The Dish

It seems the brutal tyrant in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has lost his head p.r. guy. Never mind. With puff-pieces like this one, who needs p.r.? “A Hero To Many!” Whoever Rachel Swarns is, she’s clearly a Rainesian. I love this paragraph:

Mr. Mugabe is criticized in the West for encouraging blacks to invade white-owned farms, for hounding journalists and judges, and for jailing opposition party leaders. But to some leaders, particularly in Africa, he is a hero. To them, he is the guerrilla who ended white rule here in 1980, the statesman who expanded access to education and health care and the revolutionary who is returning land stolen from blacks during the British colonial era.

“Criticized in the West.” This is a man who jails his opponents, rigs elections and is fomenting a famine in his country by brutal evictions of the only productive farmers. He’s viciously homophobic and reviled by any serious African analyst as a menace to any democratic trends in the region. But the Times sees his good side. Of course they do.

James Lileks’ stirring piece on why he’s still angry; and why we all should be. The ending made my stomach clench again.

I just took another look at Jeffrey Goldberg’s harrowing account of what’s been going on in Iraq, Iraq’s links with al Qaeda, and the record of this man, Saddam, whom so many wish to contain and appease. It’s about the best reality-check I can find.

PRE-EMPTIVE LOGIC: Hitch has a superb essay on then need to keep our sights on the evil of radical Islamism, as the anniversary of their massacre approaches. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.

Sorry, Hitch. It’s beginning to look as if we’ll have to wait for another catastrophe before we can carry this struggle forward.

GSWB SYNDROME: I was struck by a few of you who wrote in to berate me for bringing this subject up. You have, it seems to me, a good point (although, in fairness, a reader brought it up). Here’s one particularly tart email on the subject:

OK, enough. Accusing Howell Raines, James Carville, etc. of being liberals because they’re southerners and want approval from northerners is silly–just as silly as saying that Andrew Sullivan, a lower-middle-class Irish catholic lad and budding homosexual growing up in stuffy, class-obsessed England, was ashamed of his social class, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, and became a conservative in order to curry favor with his betters. People sometimes do things out of genuine moral and intellectual conviction, and being an open supporter of civil rights in the South of the 50s and 60s took a whole heap of moral conviction. Implying otherwise is just a cheap shot.

I think the guy has a point. I don’t think that you can reduce people’s political convictions to a pat analysis of their roots. There’s no reason a Southern white male might not come to be extremely liberal for his own good reasons. At the same time, there does seem to be something of a type among Southern liberal journalists and politicians, who often cite their own roots in explaining their political position. You only have to think of Ivins or Carville to see this. Raines constantly invokes this heritage to describe himself and his politics – he did so on the Newshour recently as well. In answering one question, he said, “I have to say that I think, you know, I often say the one thing that my part of the country learned from U.S. Grant is ‘concentrate your resources at the point of attack.'” This is the executive editor of the New York Times still talking about “my part of the country,” in referring to the South. Hard not to think it’s relevant and informative when he often says so himself.

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE: Jimmy Carter, a president whose foreign policy brought the United States to its weakest international position in the second half of the twentieth century, is – surprise! – against doing anything militarily against Saddam. A few days after September 11, he wasn’t quite so dovish. Even Carter could see the evil when it flew into this country. But even then – even then – he preferred some sort of collective, protracted muiltilateral solution that would not involve “bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan.” Here’s the text of his speech on September 15. No big news that he wants to keep appeasing today:

I have had discussions with the White House and I have talked several times with Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, as Americans, I know that you and I are interested in the response that President Bush is evolving with his advisors. There has to be a response of strength, of punitive action against those that are guilty of this horrible crime against our country, and against our people. That’s a decision that is inevitable and absolutely necessary. But I think it’s also very good for us to give thanks to our President that there has not been any precipitous action, no bombing or missile attacks against, for instance, the people of Afghanistan. That he’s determined to identify the culprits in this attack and those that directly harbor them … We need to garner as much as possible the full support of our natural allies, NATO obviously, Canada sure, Mexico of course, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, even China and Russia, who fear the same kinds of terrorist attacks that we have just experienced. But it’s also important for us to reach out to the moderate Arab countries and Muslim countries who have been known [even our best friends] to have permitted terrorist groups or cadres to exist in their own countries, and then to focus our attention on the punishment of the guilty and not the innocent.

