The Dish

Who wrote this headline in today’s New York Times: “Direction of Global War on Terror Raises Unsettling Questions”? Why is it “unsettling” for the United States to have achieved at least some success in its campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan? Why is it “unsettling,” as the article suggests, that the U.S. might take heart from this initial success and extend its campaign elsewhere? Wouldn’t it, in fact, be far more unsettling if the reverse had occurred and the U.S. was now retreating wounded from battle? The article adds nothing new to what we already know and doesn’t suggest any obvious reasons why we should now be worrying. In fact, it’s clear that the only people who’d find the direction of America’s war ‘unsettling’ at this point are the terrorists and leaders of rogue states who wish the West ill. So why on earth should the Times be looking at the world from their point of view?

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR DEPT.: “The phallic artwork has since been stolen, then recovered by police and will not be re-hung in the library.” – Scripps Howard News Service, November 19.

Two newly posted pieces opposite mark the occasion. I wrote the first five years ago, but its sentiments remain salient, I hope. The second can also be found at Forbes.com.

Another useful column by Jim Hoagland in today’s Washington Post comparing the Clinton and Bush approaches to multilateralism. The former asked the allies first, delayed committing ground troops, preferred limited and ultimately counter-productive strikes, and talked endlessly. The latter commits the U.S. immediately, consults with his close allies (Britain and Russia), always pledges ground troops if necessary, and then watches as other allies – Germany, Italy, France – race to join in. The other difference, of course, is that Bush has wisely never promised an easy ride – or consulted the polls to find one. It seems clear enough to me that this war is only just beginning. It will soon encompass Iraq, and may well include targets in Africa. Because Bush commits the U.S. first and then asks the allies if they wish to follow, he doesn’t need to engage the tortured and usually fruitless efforts to bring every ally aboard before doing anything. If he stays the course, the contrast between his successes and the failures of the past will only deepen with time.

STRATEGERY: Check out my latest column on Bush’s war management opposite. My apologies for not updating the letters page for a few days. I’ve been swamped with work.

HARVARD SIGNS UP: In a fascinating sign of the times, Harvard’s new president, Lawrence Summers gave a speech last week – barely covered in the national media – that seems to me a cultural milestone. “The post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream values is a matter of great concern and has some real costs,” Summers said in an interview with the Crimson. “The United States is engaged in a conflict that is very widely seen as between wrong and right, fear and hope, and is without the moral ambiguity of Vietnam,” he went on. Hard to see his predecessor saying something that bold. Summers even brought up the thorny issue of allowing ROTC back on campus since it was banished in the 1970s. The military’s policy of persecuting gay servicemembers is one reason a reconciliation hasn’t yet taken place. But Summers clearly wants a rapprochement. “[This crisis] provides an opportunity for some reconciliation of values,” he added. With any luck, the military will at some point return the favor. We need our elite universities providing the military and intelligence services with the best the country can offer. And we need a military that will not destroy talent for an anachronistic relic of discrimination.

AS IF I HAD NEVER READ A BOOK: The full text of Leon Wieseltier’s account of visiting Ground Zero, which I quoted from last Saturday, is now up on TNR’s website.

MORE ORWELL FOR TODAY: “The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.” – England Your England, 1940.

A HAMAS ODE TO ANTHRAX: Here’s a charming “open letter” from a regular columnist for the Hamas Weekly. Usually the columnist writes open letters to various prominent politicians or terrorists. For his latest screed, according to MEMRI (scroll down to item 297), he addressed his thoughts to anthrax: “Oh Anthrax, despite your wretchedness, you have sown horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness! Your gentle touch has made the U.S.’s life rough and pointless. You have filled the lady who horrifies and terrorizes the world with fear, and her feet almost fail to bear [her weight] in horror and fear of you. Because of you, she has lost confidence in the moment in which she lives, or in which she will live. You have entered the most fortified of places; [you have entered] the White House and they left it like horrified mice … In sound mind, I thank you and confess that I like you, I like you very much. May you continue to advance, to permeate, and to spread. If I may give you a word of advice, enter the air of those ‘symbols,’ the water faucets from which they drink, and the pens with which they draft their traps and conspiracies against the wretched peoples … Turn the bodies of the tyrants into matches burning slowly and gradually, so that they understand that the truth belongs to Allah and that they should give those entitled to rights their rights.” This is one of the most convincing arguments for extending this war to all such Islamo-fascist terrorist entities that threaten the West.

