The Dish

Tony Blair knocks it out of the park at the Trades Union Congress. Here’s an argument that strikes me as a critical one in the debate over pre-emption:

Suppose I had come last year on the same day as this year – September 10. Suppose I had said to you: there is a terrorist network called al-Qaida. It operates out of Afghanistan. It has carried out several attacks and we believe it is planning more. It has been condemned by the UN in the strongest terms. Unless it is stopped, the threat will grow. And so I want to take action to prevent that.
Your response and probably that of most people would have been very similar to the response of some of you yesterday on Iraq.
There would have been few takers for dealing with it and probably none for taking military action of any description.

Read the entire speech. But it seems to me that this early question posed by Blair must surely be asked of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Raines, Sontag and many others opposed to war in Iraq. If you had been given evidence of al Qaeda’s capabilities and intent to kill Americans prior to September 11, would you have gone into Afghanistan to prevent it? The answer seems to me a pretty clear one: almost all the critics of pre-emption would have refused to go into Afghanistan to prevent 9/11. Their policy is this: we have to wait to get devastated before we act. My policy is: once is enough. The advocates of inaction – or, worse, the appearance of action – seem to me to be essentially bargaining away the lives of American citizens to protect their anachronistic notion of an international order. No president of the United States can do that while performing his constitutional duty to protect us from a foreign menace. Thank God.

“Some people in the United States were rather delighted that it (the attacks) mobilized the entire country and focused on a single enemy, which we’d been demonizing for quite some time — the Muslim world. He [Bush] wants this to go on forever. He said to Congress after 9/11: ‘It’s going to be a long war’. He was thrilled.” – Gore Vidal on the BBC World Service.

BUSH REBOUND? Has the Iraq debate halted Bush’s polling slide? And hurt Democrats’ chances in November? Ipsos-Reid sees some evidence for it, although the Dems still have a clear edge.

MUST READ: “The hostility which these regimes, and the terrorists they sponsor, feel towards the West is existential. It cannot be assuaged by more international aid, a reordering of the world financial system, a new peace plan for the Palestinians, the signing of the Kyoto treaty or any other of the panaceas for soothing away world tension peddled by the new Left or old Arabists. As with Nazis and the Communists, they hate us for what we are, not what we do. And that hatred, being molten, is dynamic. It cannot be limited by lines in the sand, or constrained by diplomacy. Just as it is in the nature of totalitarians to hate so it is endemic to them to attack, to expand, to export their violence.” – Michael Gove in the Times (of London) today.

From the Washington Post:

“Report Warns Iraq Could Produce Nuclear Weapons

LONDON, Sept. 9–Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon “in a matter of months” if supplied fissile materials from an outside source, according to a report released here today. Saddam Hussein’s government also has an extensive biological weapons capability, a smaller chemical weapons stockpile and a small supply of missiles to deliver them, the report concluded.”

From the Raines Times:

“London Group Says Iraq Lacks Nuclear Material for Bomb

LONDON, Sept. 9 – Saddam Hussein has substantial stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and the capacity to expand production of them on short notice, but Iraq will be unable to build a nuclear weapon for years unless it obtains radioactive material on the black market, a leading security affairs research organization said today.”

9/11 IN OSLO: My friend Bruce Bawer emails to let me know that Oslo’s main commemmoration of 9/11 will be a major address by … Gore Vidal! Pilger was already booked.

Whose inspired idea was it to ask Susan Sontag to write an op-ed for the New York Times the day before the first anniversary of September 11? Sontag and Raines … together at last. (I’ll respond to her arguments later today).