The great thing about Carter is his consistency. He may well be an admirable man, but he’s also been consistently wrong about everything since the day he took office.

THE “GRANDFATHERED” WAR: Blogger Baseball Crank has an interesting aside on policy toward Iraq. He goes back to the foreign policy debate in the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign and found the following exchange:

“MR. LEHRER: — how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?
VICE PRESIDENT GORE: I haven’t heard a big difference right — in the last few exchanges.
GOV. BUSH: Well, I think — it’s hard to tell. I think that — you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better. I mean, we don’t —
MR. LEHRER: With Saddam Hussein, you mean?
GOV. BUSH: Yes, and —
MR. LEHRER: You could get him out of there?
GOV. BUSH: I’d like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. But we don’t know — there’s no inspectors now in Iraq. The coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be. He is a danger; we don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard to — it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
MR. LEHRER: Do you feel that is a failure of the Clinton administration?
GOV. BUSH: I do.”

My point? The point is that the president stated his hope of removing Saddam Hussein even before he took office. 9/11 showed that we were even more vulnerable to his weapons of mass destruction than we thought before. This war against Saddam is therefore not new nor improvised nor in any way “grandfathered” onto any other war. It is now and long has been a critical element in securing the safety of the citizens of the United States.

Check out my reading of Frank Rich’s latest accusation of treason against the president. Salon is running it. I’ll be contributing a weekly piece of left/liberal/whatever stupidity or malevolence to that online magazine. Good for them for having a diversity of views out there.

DECTER ON GSWB’S: A reader points to this July 1998 Commentary essay by Midge Decter on the Guilty White Southern Boy Syndrome. It’s about her experience as a young writer at Willie Morris’s Harpers. You can buy the full version here. She makes, as usual, some interesting points:

Willie’s Harper’s, “hot” though it may have been, was, for reasons of his own, brought to an end by its owner in the early 70’s. Little by little, the old office gang was broken up. By today, of course, decades later, all those up-and-coming Southern Boys I used to have beer with have long since settled into whatever they were going to be. I have not seen them in years. But one thing about them on which I would be willing to bet something of large value is that all of them have remained men of the Left. They have been locked into that posture most of all by the imposition on them of a new kind of entanglement with America’s blacks.

All their lives, to be sure, the Boys had been deeply bound up in the fortunes of black people. But the same civil-rights revolution that liberated Southern blacks from the oppressive thrall of Southern white men seems in some sense to have had the opposite effect on a decisive group of their former tormentors. To put it simply, the battle for civil rights that took place in the South was a dangerous struggle for the right and the good in which a group of Southern blacks acted with genuine heroism and, with only a couple of highly notable exceptions, the Southern Boys did not. Could educated, intelligent young Southerners at the time actually not have known where their duty lay? Of course they knew, but the combination of guilt and contempt they must all their lives have felt toward blacks no doubt made it impossible for them to participate outright in the action.

How they did ultimately respond to the death of Jim Crow was given expression in two separate ways, and unfortunately both turned out to be deeply influential. First, they staked their personal claim to decency by reminding us how much worse they could have been expected to be. Take the case of Tom Wicker, the former New York Times columnist and Southern liberal par excellence. In A Time To Die (1975), a memoir of his experience as a journalist during the famous riot at Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971, Wicker mused: “In 1946 [I] had made the great discovery that blacks were as human and individual as anyone. It was not much to learn, yet it was more than some people learn in a lifetime.”

What Wicker was really saying here was that, given where and how he grew up, to have discovered that Negroes were human made him a better man than those who had never doubted the proposition in the first place. Whether or not, in the dark night of his own soul, Wicker really got away with this piece of moral grandstanding, his notion of a special virtue attaching to the Southern liberal was accepted with enthusiasm, and taken up in a variety of ways, by a whole host of his fellow Southerners.

The second response of the Southern Boys to the disruption of their old social habits was contained in a formulation that, despite being quite untrue, again turned out to be not only psychically soothing to them but fateful for everyone else. What they commenced to declare in the mid-1960’s was that the experience of black people in the North was, in its own way, far worse than the experience of black people in the South. This claim, ridden for all it was worth, helped to create a whole new agenda for Northern civil-rights activists who had long been fighting the good fight in the courts – something it was, after all, possible to do in the bad old North – but had missed out on the defining experience of heroism that had been vouchsafed their Southern counterparts.