Forget the broad coalition for action against al Qaeda. Forget the U.N., which has once again been shown to be essentially useless in a real crisis. Forget the E.U., which also dissolves into constituent parts at the first sign of gunfire. The only real alliance worth anything right now is a tripartite arc from Washington through London to Moscow. In Afghanistan, British and American troops are jointly fighting the war. The Brits have also been a handy bridge for Washington with the other European powers, as well as an indispensable diplomatic tool. The Russians for their part have provided hard intelligence, accommodation on missile defense, and lower oil prices. In the coming decade, I predict a massive Western investment in oil exploration in Russia – a giant quid pro quo after September 11. And last Friday, Tony Blair joined two remaining dots by offering a new role for Russia within NATO. On Saturday, straight from Crawford, Putin called Blair to thank him. Putin’s statement read: “Moscow highly esteems the practical reaction of the British leadership to the Russian president’s repeated suggestions on the need to alter the mutual relations between Russia and the Western alliance in response to new challenges.” So we have a new entente cordiale between two old imperial powers and the current hegemon. This arc might come under strain if Washington aims next for Iraq – and, so far, the Brits have expressed panic at the very idea. But I deeply doubt that, when the crunch comes, the Brits will fiercely protest an Iraqi extension of the war. Blair has too much invested in this new alliance to watch it unravel now. Same with Putin. He sees the new alliance as a way for Russia to leap forward in international relations. And Bush finally has two foreign leaders he can trust. Neither unilateralism nor multilateralism: this trilateralism could actually work, i.e. do more useful things than employ professional diplomats.

HUMAN NATURE: I had dinner last week with William Hague, the former Tory leader, in Washington. He said one thing that stuck in my mind. We were discussing the images from liberated Afghanistan of women throwing off their veils and feeling the sun on their faces for the first time in years. How could anyone have believed that these women actually wanted to live like that? We have become so saturated with the nostrum that culture is everything, that we cannot judge or understand others brought up with different faiths or histories or legends that we have forgotten a simple thing. Some things are simply against human nature. There is barely a child anywhere in the world who wouldn’t take some pleasure in flying a kite. There is no human who has ever lived whose life wasn’t improved or enlightened by some kind of music. A religion that attempts not to channel human nature for good, but to suppress human nature altogether is doomed to failure. What we saw in Afghanistan is not some shift to a different political order. What we saw in Afghanistan was human nature rebelling against a cruel and evil abstraction. We are seeing human light in a theocratic darkness.

IT’S OFFICIAL: “Mr. Clinton now has to defend himself from the charge that he did not do enough to capture Osama bin Laden.” – Rick Berke, New York Times today. And when I dared to say this weeks ago, the Clintonites went berserk. Always trust content from andrewsullivan.com! In a few weeks, even the Times will concur.

THE PHARMACEUTICAL DEBATE: Yes, other issues haven’t gone away. Here’s a webcast of a panel I was on last week on the subject of the allegedly evil drug companies. I know it sounds dreary, but it was actually very lively and sparked some interesting exchanges. I was up against Merrill Goozner of the American Prospect and Ron Pollack of Families USA.

