The Dish

“Ask the average leftist today what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. Ask him what he is against, and the rhetorical floodgates open. That tells you something. Similarly, ask the average anti-war activist what she is for with regard to Iraq, what exactly she thinks we should constructively do, and the stammering and stuttering begins. Do we just leave Saddam alone? Do we send Jimmy Carter to sign the kind of deal he made with North Korea eight years ago? Will pressuring the Israelis remove the nerve gas and potential nukes Saddam has in his possession? Will ceding the West Bank to people who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center help defang al Qaeda? They don’t say and don’t know. But what they do know is what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the “racist” war on Afghanistan, and on and on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder some have started selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park.” – from my latest Sunday Times piece on the anti-Semitism hijacking the anti-war movement.

What on earth is going on in Iraq? I have no way of knowing what Saddam’s strategy is behind the sudden release of so many prisoners. Its probably a desperate plea for support. But we know from history that the moment a tyrant begins to relax his grip, forces are unleashed that he can find hard to control. The superb New York Times reporter, John Burns, has been writing peerless reports from Iraq (they make Nick Kristof look like a college stringer), and he delivers these two paragraphs today:

A 68-year-old retired high school mathematics teacher, who gave her first name as Samiya, said she heard of the amnesty while driving across Baghdad, and headed straight for Abu Ghraib in the hope that her 59-year-old brother, a chemical engineer serving a 30-year prison term, would be freed. When asked if her brother was a political prisoner, the white-haired woman turned away, then said he was the victim of denunciation by a “jealous colleague” at work. Then, she launched into an encomium for Mr. Hussein. “We love our president because he forgives the mistakes of his people,” she said.
Once the prison gates collapsed, the mood changed. Seeing watchtowers abandoned and the prison guards standing passively by or actively supporting them as they charged into the cell blocks, the crowd seemed to realize that they were experiencing, if only briefly, a new Iraq, where the people, not the government, was sovereign. Chants of “Down Bush! Down Sharon!” referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, faded. In one cell block, a guard smiled broadly at an American photographer, raised his thumb, and said, “Bush! Bush!” Elsewhere, guards offered an English word almost never heard in Iraq. “Free!” they said. “Free!”

Ah that war-monger Bush. No wonder Iraqis hate him.

The argument that immediately surfaced in the media following the North Korean revelation about their nukes has been: See? Why shouldn’t we invade North Korea now? The Bushies are sooo inconsistent. They just want to invade Iraq for oil/empire/the hell of it/the mid-term elections, or fill in the latest Dowdian allegation. But the difference between North Korea and Iraq is so simple it’s astonishing some people don’t see it. So let’s put this as clearly as we can: North Korea has a nuke; Iraq, so far, doesn’t. Got that? When a rogue state succeeds in getting weapons of mass destruction, our options are severely limited. The question with Iraq is simple: in trying to stop Saddam getting a nuke, do we follow the same policies as Clinton and Carter in 1994 with North Korea, or do we try something else? Amazingly, large swathes of apparently intelligent people seem to think we should try the Carter/Clinton approach to Iraq. My view is simple: if we do not disarm Saddam now, we never will. And if we don’t, a full-scale nuclear, biological and chemical war is inevitable in the Middle East; and that war, with the help of terror groups like al Qaeda, will soon come to LA and New York and London and Washington. So the choice is a dangerous war now; or a much more destructive war later. I know democracies don’t like to hear these as the two options; democracies rightly, understandably hate to go to war. But these choices, in my view, are the only ones we actually have. So what’s it gonna be? Or do we still want to change the subject?

ONE AT A TIME? Then there’s the latest anti-Iraq war argument. The old line was that we have to go after al Qaeda, not Iraq, because al Qaeda is the bigger threat. We can’t do both. But the obvious response is: why on earth not? The military says it can be done as a practical matter. As a political matter, a victory against Iraq would, in my view, likely help the war on al Qaeda, opening a trove of intelligence, demoralizing anti-American forces in the region, and acting as a model for a post-tyrannical Middle East. So we’re left with the next argument. Defanging Iraq will so inflame the Muslim “street” that other Muslim countries will stop cooperating with us in the war on terror. Tony Judt yesterday cited Indonesia and Pakistan as evidence for this. The trouble with this argument, it seems to me, is that the Indonesian government wasn’t cooperating much at all until the Bali massacre. Are they going to cooperate less now? Or less if another wave of terrorism hits in the wake of Iraq? If anything, the record suggests that they’ll only crack down when faced with a real threat.