I must say I found Adam Shatz’s long essay in the Nation about the Left’s response to 9/11 to be pretty fair, comprehensive and occasionally fascinating. What its conclusion amounts to, I think, is that the crime of 9/11 has still not finished throwing that diverse coalition we call the Left into a deep and long-lasting crisis. Check out this paragraph:

Some of the people I interviewed opposed going to war in October because they feared a bloody quagmire and didn’t trust the Bush Administration, but changed their minds a month later when the Taliban unexpectedly fell. Others went in the opposite direction, coming out against the war only after US bombing began to inflict heavy civilian casualties. A few people supported targeted strikes against Al Qaeda training bases, but not the overthrow of the Taliban – not because of any sympathy for the regime but because the Bush Administration might be emboldened to overthrow other governments. Others argued, in contrast, that we shouldn’t be bombing Afghanistan unless we were willing to send in ground troops. Some said that a struggle against radical Islam is necessary, but that we should be waging it in Saudi Arabia, not in Afghanistan. And many of the people who cautiously supported the Afghan intervention passionately assailed the war on terror as a new cold war, a danger to both American democracy and security.
To be honest, I’ve held a number of these positions myself.

Although it’s hard not to snicker at the pretzels these people have twisted themselves into, it’s also admirable, isn’t it, that some are thinking through their conflicts honestly. There are some contemptible people in the anti-war left, but there are also some people thinking for their lives. Thank God.

ISN’T SHE LOVELY? Baby pictures from the Hamas website. Charming. But, hey, it’s just another culture isn’t it, professor Fish? The pics come courtesy of a blog I unaccountably left out of my August round-up: the always great Little Green Footballs.

IRAQ AND BUSH: Thanks to readers who’ve tracked down old statements by president Bush on Iraq. I was particularly struck by this piece from the Boston Globe in December 1999:

Thursday night, when asked what he would do about Hussein, his father’s nemesis during the war to free Kuwait, Bush was a tad belligerent. He would not ease sanctions, he said. He would not negotiate with Hussein, he said. He would help opposition groups, he continued, and he would make ”darn sure” that Hussein lived up to agreements he signed in the early ’90s.
“And if I found in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I’d take him out,” Bush declared. ”I’m surprised he’s still there. I think a lot of other people are as well.”
When the moderator, Brit Hume, inquired further, Bush either pulled back, clarified, or contradicted himself. ”Take him out?” Hume asked.
”Take out the weapons of mass destruction,” Bush responded.
Yesterday morning, Bush was asked again about Hussein, and how he planned to take out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
”That’s up for Saddam Hussein to figure out,” Bush said during an early morning news conference, declining to elaborate. ”He doesn’t need to be building them. … He just needs to know I’ll take them out. It’s important for a future commander in chief to state our intentions and the means will be evident to him.”

It’s so odd that so many are now calling for a debate about Iraq, as if we haven’t had one before. We’ve been having a debate for a frigging decade. The only reason for the call for a new debate is because the appeasers have so far lost the argument and want to try again. This is a democracy and we should have such a debate – even until we go blue in the face. But it seems to me that the insistence that president Bush “make the case,” is simply a ploy for many on the left to avoid taking a position. Well, pretty soon, they’ll have to. I can’t wait.

HARPERS CALLS ME AN ANTI-SEMITE (I THINK): I guess you can tell where Lee Siegel is coming from when he argues in the latest Harpers magazine (not online, alas) that the Bush administration is composed of near sociopaths, that Paul Krugman is “an economic genius,” and that Richard Goldstein is “perhaps the most gifted gay journalist in the country.” He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, as he is to his view of my own work. He’s entitled to think that,

reading [Sullivan], you feel that he is not thinking, exactly; rather, one side of his brain is merely fondling the other.

Or this gem:

[I]t is hard not to picture the two sides of Sullivan’s brain as two kittens, playfully cavorting with a little rubber figure called Michael Oakeshott.

Two kittens? Why not bunny rabbits? But what Siegel is not entitled to is the preposterous idea that because a) I once considered running an ad on this site for the pharmaceutical companies, and then didn’t, my views are “bought and paid for,” and b) because a friend donated $500 to the site’s expenses, he “bought” a favorable mention in the Dish. The friend is Charles Francis, someone who has done more than anyone to build a bridge between gays and Republicans in recent years. His donation was swiftly disclosed on the site, and still is, and the notion that I would need $500 to support his efforts, when I’ve been banging on about the same themes for over a decade, is simply loopy. Then there’s c) which almost beggars belief. I can’t do better than to cite Siegel’s logic:

More recently, 9/11 gave [Sullivan] the opportunity to recover the fig-leaf of seriousness he repeatedly reaches for; you could see him railing against Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism in The New York Times Magazine, sentiments I would second whole-heartedly were they coming from a writer who really believed them himself. But Sullivan also likes to publish anti-Semitic jokes on his website, which he then virtuously adduces as evidence of rising anti-Semitism.