YES TO MILITARY TRIBUNALS: Look, I’m a pretty solid civil liberties guy. But this has nothing to do with civil liberties. The murderers of September 11 are not criminals. They are soldiers in an army protected by a foreign power which attacked American soil. They should be fought and captured or killed abroad. If they are in this country, they should be hunted down in exactly the same way as soldiers. I agree with William Barr and Andrew McBride in the Washington Post that this is not a radical move. It would be a radical move to treat these people as civilians subject to the usual protections. Our tortured attempt to do exactly that in the past – remember the Lockerbie fiasco? – is one reason why al Qaeda thought they could get away with mass murder this time. It’s time once and for all to state as clearly as possible that terrorism is not crime. It’s war. The fact that President Bush grasped this critical point early on is extremely good news. It means he knows what we’re up against. And his own personal involvement in such matters implies that this provision will be used carefully and sparingly and with full political accountability. As for the death penalty, this is one exception that, to my mind, makes sense. In a just war, when society itself is threatened by the lives of fascist mass-murderers, there is every justification for executing convicted prisoners of war. Of course, there is one way to avoid this altogether and that is to kill as many of these thugs as possible in the theater of war. We should show them the same mercy they showed to the men and women who showed up for work on September 11.

NOW, IRAQ: A very useful piece by Dean Godson in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph makes a simple point. What we’ve learned in Afghanistan is that airpower works, that regimes we believed had support are actually quite weak, and that regime stability, so beloved of the first Bush administration, is not always the most important goal. With that in mind, why shouldn’t Saddam Hussein be vulnerable? As Condi Rice said this weekend, it matters not whether we can prove that Saddam was involved in September 11 or the subsequent anthrax attacks. What matters is that he is trying to get chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in contravention of U.N. resolutions. He is acquiring those weapons as a means to control his own people and to attack the West. We already have a casus belli. In some ways, Iraq would be easier than Afghanistan. Iraq has no major supporting neighbor, like Pakistan for the Taliban. Airpower could be much more effective, because there are more targets. Saddam is already pinned down in only a third of his own country, and is unpopular even among his own Sunni minority. The usual suspects claim that the main opposition to Saddam, the Iraqi National Congress, is divided, incompetent and unscrupulous. Sounds exactly like what they said about the Northern Alliance. As for regional conflagration, the State Department has it backwards, as usual. The main impact of our firmness with al Qaeda will not be greater Muslim revolt; it will be a broader awareness within the Muslim world that we should not be messed with. There will be fear. And there will also be greater hope among those people now trampled by the Baathists in Baghdad. We let those people down once before. Let’s not do it again.

Here’s a piece of brave and eloquent introspection from M.A. Muqtedar Khan in tomorrow’s Orlando Sentinel. Yet another indicator that these awful events might lead to a brighter future – not least for America’s many Muslim citizens, and their fellow-believers around the world.

“AS IF I HAD NEVER READ A BOOK”: Leon Wieseltier and I have had our deep differences, but his diarist in this week’s New Republic (it is not, alas, online) is the finest response I have yet read to the physical remains of the crime of September 11. He manages to be both surpassingly eloquent and yet also deeply right. Here’s the final paragraph: “I cannot locate the balm in culture. It is just not my piety. I discovered this when I wasnt into ground zero, in a red hard hat. I was not prepared for what I saw. I do not know how to express the quality of my shock, except to say that it banished culture completely from my mind. I fell dumb and stood there as if I had never read a book. My observations erased my memories. I was without allusion and without metaphors. Can a mind be naked? Then I was naked, without coverings. All I could do was look and pray to see. The metal was the color of an infernal tarnish. I learned that yellow smoke is released when iron is cut. The hole in the sky was more striking than the hole in the ground. I watched the cranes scoop up soil from the pit, and then I grasped that it was not soil. There was no soil in this place. What they were moving was the substance that was formed out of the dissolution of everything and everybody that had been crushed and incinerated: a deathloam. There were spots of it on my boots. I shivered and moved away. And when I left it was not culture that was restored immediately to my consciousness. It was politics; policy; American action.”