AND PAKISTAN? As for Pakistan, it seems to me that Judt’s case is stronger. Musharraf has indeed been walking a tightrope. But if our policy is to fight terror without in any way pissing off the “Arab street,” we might as well pack up and go home. Ideologically, most of Arab public opinion, shielded by the police states most Arabs live in, hates the U.S. regardless of what we do. What we’ve learned is that although this hatred is constant, their respect for us isn’t. Under Clinton, they held us in contempt. Hence the steady rise of al Qaeda and the growing belligerence on the West Bank in the 1990s. Under Bush since 9/11, they’re far more circumspect, as well they should be. The Afghanistan campaign was therefore the best argument against Islamic extremism the Arab world has heard in a long, long time. Besides, Musharraf is a realist. If America takes Tony Judt’s advice and simply lets Saddam continue to develop nukes, poison gas, and smallpox, then Musharraf really would have an incentive to placate the extremists. After all, America’s biggest enemy in the region would now be invulnerable and have any number of weapons of mass destruction to wreak havoc. But a successful war against Iraq would do the opposite. It would give Musharraf the momentum to keep going. That’s why this is not the time to lose our nerve. In fact, it’s time to steel ourselves and press on. Our problem right now is our passivity. We need to take this war to the enemy sooner rather than later. Or they will bring it back to us. In fact, they already are.

PEDOPHILES MAYBE; GAY MEN NEVER: Rome, it seems, is unwilling to back the zero-tolerance policy toward child-abuse endorsed by the American bishops. No surprise, I suppose. This is a bureaucracy that defends its own. The children are now and always have been secondary to this instinct for self-preservation. Besides, the Vatican would argue, zero-tolerance doesn’t do full justice to the variety of incidents involved. But there is an area where the church is moving toward zero-tolerance: not against those who rape and molest children, but against any gay priest, celibate or otherwise. The word is that the Vatican is slowly moving toward a massive purge of gay people, people who for centuries have served the church diligently, faithfully and well. The Vatican cares not whether these priests or would-be priests are chaste, whether they love and serve God, whether they are brilliant preachers, or compassionate pastors. They’re gay and therefore they must go. My heart breaks. To see a church I love enact a policy so devoid of even the slightest humanity and fairness – in order to deflect attention from its own terrible responsibility for permitting the abuse of the young – is just a soul-destroying experience. The people who told me I was a fool to stay in the church, to trust in its better nature, the people who have long viewed the Church as quite simply the enemy of gay people – I’m afraid they may have been right all along. I find myself, in the face of this inhumanity, unable to go to mass any more. I haven’t left the church in my head or my soul. But I can’t go right now. It’s too painful. I just pray the purge won’t actually happen. What else can I do?

AGAINST KRUGMAN’S CLASS WAR: “The importance of incentives to innovate comes up in evaluating Krugman’s comparions between the U.S. and countries like Canada and Sweden. Comparing the bottom decile in America to the bottom decile in Sweden is interesting, but fundamentally it cannot tell us what would happen if public policy in America took a hint from the Scandinavians. That’s because America–more accurately, the existence of an enormous, relatively free marketplace for new products–has been responsible for much of the innovation that has made living standards elsewhere so high. The median Swede might lose some of her wealth and longevity if it weren’t for America’s big-winner system producing new computers, software, pharmeceuticals, and other technology that make an hour of work buy a lot more stuff today than it did, say, in 1970. Even if some of those gains come from the minds of non-Americans, we have to ask how many of them we would have seen if it hadn’t been possible to sell beneficial new products in such a great big market.” – more on Krugman’s desire to punish talent, why I’m no Orwell, why Jeb Bush will win in Florida, and the emergence of “Dildo Republicans.” All on the best Letters Page on the web.

