for anyone who likes the sound of “a final all-out war against the ‘System,’ or “deliberately risks-and gives-his life to alert his fellow citizens to an onerous government.” In the end, McVeigh and bin Laden are pikers. “Most of today’s actual terrorists can be found within our own governments, federal, state, municipal.” “Municipal” is a particularly nice touch: perhaps Vidal means police departments, though for all the care he takes he might just as well be alluding to death squads at work under cover of sanitation departments. If you wonder what might be a better society, Vidal helpfully offers up what he calls “Tim’s Bill of Rights,” which includes (a) no taxes, (b) metal-based currency, and (c) low legislative salaries. So much for political theory.” – Todd Gitlin, decrying the Bush administration in Dissent, but also exposing the idiocy and moral callowness of some now on the left.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “I’m not sure if enough people in America have gotten wind of what’s about to happen now – and, if it does happen, whether it’s right or wrong. That may be the only difference. But we certainly have criminals in the White House. These are even more successful than the last time. I mean, Nixon and company were kind of petty in their ambitions. These guys are ruthless beyond belief, and boy, are they pocketing a lot of money.” – Terry Gilliam, the Onion.

FISKING PELLETIERE: The New York Times sank to a new anti-war low last weekend publishing the theory of one Stephen C. Pelletiere, claiming that the gassing of Kurds in Hallabja was the work of Iran not Saddam. The New Republic’s Spencer Ackerman does a splendid job dismembering it.

I agree with most of Paul Krugman’s column on space exploration today. (I admit I read it mainly to see if he could manage to blame Bush. But he didn’t. What a let-down.) Money graf:

Does that mean people should never again go into space? Of course not. Technology marches on: someday we will have a cost-effective way to get people into orbit and back again. At that point it will be worth rethinking the uses of space. I’m not giving up on the dream of space colonization. But our current approach – using hugely expensive rockets to launch a handful of people into space, where they have nothing much to do – is a dead end.

Pity about that final phrase. But the rest makes sense. Charles Krauthammer is a useful book-end to Krugman. His solution: stop the risky ups and downs of the first 150 miles into space and aim much higher.

GERMANY AGAIN: The Times of London’s Michael Gove worries about Germany’s latest ideology – a kind of all purpose Green pacifism. Hmmm:

There has been a tendency among German elites over the past 200 years to invest the ruling ideology of the moment with the quasi-mystical quality of a political religion. Those thinkers who reacted against the French Enlightenment, such as Hegel and Herder, contributed to a romantic, anti-liberal, nationalist temper in 19th-century Germany. The Wilhelmine state which went to war in 1914 was deeply imbued with a mystical sense that its Kultur was superior to the desiccated, rationalist, mercantile outlook of the British and the Americans.
The anti-liberal beliefs which bewitched Germany in the past led to war. The ideology of the ’68 generation may seem altogether more admirable, because it finds expression in opposition to conflict. But it is, at root, just as anti-liberal, and similarly baleful for Germany’s future health. The freedom which the ’68ers oppose is the economic liberalism of America, and their hostility to the US is the animating force in their opposition to action against Iraq.

I actually disagree about Hegel. He was one of the great liberals. But the fact that the Germans completely misread him only furthers Gove’s point, I suppose.

“Kudos to you for not engaging in the irresponsible, almost unconscionable blather the mainstream media is producing regarding the space shuttle. Since September 11th, the flood of coverage has made journalism (especially the cable news channels) in this country into a pack of starved wolves, salivating over anything they can sensationalize. Sadly, the loss of the Columbia is the newest bloody feast.” – he’s particularly tough on Fox News. This and much more on the Letters Page.

WHAT’S WRONG HERE? The always readable Oxblog finds something fishy about this Washington Post piece about the marvels of Saddam’s food distribution program.

THE PIANIST: Easily the best movie I’ve seen in a while. It follows the arc of a classic Holocaust trajectory. We know where it ends. But the details of gratuitous Nazi savagery; the incidents of human goodness that prevail even in the worst form of hell; the first-person, endless, draining survival story that leaves you hopeless yet somehow relieved; the sheer randomness of fate; and the importance of war to deter evil: this film manages to convey all of it in a metaphor of soundless music.

I highly recommend Richard Posner’s excellent book, “Sex and Reason,” for a non-hysterical approach to the issues of safer-sex and reducing HIV transmission. The issue has been troubling me after the dumb Rolling Stone “bug-chaser” hysteria. One of the worst elements of that piece is that it sensationalized and polarized an important issue: how we manage to reduce HIV transmission in an era where an HIV diagnosis is nowhere near as scary as it used to be. The reason I admired Posner’s book is that he assumed that men seeking sex are actually rational beings. They measure costs and benefits and change behavior accordingly. Hence the amazing decline in HIV transmission in the mid 1980s. Hence also the slow shift back since. Or take a less fraught analogy. Let’s say that science found treatments that reduced the rate of fatality from lung cancer due to smoking by, say, 80 percent. Let’s also say that these treatments became progressively easier to tolerate. What would you predict would happen? More to the point: How would you conduct a public health message that still credibly warned against the risks of smoking? That’s the question we need to explore. And it’s not an easy one.

