The Dish

“Unless Hussein … suddenly unzips his skin to reveal he is actually Bin Laden, we are likely to march to war with the support of an ‘international coalition’ that amounts to a fig leaf named Tony Blair and a motley collection of nations one can buy on EBay.” – Robert Scheer, the Nation. Italy? Spain? Poland? Ebay? Isn’t it amazing how quickly these alleged liberal internationalists turn into ugly and arrogant xenophobes as long as it can be used against Bush?

LEFT PERVERSITY II: “If and when US and British occupation forces march down Baghdad’s Rashid Street, we will doubtless be treated to footage of spontaneous celebrations and GIs being embraced as they hand out sweets. There will be no shortage of people keen to collaborate with the new power; relief among many Iraqis, not least because occupation will mean an end to the misery of sanctions; there will be revelations of atrocities and war crimes trials. All this will be used to justify what is about to take place. But a foreign invasion which is endorsed by only a small minority of Iraqis and which seems certain to lead to long-term occupation, loss of independence and effective foreign control of the country’s oil can scarcely be regarded as national liberation. It is also difficult to imagine the US accepting anything but the most “managed” democracy, given the kind of government genuine elections might well throw up.” – Seumas Milne, the Guardian, yesterday. Well, we’ll see, won’t we? But it’s interesting how some on the left are beginning to worry what the future portends.

Rarely have we seen a more pathetic display of incoherence, shifting arguments, issue-avoidance and flim-flam than in the New York Times’ editorials on Iraq. I can see only one connective thread: naked partisanship. If everything were the same and this were a Democratic president, the Times would be gung-ho. At least that’s the unavoidable conclusion of their previous arguments. Instead, we have a series of editorials placing obstacle afater obstacle in the path of a serious attempt to disarm Saddam. Each time the administration’s policy accords with the Times (on the U.N. route, for example), the Times subsequently moves the goal-posts. Here’s my fisking of a recent, spectacularly incoherent editorial. I’m not the only one who has seen this. The New Republic’s latest editorial contains an icy blast at the shallowness of the Times’ reasoning. I’ve come reluctantly to believe that in the mindset of the Times editorialists, wounding this presidency has become a far greater objective than dealing honestly or consistently with issues of national security. In this, they incarnate the problem at the heart of many (but mercifully not all) of today’s Democrats.

“Meanwhile,GW was expected to become manager of the local K-Mart. Suddenly GW is not only President, but he really does become a great one, not in his own mind, but in the hearts and minds of a large majority of Americans.This is some sort of horrible alternate universe for the in-crowd. Why, the man is stupid! Too stupid to know how to lie! He’s religious! He doesn’t even cheat on his wife! How can this be? To the in-crowd, GW is an affront to their view of the world. Only his total failure will vindicate the in-crowd’s value system. Meanwhile, GW, the sweet guy who’s too decent to hate anyone, ignores the in-crowd and gets on with his job (“I’m a loving man, but I’ve got a job to do”). The joke is that the more the in-crowd hates him, the more they destroy themselves (they have ignored Dick Nixon’s advice). Will the New York Times ever be trusted again? Will Enron Paul be read by anyone? Will any of the current crop of Democrats amount to anything? Not in a lifetime…” Check out more reader response on the Letters Page.

Great to see Josh Marshall doing a blog interview. I should do more myself. Even better to see an interview with Kenneth Pollack, the man who’s done more work actually persuading people of the Saddamite threat than anyone. To my mind, here’s the key part, on whether Saddam has nukes or is moving toward nukes. I’ve been relieved to see a widespread skepticism about Baghdad’s nuclear capacity. But here’s Pollack:

But in 1994 we really thought the IAEA had eradicated their nuclear program. And the IAEA really thought that they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And they were telling us they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And Khidhir Hamza comes out and says ‘No, the nuclear program in 1994 was bigger than it had ever been before.’ In point of fact the Iraqis had found all kinds of ways to hide what they were doing. It introduced inefficiencies in what they were doing. For example, they talk about these short track cascades. Normally the cascade is enormous. The way we do it it’s three football fields long. That’s the most efficient way to do it. The Iraqis figured out ways to do short cascades, which didn’t require as much energy, which weren’t as big and therefore were much more easily concealed. They were more inefficient. They didn’t produce the enriched uranium nearly as well. But nevertheless they were able to do it.

Telling, no?

Stunning article in the Times of London today. Eight leaders of European countries call for unity between Europe and America in dealing with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They are: José Marxeda Aznar, of Spain, José Manuel Durão Barroso, of Portugal, Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, Britain’s Tony Blair, Václav Havel, of the Czech Republic, Peter Medgyessy, of Hungary, Leszek Miller, of Poland, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, of Denmark. Their average economic growth last year was more than twice that of France and Germany. And they see the real issues involved:

We in Europe have a relationship with the United States which has stood the test of time. Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and far-sightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the United States we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The transatlantic relationship must not become a casualty of the current Iraqi regime’s persistent attempts to threaten world security.