HEADS UP: I’ll be on the road mid-week, speaking on the Catholic crisis at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, on Wednesday at 1 pm. On Thursday night, I’ll be in New York City, on a panel on Orwell at New York University at 7 pm. My fellow panelists are Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer and Vivian Gornick. You’re all welcome, natch.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLINTON: I agree with every word Max Boot writes here. No, it’s not some kind of anti-Clinton obsession. It’s a vital and important part of understanding our world to understand how we came to be in this awful predicament – in a world war with no apparent end in sight and much horror still to come. It’s my judgment that president Bill Clinton’s policies – not his person or his private life or anything else – but his policies left the world a far more dangerous place than when he took office. History will judge him brutally for what he has done to damage world peace. He may have meant well; but we must live with the consequences.

AND THANKS: Another record: 245,000 unique visits last week. We might break a million this month.

Here’s an idea. Maybe OxBlog could do it. Someone out there in blogland should take a look at Ann Coulter’s recent columns and Maureen Dowd’s. Using strict criteria – personal smears, rhetorical hyperbole, unprovable accusations of ill-will, bigotry (towards a class or race or group of people), unsubstantiated claims, and so on, see how the two stack up. It’s not worth criticizing Dowd any more. She’s beyond criticism. But it would be interesting to see how the prize columnist at the Times compares with a writer now deemed beyond the pale by large sections of the media. One your marks, get set … I’ll link to the best.

KRUGMAN’S CLASS HATRED: Wow. Barely a single original thought in Paul Krugman’s Times magazine cover-story, a piece that reads like Howell Raines just ordered it into what was once a pretty independent place. Growing inequality in America? Whodathunk it? For anyone wanting an intelligent liberal attempt to deal with this issue and actually come up with some honest solutions, go read Mickey Kaus’s superb, “The End of Equality.” It was written over a decade ago. It’s still fresher than Krugman’s rant.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: “In his years out of office, [former president Jimmy Carter] has avidly pursued the mission of what he calls ‘waging peace.’ He had some successes in trying to resolve a dispute between Ethiopia and the Eritrean rebels, negotiating a four-month cease-fire in Bosnia and brokering a deal between longtime enemies Sudan and Uganda.
But at times he has also encountered stiff criticism. In 1994, a few weeks before North Korean President Kim Il Sung died, he invited Carter to visit Pyongyang in an effort to calm tensions with South Korea and the United States over his nuclear weapons program. That meeting led to a thaw in Pyongyang’s relationship with Washington although former President Bill Clinton at first rejected the overture and the State Department, never appreciative of outside help, viewed the Carter visit as meddling. Eventually, Clinton wised up and tried to pursue Carter’s approach.’ – Helen Thomas, October 17. Thomas now has a clear lead.

The Times predictably ran an op-ed on North Korea today that essentially ignored the question of which policies led to North Korea getting a nuke (with U.S. help). Instead, the op-ed all but defends the 1994 accords and sees them as the basis for new diplomacy. I guess this is a fair position – the notion that people who have supported a failed policy should actually explain their failure seems, in the world of Raines propaganda, hopelessly utopian. But look who they got to write the op-ed: the guy who was, in Jake Tapper’s words, “a State Department official responsible for implementing a 1994 agreement with North Korea that was to have ended the country’s processing of plutonium at a factory suspected to be manufacturing nuclear weapons.” Joel S. Wit. Here’s his CSIS bio:

He was most recently the coordinator for the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework and was responsible for U.S. policy related to the implementation of that agreement. From 1993 to 1995, Mr. Wit served as senior adviser to Robert L. Gallucci, ambassador-at-large in charge of policy towards North Korea, where he worked on U.S. strategy to resolve the 1994 nuclear crisis, was in charge of the interagency sanctions working group, and led the U.S. effort to establish a new international organization, KEDO, to implement the Agreed Framework.

Again, that’s fair enough. But shouldn’t the Times have at least identified the man as such? Isn’t it relevant that the guy now defending the failed 1994 accords on the New York Times op-ed page was actually the person in the Clinton team responsible for enforcing them? Raines law says otherwise. Keep the readers in the dark, and keep spinning, spinning, spinning.

THE WESTERN DISEASE: This astonishing moment of clarity in the Independent, no less. Maybe Bali has changed minds in the world, after all:

Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – “What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?” etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel’s will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.

Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.