This time for blatant editorializing in what might appear to be a straight-forward news story. Here’s Reuters’ caption for a photograph of the WTC site as it is today:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11. REUTERS/Peter Morgan

I’ve cited the caption here in case they amend it.

Although Mickey Kaus, Virginia Postrel and Geitner Simmons don’t disagree with my readers’ assessment of how some Southern whites became hyper-liberals, they all have something interesting and nuanced to add. Another great thing about the blogosphere – you can throw an idea out there and all sorts of other interesting ones come back.

Impressive evidence that if the president makes the case clearly, if we demand meaningful inspections first (and I mean meaningful), we’ll win the battle of public opinion over the battle with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Maybe, as some of you imply, Bush has indeed played this superbly. He has let the debate unfold, without tipping his hand too much. He has let the anti-war left overplay their hand. He has identified who his real domestic allies and opponents are. And he has used the time to orchestrate an arms buildup for the Iraq campaign. Is he Lincoln? I wish I could concur with David Warren. But Bush sure is smarter than many of his opponents believe. And, I hope, braver.

BLOG, MABLOG: Check out my email correspondence with Kurt Andersen now up and running on Slate this week.

BACK FROM VACATION: It appears I was wrong to hope for a long-term improvement in the New York Times’ front-page polemics against the war against terror in Iraq. In his remarks on the Newshour, Howell Raines clearly explained that he sees this as another Vietnam. It’s his gut feeling. So he wants to use the Times’ front-page to campaign. On the web version today, the lead story is a straightforward opinion piece against the notion of pre-emptive action in the war on terror. Here’s the opening graf of the op-ed by “reporter” David Sanger:

President Bush’s declaration today that he would seek the approval of Congress to oust Saddam Hussein amounted to an acknowledgment that he cannot proceed alone and that he needs to move quickly to try to resolve a rift within his administration, with many of his father’s cautious advisers, and with his reluctant allies.

It’s followed by a front-page interview with Chancellor Schroder warning against war. Schroder is playing the war for his own electoral benefit in a very tight race, but he also helps Raines make the case for appeasing Saddam. Why not interview prime minister Blair, a man of the center-left actually taking a political risk in the terror war, the man scheduled to come to Camp David soon? Off-message, I guess. In contrast, the Washington Post leads with the news that Iraq has been trying to develop the means to deliver chemical weapons through the air. You have the difference between a newspaper and a viewspaper right there.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR US: Rick Hertzberg defends Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to rid New York City bars and restaurants of smokers for good and all. Rick’s bottom-line is that the smokers themselves would like to be rid of their addiction, so, by curtailing their enjoyment and socialization, we’re actually doing them a favor. Would he say the same thing about bath-houses or strip-joints? And why not, by the same argument, ban drinking alcohol in bars as well? Juice only, guys. After all, aren’t many alcoholics desperate to be told they can’t drink any more? I know that smokers are now reduced to the respect level of pharmaceutical executives and Catholic priests, but is there no end to the puritan impulse out there? Even at the allegedly liberal New Yorker?

THOSE LITERATE VICTORIANS: Andrew Wilson writes the following in today’s Daily Telegraph:

Guilt at what [the Victorians] had done made the more foolish among them seek for collectivist solutions, such as the disastrous idea, first mooted in the 1870 Education Act, that the state should control schooling. At that date there was 92 per cent literacy in England. Without compulsory education, you had to learn in order to survive.

Wow. 92 percent literacy wth no public education. And we’re scared of vouchers?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “It is a lamentable fact that the democracies in their dealings with the dictators before the war, not less than in their attempts at propaganda and in the discussion of their war aims, have shown an inner insecurity and uncertainty of aim which can be explained only by confusion about their own ideals and the nature of the differences which separated them from the enemy.” – F.A. Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom.”