Now think about that passage for a minute. I think he’s saying that my long years of concern about anti-Semitism, my blogging exposing it, my documented history of love for Israel, and my constant attempts to engage and oppose religious fundamentalisms of all kinds – these are all elaborate fakes, designed to cover what is actually an anti-Semitic, Fundamentalist heart. I do not “really believe” what I write. When I condemn an anti-Semitic joke, I’m really endorsing it. Siegel’s evidence? You just read all of it.

Bob Bartley moves the ball a little in his piece this morning. It’s about the criteria for regime change:

A rough cut at a guiding principle, it seems to me, is that the world has grown too small to tolerate a state that (1) traffics with terrorists, (2) is strenuously seeking weapons of mass destruction, and (3) is ruled by a madman. Laying aside quibbles over proof and definition, can anyone object to this principle?
The Saudis may be a problem, but by these tests are not “enemies.” Syria and Libya help terrorists, but are not big players in the nuclear game. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe may have gone mad, but is neither nuclear or a world terrorist.
President Bush’s “axis of evil” – Iran, North Korea and Iraq – help terrorists, are strenuously seeking weapons of mass destruction, and are run by elites that are, to say the least, unstable. Saddam Hussein stands out with madman actions such as starting wars, repressing his own people, deploying poison gas on civilians, trying to assassinate a former U.S. president, and breaking agreements with the U.S. and world community.

Sounds eminently reasonable to me. The real problem with the Europeans, I think, is that they didn’t experience 9/11 themselves, have a history of appeasing terror, and so find the new doctrine not just psychologically novel to them but also an implicit indictment of their entire foreign policy record of the last decade. They’ll have to swallow some pride to come aboard. Like Scowcroft and Powell.

CHOMSKY’S THREAT?: It’s an idle one, of course, this time wrapped in pseudo-concern for the United States. But Noam Chomsky couldn’t be clearer: attack Iraq and the Islamist terrorists will come back at you. Just like they did after we liberated Afghanistan. But the underlying message is still a Chomsky classic: you deserve it.

“You’ve been on planes. Think how it feels, especially on a morning cross-country flight. You got up early; you’re tired; you’ve been buckled in your seat for a couple of hours, with hours more to go. You’re reading, or maybe dozing. You’re essentially cargo: There’s nowhere you can go, nothing you can do, no role you could possibly play in flying this huge, complex machine. You retreat into your passenger cocoon, passive, trusting your fate to the hands of others, confident that they’ll get you down safe, because they always do.
Now imagine what that awful morning was like for the people on Flight 93. Imagine being ripped from your safe little cocoon, discovering that the plane was now controlled by killers, that your life was in their bloody hands. Imagine knowing that there was nobody to help you, except you, and the people, mostly strangers, around you.
Imagine that, and ask yourself: What would you do? Could you do anything? Could you overcome the fear clenching your stomach, the cold, paralyzing terror?
The people on Flight 93 did.” – Dave Barry, in his latest, great, column (via Instapundit).