And they are in no illusions about what we have to do now:

The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is a threat of incalculable consequences. It is one at which all of us should feel concerned. Resolution 1441 is Saddam Hussein’s last chance to disarm using peaceful means. The opportunity to avoid greater confrontation rests with him.

Let’s not get too huffy about Europe. Much of it is far closer to the U.S. position than the tired and increasingly narcissistic powers in Berlin and Paris. Schroder, remember, has brought his party to historic lows in the polls. Chirac is president mainly because he was the only alternative to fascism. The center of gravity in Europe is indeed shifting. And Washington’s clarity in the war on terror is one reason.

BLAIR’S LATEST: He’s usually not that comfortable in the House of Commons, but I loved the following exchange between Blair and a backbench heckler yesterday:

When a Labour MP shouted “Who’s next?” at him, he retorted that after Iraq, “yes, through the UN we have to confront North Korea about its nuclear programme.” Another MP barked “Where does it stop?” bringing the response: “We stop when the threat to our country is fully and properly dealt with.”

A lion in winter.

REPORTING FROM LA-LA LAND: Each time I hear some reporter telling us what the average Iraqi on the street is thinking, I look for the obligatory context that the interviewee can only say pro-Saddam things or face being murdered. Yet so many times, especially on television, when a host asks a reporter in Baghdad on the “mood” there, we get the pretense that somehow freedom of thought is possible. The Washington Post’s latest is another classic:

At the Al-Zahawi teahouse in Baghdad’s old quarter, a ramshackle building where men gab over games of backgammon and dominoes, a trio of retired teachers who heard excerpts of Bush’s address this morning said they were unconvinced by his arguments. “He claims we have all of these weapons,” said Atta Ahmed, 65, a potbellied former math instructor. “Why doesn’t he show the evidence?”

C’mon. Let’s have some basic honesty here, can we?

THE FRENCH AND EMPIRE: This picture is worth framing.

Reading Jake Tapper’s breezy and highly skeptical view of last night’s SOTU, I stopped in my tracks at the following item:

Bush was only repeating here what the Iraqis themselves have said, according to press reports. According to a Kuwaiti newspaper story from last summer, in a June 2002 meeting among Hussein, his two sons and other members of his inner circle of advisors, Ali Hasan al-Majid, a Saddam cousin who possesses a diabolical expertise in chemical warfare, asked “has the time not come to take the fight to their own homes in America? They wanted this to be a war on all fronts, so let it be a war on all fronts and using all weapons and means.” Another referred to Iraqis becoming “human bombs in the thousands, willing to blow up America in particular,” and yet another suggested that “If bin Laden truly did carry out the September attacks as they claim, then as Allah is my witness, we will prove to them that what happened in September is a picnic compared to the wrath of Saddam Hussein.”

Jeez. Which Kuwaiti Bob Woodward unearthed that anecdote? If true, why isn’t it common knowledge?

“Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: “I must have war.” He then had it.” – John Pilger, the Daily Mirror.

I’ve been thinking in the few minutes before I sat down to write how to temper my admiration for the speech I just heard. So to get it out of the way: the domestic ambitions of this president strike me as immensely expensive and clearly liable to sadddle us with at least another decade of deficit spending. But then I found myself – an unabashed small government supporter – putting some of those concerns aside. Why? Because Bush is tapping into American ambition again, which is no small achievement. And because his domestic concerns seem to me motivated by a decency and a compassion I cannot but respect. As someone with HIV, I listened to his words about AIDS and found my throat catching. This is a Republican president, and yet he sees the extraordinary pain and anguish and death that this disease has caused and is still causing. He made me question again my more pragmatic concerns about the feasibility of HIV treatment and prevention in Africa and shamed me into realizing I should be far more optimistic in the attempt to tackle this issue. And when he spoke about addiction – a problem I also see all around me – I also felt a genuineness in his words that surprised me. I shouldn’t be surprised, of course. Bush was an addict. And he came thisclose to saying it. But this aspect of the drug problem is one too many have either spoken about glibly or not spoken about at all. If we cannot end the idiotic “drug-war”, we can at least expand treatment and care for the addicted. I was also gratified and relieved by his proactive moves on the environment. A pro-growth, technologically-driven environmentalism should be a central plank of modern conservatism. Bush went some way toward establishing that. He needs to do more. But there was something else here – the glimmers of a real core of compassionate conservatism. By mentioning the lonely elderly, or the AIDS orphan, and calling on us to get involved person by person, I felt morally led by a president in ways that I cannot recall in my lifetime. I was particularly struck by the president’s defense of the newly or prematurely born, and their right to be treated with dignity and compassion rather than with brutality. So sue me for being moved. I was.