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE: “A bombing campaign in Afghanistan brings special perils, beyond what the Pentagon refers to as holding civilian casualties to “an acceptable minimum.” In the first place, there’s not much there to hit, and in the second place, we are up against the dismal fact that the bombing campaign could well cause the starvation of literally millions of Afghans who never did anything to us.
And if mass starvation does occur, we will lose this war against terrorism whether or not we find bin Laden, since such a tragedy would instantly create more terrorists as well as wreck the coalition. And that is why some of us think it is even more important to figure out how to get food into Afghanistan before winter hits than it is to find bin Laden. Our resolve to nail him will outlast the winter – the Afghan people may not.” – Molly Ivins, November 12, 2001.

“Joseph Nye argues in his new book, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, that anti-Americanism thrives on the perception that we don’t give a rat’s behind how the rest of the world feels about anything. That’s the famous “arrogance” for which we get criticized.
On that count, a war with Iraq could play right into terrorist hands. It’s apparent that our ally Saudi Arabia has a far stronger connection to Sept. 11 than our enemy Saddam Hussein, so attacking Saddam makes us look like hypocrites willing to sell out our foreign policy for oil. That we’d also have to kill a whole of lot of innocent Iraqis (next guy who uses the words “precision bombing” has to eat them) should count for more than it probably does with all those hard-nosed Bush foreign policy advisers who have never seen war … Seems to me that the lesson of Sept. 11 is that we cannot afford to ignore what the rest of the world thinks.” – Molly Ivins, August 25, 2002.

What does it say about the anti-globalization left that it began its heckling of Colin Powell today when he criticized the insane, dictatorial, racist and famine-producing policies of Robert Mugabe? Yes, Mugabe in their eyes is morally superior to the secretary of state of the United States. And we expect them to worry about Saddam?

RICH UPDATE: A reader emails to add a detail to Frank Rich’s Scowcroft Award nomination:

Just had to add a comment on Frank Rich’s use of “Blackhawk Down” author Mark Bowden to attack the pro-Iraq invasion side. Rich left out the immediately following sentence from Bowden: “But the question of war is not just an exercise in cost-benefit analysis. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s important to go down such a road with eyes open, firm conviction and a steady hand.”
The article pointed out we killed massive amounts of attackers in Mogadishu and did it without the firepower we’d bring to Baghdad and without the numbers. He does raise the possiblity of heavy casualties in street fighting (well, yeah, no big revelation there) but does not use that as a reason to refrain from invading Iraq.

The Times keeps getting confused in its roster of anti-war voices, doesn’t it?

The Times corrects itself on Kissinger.

“The greatest risk now lies in inaction. The history of the last century showed us clearly what the price of paralysis can be. The public debate over Iraq policy must continue. But the readiness to act, once the time is ripe, should not fade away.” – Ehud Barak, in the New York Times today. Now let’s get on with it.

BLAIR’S THATCHER MOMENT: I’m awe-struck by Tony Blair’s impassioned defense of president Bush and the need to tackle Iraq yesterday. When his own party is gripped by anti-American bigotry and the tabloid media have fueled irresponsible hatred of president Bush, Blair showed real guts by coming out swinging in defense of American action. He described some of the criticism of America as “wrong, misguided and dangerous. I also think that some of the criticism of George Bush is just a parody. The person that I know and work with operates on these security issues in a calm and sensible and measured way.” He went on: “Some of the talk about this in the past few weeks I have to say has astonished me. You would think that we’re dealing with some benign little democracy out in Iraq.” Exactly. “Was Sept. 11 a threat to British national security or not?” he said. “My answer to that is yes. It wasn’t just a threat to America – they can perfectly easily have done it in London or Berlin or Paris or anywhere. And therefore it’s right that we respond to it together. If Britain and if Europe want to be taken seriously as people facing up to these issues do, then our place is facing them with America – in partnership, but with America.” With this speech, Blair ranks for the first time with Margaret Thatcher, a leader who, on the most important issue of the day, manages to take a moral, clear and brave stand. I repeat: Now let’s get on with it.