I really should write a mea culpa about Tony Blair. I’d become more skeptical of him these past few years, especially on domestic policy, but all that has to be balanced now against his piercing leadership in the war on terror. The fact that Britain might be the country to formally prod the U.N. Security Council to act up to its obligations on Iraq is proof enough. But Blair’s matter-of-fact insistence on the profound threat posed by Saddam to the rest of the world rescues the United States from an international isolation it does not in any way deserve. The British tabloid press depicts Blair as Bush’s poodle. Nonsense. He’s Bush’s translator and facilitator. He adds rhetorical nuance and diplomatic finesse to Bush’s gut refusal to risk American citizens’ lives for the sake of pleasing French presidents and the editorial board of the New York Times. Blair and Bush are very different personalities – the down-to-earth Texan, uncomfortable among East Coast elites, yearning for the weekend, compred with the upper-middle-class do-gooder, infused with moral clarity, barely leaving the office. Their relationship is not of identicals but of individual complements in a single cause: ridding the world of terrorist blackmail. Reagan and Thatcher had a similar relationship. One was a big-picture dreamer; the other was a shopkeeper’s daughter with a firm grip of accounting. But they united on ideology, and, despite (or perhaps because of) their personal differences, clearly had a profound affection for each other. In contrast, Bush-Major was a match of overly-similar cautious Tories, and it is their failed international legacy, based on a shared lack of imagination and boldness, that the next generation of leaders is having to deal with. Good relationships, it seems to me, require enough similarity to make them work (i.e. a common goal, or common values) but also enough difference to make them broad-based and supple. Bush and Blair have this, I think, which is good news for all of us. People close to both have told me how well they get along, despite Blair’s up-tight persona and Bush’s laid-back bluntness. (It’s Cherie who finds Bush hard to deal with.) Could it be that both men see in the other something they miss in themselves? Whatever the reason for the bond (which is stronger, I’m told, than that between Blair and Clinton), it couldn’t come at a more propitious moment.

THAT ANGLO-AMERICAN MAGIC II: The interview between the wife formerly known as Madonna, her husband, the movie director, Guy Ritchie, and the New York Times’ Alan Riding was a classic. Mr and Mrs Ritchie are another Blair-Bush, Thatcher-Reagan miracle of trans-Atlantic complementarity. You can see what Madonna sees in Ritchie – that working-class gruffness, the testosteroned good looks, the utterly un-p.c. and therefore almost exotic machismo. And you can see what he sees in her: amazing bod, loadsa cash, pop-cultural genius. But what’s so great about their marriage is how it plays with old stereotypes. The Ritchie household merges the Hollywood power-couple phenom with an old-fashioned husband and bloody wife from London in the 1950s. Ritchie is always calling Madonna, the “missus,” or “the wife.” And, like many British husbands, he can also degenerate into the role of put-upon teenage boy at a moment’s notice:

MADONNA: There are elements in the movie that I would say are reflective of the politics in our relationship. [She speaks to Mr. Ritchie, who is putting on Madonna’s reading glasses.] Don’t stretch out my glasses, Guy, you have a very big head.
RITCHIE: That’s all right, they’re already stretched.
MADONNA: No, they’re not. Take them off.
RITCHIE: All right. Come on, concentrate on the–
MADONNA: Anyway, yes, Guy’s a real macho and I’m a real hardnose, too. And sometimes we come to blows – not physically, but mentally and emotionally. And there is an element, a tiny little element of that in there. I’m attracted to men who are going to stand up to me.

Amen, Madonna. The great thing about Mrs Ritchie is that she’s a feminist woman who still thinks men are hot. She understands essential gender difference, and doesn’t try to erase it, but to celebrate and enjoy it on an equal footing. This is what some contemporary feminists miss – that scorning men for being pigs should not in any way be a barrier to loving them. Madonna wants equality with men, but she sure as hell doesn’t want them to stop being men, testosterone, beer, and all. And in Ritchie, who has the Brit-male-“I’m-gonna-go-down-the-pub-with-me-mates-while-you-do-the-hoovering”-schtick down pat, she has struck gold. He’s got a sharp tongue as well:

MADONNA: I just think I have to be clever about picking the right parts.
RITCHIE: [Reading from a list of Madonna’s movies] “The Tulse Luper Suitcases.” Remember that?
MADONNA: No. But Guy, are you going to read that or do the interview?
RIDING: [To Madonna] Here you can demonstrate your powers of getting him to cooperate.
MADONNA: Guy.
RITCHIE: Yes, darling.
RIDING: We were going to talk about how the two of you work together, and I’m seeing an example of it.
MADONNA: Yeah, well, this is an example of it. I try to exert my power and it doesn’t work.

“Yes, darling.” Two words that help sum up the British male’s essential attitude toward “the missus:” world-weary coexistence. Madonna’s brilliance is to find all that schtick absurd, funny and sexy at the same time. As always, her taste is impeccable.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Not everyone will be greeting September 11 in a somber mood. Some will be celebrating.