STAYING AFRAID: What to do? With HIV, insisting on abstinence for life is a non-starter for the vast majority of gay teens and adults. Falsely scaring them with empirically false statements about death rates is also counter-productive – it merely undermines the credibility of the authorities. Sexual segregation between HIV-positives and HIV-negatives has some advantages in creating a firewall between the two groups, but in time, it has apparently only further decreased fear of HIV. The pozzies look great, seem in good health and no longer live in terror of getting the disease. Some degree of “HIV-envy,” while not as pathological as “bug-chasing,” and if only because having it means you can’t be scared of getting it any more, is still a real issue. Again this problem strikes me as close to insoluble. I’ve been HIV-positive for ten years now, and my immune system is healthier now than when I got infected. I look better than I did when I was negative, have experienced deep spiritual and emotional growth as a result of my HIV experience, and live every day now with a vigor and gratitude I never felt before. I’m just one of thousands of productive, healthy people with HIV who are daily – albeit unconsciously – transmitting the message that an HIV diagnosis is no calamity. Having been a beneficiary of the solution to HIV, I am now unwittingly part of the problem.

THINKING POSITIVELY: Some structural changes would help, I think. Encouraging monogamous or more stable relationships through marriage rights would clearly have an effect, but probably only with time and in the next generation or two. (This is something, of course, that conservatives who say they want to reduce HIV infection admantly oppose.) Going around exposing people’s private failings and trying to stigmatize people with HIV may satisfy a few puritans on the right and left but I doubt it would make much difference as a whole. It also merely encourages gay men never to talk publicly about these issues for fear of being subjected to gross violations of privacy. (Tell me about it.) And then we have the simple and unavoidable fact that we are asking people to be extremely careful in a sphere of life where fantasy and passion rule. This isn’t just a gay issue. It’s a human issue. We have almost universal access to contraception, for example, and still sky-high numbers of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Sex is messy and dangerous. But it’s also one the greatest and most exhilarating gifts our nature has given us – and free societies respect the freedom to explore it. Resolving that paradox is an impossibility as social policy, and always has been. But ameliorating it must be within our reach. So how? I wish I knew. Or do we have to get used to a certain level of HIV-infection the way we have become used to herpes, and every other sexual disease which has affected mankind, gay and straight, for millennia?

A few of you have taken me to task for not writing more about the Columbia tragedy. I was travelling that morning, alas. But more generally, I haven’t written much because I have nothing worthwhile to say, except, obviously, condolences for the families involved. Saying nothing is not the same as feeling nothing. But it seems to me that events like this – disasters, earthquakes, floods, explosions – are best dealt with by simple hard news reporting, which is not what this blog is or should be about. Finding ‘angles’ to these events, opining prematurely, hyper-ventilating about the meaning of it all – please turn elsewhere for these. I’m with Jonah Goldberg on this, feeling that the media has gone overboard. It is an awful event, and I will pray for those grieving. But I have nothing much to add to that sincere if banal observation.

“People need to stop whining about the Columbia shuttle tragedy. These were volunteers from the highest socioeconomic strata; they knew the risks they were undertaking. We’re talking about seven lives here, not the seven times seventy times seven hundred innocent lives that will be taken on our invasion of Iraq. If we’re going to treat the lives of the innocent Iraqi citizens and our disproportionately lower-class U.S. soldiers so callously, then we need to call a spade a spade and forget about the Columbia astronauts the way we have already forgotten about so many others.” – emailer from Bethesda, Maryland in a Washington Post online chat today with Joel Achenbach.

This from Punditwatch, the weekly blog round-up of the Sunday talk-shows:

The only scheduled guests to maintain their Sunday spots were Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn, on Face the Nation and Iraqi Ambassador to the UN Mohammed Aldouri on Fox. Frist was only asked about issues related to the Columbia tragedy and he was cautious discussing both the future of the space program and the level of investigation that the Senate might initiate.Aldouri was not the least bit conciliatory. He claimed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew Saddam Hussein better than he did and he thanked the New York Times for defending Iraq. Brit Hume called Aldouri’s responses “word salad.”

Sometimes a gaffe is just a gaffe. I wish I could find a transcript.
UPDATE: James Taranto has the transcript.