SORRY, DOLLY: Whitney Houston’s hit, “I Will Always Love You,” was written by Dolly Parton. If anyone gets the royalties, it should be Parton.

Yep, her song, “I Will Always Love You,” was picked by Saddam as the theme song for his recent “referendum.” I hope she got some royalties.

“Abu Bakar Bashir is the elderly cleric Western intelligence has identified as the man most likely to have organised Saturday night’s Kuta slaughter… Asked if there was anything he wanted to say to families who lost relatives in the bomb blast, he said: ‘My message to the families is please convert to Islam as soon as possible.’ Mr Bashir offered no sympathy for those who died; just his belief that by converting to Islam, the survivors could ensure they would avoid the fate of those non-Muslims who died and went to hell.” – The Age, Australia, today.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “For many they are brute macho breathtaking reassurance that America is still fighting some sort of good fight, still kickass and badass and hoo boy watch out here come the Good Guys, that our tax-dollar trillions in bloated military expenditures can at least provide a nice afternoon air show in the park, whew. But of course these exact jets are also, for millions of others, the bringers of death. These very same aircraft are awesome machines of violent destruction sent by Cheney and Dubya and Rummy to blast already destitute and deeply oppressed foreign countries into submission so that Bush & Co. can lay some pipe and their oil crony pals can stop salivating at the prospect of a newly gutted Iraq and actually get in there and make some billions. This is the true reality.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com.

“North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be very firm about it.” – Bill Clinton, “Meet the Press,” Nov. 7, 1993.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday’s draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North’s nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.” – The New York Times, wrong yet again, October 19, 1994. (The Von Hoffman Award is named after famed commentator Nick von Hoffman who boldly predicted the collapse of the Afghan campaign the week Kabul fell. It’s for truly bad judgment or prediction among the punditocracy.)

ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY: Now check the Times’ editorial today. Not even a hint of their previous misjudgment. Just another piece of pabulum calling for more diplomacy. No criticism whatsoever of those who negotiated this deal and helped bring another nuclear rogue state into being. They even say this gives some ammunition to the Iraq “doves,” who “will say this gives the lie to the administration’s argument that Iraq is uniquely dangerous.” Please. Don’t the Times’ editorialists owe their readers some kind of argument as to why they were wrong when this deal was originally signed? Hey, guys. We have Nexis now.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: Here’s what the Clinton administration’s top negotiator with North Korea told Jim Lehrer last January about president Bush’s policy toward North Korea:

JIM LEHRER: What about the idea that the President laying the law down to them, calling them and putting them in the same league with Iraq and Iran and calling them part of this axis of evil helps the situation or hurts it? Do you feel like it helps?

WENDY SHERMAN: I don’t think it was particularly helpful.

JIM LEHRER: Why not?

WENDY SHERMAN: It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It’s not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.

“They do and can follow through.” Says it all, doesn’t it?

ON THE OTHER HAND: There were some people who clearly saw the scam that was the Carter-engineered, Clinton-signed group-hug with the North Koreans. Here’s John McCain, the same day the Times came out hailing the Clinton deal:

On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang’s almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee. …I suspect that the Administration’s willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime’s collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

Hmmm. And what does McCain say about Iraq today?

“DANGEROUSLY WEAK”: This is clearly a suck-up to my friend Charles Krauthammer. But, hey, he deserves it. This is what he said about Clinton’s North Korea deal at the time:

(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility – not very high after Clinton’s about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti – sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, “It’s one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down.” Better though, said another, than “falling on our own sword over phony principle.” If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president’s real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation “very good news.” For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

Man, was he right. And what is his position today on Iraq?

You’d think something as innocuous as Bartlett’s quotations wouldn’t be spoiled by leftist bias. But it has been. Is this my paranoid reading – just because president Reagan wasn’t included until now? Nope. Finally, the editor, Justin Kaplan has come clean. According to USA Today:

After the last edition, Kaplan was criticized for ignoring President Reagan. “I admit I was carried away by prejudice. Mischievously, I did him dirt,” he says. He has added six Reagan quotes, including “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” which Kaplan calls “one of the greatest moments in Western history.”

I wonder if, in a few years’ time, Howell Raines will admit the same about Bush.