A SADDAM PRIMER: I found this summary of Iraq’s horrors useful and salutary. For the proper context. I still want to urge you to buy and read Michael Ledeen’s “The War Against The Terror-Masters,” the most concise description of the forces of evil we are now confronting. It’s our book club selection this month. Read it and join the argument with Michael himself later this month.

LETTERS: “I was raised to be a Guilty Southern White Boy, but it didn’t take. Real life in the South of the last 30 years has been too complicated for me to work up very much unadulterated “G.” One way you can see the drift of the traditional southern liberal into irrelevance is to read To Kill a Mockingbird, the GSWB’s sacred text. I love that book, but, as a high school English teacher in the Atlanta area, I’m glad that I no longer have to teach it (students in the grades I teach don’t read it). Year by year, that book becomes more and more obsolete as a picture of race relations or any other aspect of life in the South. The day has come and gone for Atticus Finch’s heroism and Tom Robinson’s martyrdom. The legacy of those days is still with us, but now we’re on to something different. Some folks haven’t figured that out yet.” This, more GSWB testimony, the new York Times as Pravda, and why there are only five cool English guys alive, all on the Letters Page this week.

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE:
“Meanwhile the popular expectation of a knockout blow against the Taliban has been cruelly disappointed. Remember the optimistic remarks a couple of weeks back about the way American bombs were eviscerating the enemy? This has given way to sombre comment about the Taliban’s dogged resistance. Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgements. The Joint Chiefs may have been misled by the apparent success – now that Milosevic has been defeated – of the bombing campaign in Kosovo. Perhaps they should have reflected on Vietnam. We dropped more tons of explosives on that hapless country than we dropped on all fronts during the Second World War, and still we could not stop the Vietcong. Vietnam should have reminded our generals that bombing has only a limited impact on decentralised, undeveloped, rural societies.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, November 2, 2001.

“We Americans can learn to live with minor terrorism, as the people of Britain, Spain, India, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Sri Lanka and most of the world have already learned to do. By doing so, we will ensure that Sept. 11 will not lead to a Third World War and will not change our world forever… Unlike the Gulf War, which was essentially paid for by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan, we would have to pay for this war ourselves, and the impact on oil prices and on our economy could be disastrous. And we would wage this war largely on our own: Our supposed friends in the Middle East – King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Turks, the Egyptians and even many of the Kurds – oppose military action. Moreover, such a war might yet produce the vast enemy we currently lack. If we bomb and invade Iraq – surely killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians – if we destabilize the Arab countries, if we permit Israel to deny the Palestinians a separate state, we risk uniting the Muslim world against us and setting off that much-feared “clash of civilizations.” This could lead to a Third World War, a ghastly conflict employing biological warfare, chemical warfare, radiological warfare and even, heaven help us, nuclear warfare. If these consequences ensued, Sept. 11 would indeed be a date that would live in infamy.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger, September 8, 2002.

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN’S NIGHTMARE: Masculine, Mid-Western football fans – and they’re gay.

TIMES WATCH: In yesterday’s Week In Review, under a picture of Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, under arrest for espionage, the caption reads:

The United States forms the House Un-American Activities Committee to root out Communist Spies. Alger Hiss (left photo) was accused of espionage, and perjury charges were brought against him when he denied being a spy before a grand jury. He was convicted in 1951. It was later learned that some evidence supporting his claim of innocence was covered up.

It is also now public knowledge, thanks to decoded Soviet transcripts, that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and traitor. Only a few nutcases at the Nation believe in Hiss’s innocence any more. Oh, and the editors of the New York Times.

If Saddam Hussein “fails to comply [with U.N. inspections], and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction… If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow… Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.” – Bill Clinton, February 18, 1998. How soon they forget. And some of them accuse president Bush of cynicism?

GOOD NEWS: The administration seems to be following the strategy I wrote about last Tuesday. Use the U.N. – but don’t be used by it. The case is so strong we can afford to exhaust every single peaceful avenue, as long as we don’t leave open the possibility of Saddam wriggling out of his obligations.

John Scalzi has a very smart piece on how or if blogs can ever make real money for writers. Bottom line: he thinks they’re inherently loss-leaders. I fear I agree with him.