KENNEDY, REVIVED: And then the extraordinary transition to foreign affairs. It was a brilliant rhetorical flourish to begin so quietly, almost intimately, and then to build resolve out of compassion. He laid out the distinctions between the various despotisms in the axis of evil, calmly, clearly and persuasively. He did not strike me as in any sense eager for war. But the case against Saddam is so overwhelming, so morally right, so strategically essential that the need for war, if necessary, was, to my mind, irrefutable. So too was the attempt to show that, in these terrifying and bewildering times, we can still control our own destiny. I respect those who worry about the unintended consequences of a war with Iraq. I understand those who are concerned about the precedent of a pre-emptive strike. I admire those who want clear empirical data before the grave decision of war. But it seemed to me that the president effectively answered each of those worries. He should have mentioned the allies who are already on board – the Brits and Italians and Australians and Spaniards. But if his goal was to show resilience, patience and a moral grasp of America’s current responsibility, then he accomplished it. In many ways, this was a Kennedy-like speech, a speech a Democratic president could have made, if the Democratic Party hadn’t fallen into such moral and strategic confusion. Self-confident, convinced, as he should be, of the benign nature of America’s role in the world, ambitious, and warm, it was a tour de force of big government conservatism, mixed with Cold War liberalism.

“THAT THAT DAY NEVER COMES”: My highlights? When Bush directly addressed the poor people of Iraq, he destroyed the media cant that mistakes a butcher for a people. When he declared of the evil men of al Qaeda, that “one by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice,” his message must have rung in the ears of those still longing, as I am, for the perpetrators of 9/11 to be captured or killed. But his best passage was when he outlined the irrefutable logic that connects 9/11 with Saddam:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

That’s it, in a nutshell. It is not paranoid to fear this. It is responsible. And it is the president’s job to be responsible. He seemed to me to show the calm of someone with real faith – both in the justice of his cause and America’s ability to see it through. Everything else is minor compared to this. Everything.

“As one of those W.-hating liberals/Leftists for whom you seem to have so much contempt, but also as someone who acknowledges that the “He’s a moron” argument “is not one of reasoned opposition,” I want to offer my take on why the liberal/Left hates W. so much. Pretty simply, he was the guy whom we hated in high school: rich, blandly good-looking, unstudious, and popular. We resented that while we were the ones doing all the studying and music-making and painting, he was the one who got to go to the cool parties and who got the good-looking girls. We consoled ourselves with the thought that someday the scales would balance. Now he’s been elected president, just about the most symbolically resonant position in the world, and it’s hard not to take his election, and his popularity, as a national rejection of the choices we made to be good girls and boys. As it turns out, the rich, blandly good-looking, unstudious, popular kid still gets to go to the cool parties (and his wife is kinda hot too).” – well that’s one candid view from an emailer. For more feedback, check out the Letters Page today: a new batch from the smartest readers on the web.

The gamble to take the issue of Iraq’s violation of the 1991 truce to the U.N. was always going to be a tricky one. Secretary of State Colin Powell was critical to that strategy (and has always been far closer to the president’s own goals in this endeavor than much of the media wants to believe). I supported it at the time, but had my doubts. I have to say that after yesterday’s Blix report, I’m more impressed than ever by the strategy. Blix’s report is a devastating blow to those who still hold out hope that appeasing Saddam or attempting to contain him diplomatically will solve the problem we face. The critical elements of the report are: that Saddam’s December 7 dossier was riddled with unacountable gaps and omissions; that there are tons of unaccounted for VX gas, anthrax, 6500 missing chemically-armed bombs, SCUD missiles, and the like; that Saddam has neither shown what happened to these weapons and chemicals nor has he publicly destroyed them; that no Iraqi scientists have been granted immunity in order to talk to UN inspectors alone and without fear of retribution; and that documents related to uranium enrichment have been found in scientists’ private homes, suggesting a policy of deliberate concealment of critical documents related to chemical and biological weapons. Any one of these is a material breach of U.N. Resolution 1441. All of them represent a hole the size of a tank in the credibility of Saddam. What we have seen is the most minimal cooperation – just enough to confuse useful idiots in the West – in the attempt to disarm. But, in Blix’s words,

Paragraph 9 of resolution 1441 (2002) states that this cooperation shall be “active”. It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of “catch as catch can”. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items.

Nothing the U.S. or the U.K. could say could be as damning as this report. It’s a slam-dunk.

WHAT NOW? So the question now is: what do we do about it? The U.N. promised severe consquences if Iraq didn’t comply with active cooperation. The last chance has been missed. Should the West give Saddam a really really last chance? I think we should. But purely for the demonstration that we have absolutely no desire to go to war as such, but only to protect the West and the Middle East from Saddam’s menace. That means no more than a few weeks, and only enough time to ensure we have the best conditions in which to wage what will be a hazardous war. That should be the message of the president tomorrow night. He can’t win over the haters; but he absolutely can win over those who believe the U.S. can and must uphold some element of order in the world, especially with regard to weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and terror. And if he can produce more evidence of Saddam’s violation of the U.N.’s demands without violating critical intelligence, then he should. He doesn’t need to morally or logically. And he shouldn’t produce it as the critical proof. We have that already in Blix’s report. But he can use it to add rhetorical strength to the strategy he is pursuing. The issue, in Colin Powell’s eloquent expression, “is not how much more time the inspectors need to search in the dark. It is how much more time Iraq should be given to turn on the lights.” A few weeks at most. And then we will turn on the lights, and the world will retroactively judge this war as one of the most justified the West has ever waged.