SCOWCROFT AWARD NOMINEE: Readers may remember how last October and November, large numbers of pundits, analysts and experts both opposed the war in Afghanistan and confidently predicted its failure. Undeterred by their failures last time around, some of the same people are now opposing a war against Iraq. It seems to me a public service to remind readers of some of these people’s records. Brent Scowcroft, one recalls, opposed the war in Afghanistan and was a loyal fan of murderous tyrants in Moscow and Bosnia and Beijing throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Yet few major media outlets cited these failures of judgment in anointing Scowcroft as a serious commentator on our current predicament. Readers are therefore invited to send in examples of some commentators’ opposition to the war last year juxtaposed with their current deliberations. Our first nominee is a mild, but telling, one. It’s from New York Times columnist, Frank Rich. Last November 10, he saw the declining popularity of the war in Afghanistan as a sign it might fail:

“Like politicians’ assertions that terrorism at home can be deflected by cheap fixes and oratorical optimism, disingenuous official claims of our allies’ strengths and our enemies’ weaknesses will come back to haunt the administration if all does not go smoothly. Already a Newsweek poll shows that only 56 percent of the country believes ‘the war in Afghanistan is going as well as American officials say.'”

Here’s a passage from his most recent column accusing the president of cynically inventing a new war against Iraq to shore up his domestic political standing:

“‘An all-out attack on Iraq will entail a level of risk and sacrifice that the U.S. has not assumed since Vietnam,’ wrote the author of “Black Hawk Down,” the combat journalist Mark Bowden, this week. As this reality sinks in, support for war with Iraq is falling – from 70 percent last fall to 51 percent now, according to the new Time/CNN poll. A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that only 40 percent would approve if there are ground troops and significant American casualties.”

If you find any other strange parallels between pundits against the war in Afghanistan and those against the war against Iraq today, please send them in under the “Scowcroft Award” heading. (Special mention will go to Vietnam analogies. And don’t pick on Colin Powell. It’s too easy.)

THE CONTINUING RISK: Don’t miss Mike Crowley’s typically superb overview of our remaining vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction from routes other than Iraq. It’s a damning piece about the Bush administration’s lack of real progress in tracking down porous nuclear plants around the world, plants that are tempting targets for al Qaeda and others. Be afraid.

SOUTHERN HYPER-LIBS: Thanks for the input. How could we have forgotten Bill Moyers? Then there’s Bill Kovach, Tom Wicker, and, of course, Dan Rather and James Carville. To be fair to them, they may be reacting in part to Northern prejudice. As one reader opined,

In any lefty circle, being a white Southerner is perceived as a huge character fault, regardless of that Southerner’s ideologies. Lefties hear a Southern accent and cringe. So to earn points with colleagues in notoriously left-leaning newsrooms, Southerners overcompensate for the flaw of being Southern by abandoning all sense of reason and out-lefting anyone in sight. It’s a phenomenon something along the lines of the fight for gender equality in the workplace – the old saying about women having to do twice the work of men for the same pay.

That captures part of the dynamic, don’t you think?

WHY NOT IRAN? You may have noticed from Maureen Dowd’s recent column that one of the latest flimsy excuses for doing nothing about Iraq is that we should expedite regime change in Saudi Arabia as well. After all, they’re a terrorist-sponsoring, Islamist-funding, barbaric autocracy as well. Amen, MoDo. But first things first. Let’s get Iraq’s and Russia’s oil supplies up and running first, can we? But the really interesting thing about the belated liberal fixation on the evil of Saudi Arabia (with which I concur) is the strange absence in their argument of any mention of Iran. Why isn’t the New York Times on the warpath there? Well, the obvious reason is that it might mean some support for president Bush, which is unthinkable. But the second reason is that it might reveal that the assertion that Iran is already some kind of democracy would collapse. Michael Ledeen has another astute piece on National Review, showing the Times’ blind eye to the evil regime in Tehran. Don’t miss it. (And if you want a real guide to the context of our war on terror, don’t miss his book, “The War Against the Terror-Masters,” which is our book club selection this month. You won’t find a more concise and informative primer on why we are at war, and how we can win.)

IS BUSH READING SUN TZU? Okay, it’s a long shot. But Bush’s long silence, the contradictory messages from his administration, and mysterious arms buildups around the world leads one reader to wonder whether the president has been boning up on the art of war. Two maxims stand out: “When near, make it appear that you are far away, when far away that you are near.” And: “O
ffer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him.” Wishful thinking no doubt. But then this president is often under-estimated.

THE WORLD IS ENDING: Krugman blames someone other than Bush for the post-bubble economy. He even suggests that the root of the problem lies in the 1990s … Who knows where that line of inquiry could lead?