“Like fundamentalist terror, totalitarian terror leaves no
aspect of life exempt from the battle being waged. The
state is felt to be the apotheosis of political and natural
law, and it strives to extend that law over all of
humanity. Reality, Arendt suggested, never modifies
totalitarian ideas; events do not prove those ideas wrong
or diminish belief. Instead, totalitarianism modifies
perceptions of reality to suit the ideas; the world is
changed to fit with the vision of totalitarianism. Nothing
is allowed to stand in the way of totalitarian ideas.
Opposition is guilt, punishment is death.

“If contemporary Islamic terror can be considered a variety
of totalitarian terror, it becomes clearer just how limited
the injustice theory and the question of “root causes” are.
No doubt, injustices and policies can be argued over, but
not as root causes of terror. Totalitarianism stands above
such niceties. No injustices, separately or together,
necessarily lead to totalitarianism and no mitigation of
injustice, however defined, will eliminate its unwavering
beliefs, absolutist control and unbounded ambitions. Claims
of “root causes” are distractions from the real work at
hand.”

– <a href = http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/17/arts/17CONN.html?ex=1007003570&ei=1&en=7114992e4320f6b3 target = new>Edward Rothstein, New York Times today.

According to Gallup, almost every single public institution has grown in popularity since the war began. Except, boo hoo, the media. We now have a negative rating of 54 percent. Do you think any of those titans of the press will figure out why?

“I was on Air Force One the day of the attack, working my way back to Washington via Louisiana and Nebraska… (LAUGHTER) … making sure that the president was safe and secure.” – George W. Bush, yesterday. Take a look at this transcript. I found it illuminating about the president. At home, in Texas, he seems more relaxed and the divide between public and private selves less acute. The self-deprecating humor is a part of that. Take this exchange from the Crawford high school:

“BUSH: The president and I have agreed to take a few questions from the students. I figure this would be a pretty good opportunity for you all to ask…
PUTIN (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Only questions. No math questions, please.
(LAUGHTER)
BUSH: Good idea. Particularly, no fuzzy math questions.”

The alternation of quick humor and sudden sincerity reminds me of JFK.

READING PUTIN: You can see why Bush and Putin get along. Here’s a Putin quote from yesterday: “Of course, it is very important to be born under a happy star and to have destiny facing your way. And indeed, I’m in agreement with the president, perhaps, God was looking quite positively on this. But there are different approaches to addressing such kind of problem. There are people deeply religious who usually say that God knows what is to befall a nation of people or a person. But there are people, no less devoted to God, but who still believe that the people, a person, should also take care of their own destiny and lives. And it gives me great pleasure to deal and to work with President Bush, who is a person, a man who does what he says.” That’s one hell of a quote. It raises the religious question explicitly, respects those who don’t share it, and then provides the clincher of the relationship: Bush is “a man who does what he says.” The media will focus on the lack of agreement between the two countries over the ABM issue. As usual, they’re wrong. The only fundamental issue at Crawford is al Qaeda. Bush artfully and constantly invoked the “evil ones” as an equal threat to the U.S. and Russia. Discussing humanitarian relief in Afghanistan, Bush said, “Part of the problem has been the Taliban. They’ve been stopping the shipments of food, believe it or not. It won’t surprise the president because he understands how evil they are. We’re just learning how evil they are in America.” In this statement, he almost seems to say that Russia is more aware of the problem than the U.S. One other small aside: yesterday a Russian president used the word “liberated” to describe the rescue of American aid workers from the Taliban. “Liberated.” It is a new and hopeful world.

THE OIL ALLIANCE: My bet is that one of the central subjects for discussion at Crawford was not only the post-Taliban government, but Iraq. But the biggest gift that Putin can give, he has already delivered. Which country is mainly responsible for a recent fight with OPEC? A fight that has led to complete disarray in the oil cartel? Yep, thanks to Russia, the price of oil may soon decline to $10 a barrel. That’s a huge boost to the American economy (way more important than an unnecessary “stimulus package”). And Putin did it. Oil is, in fact, a critical part of the new U.S.-Russian relationship. “We in Russia somehow tend to know about Texas rather better than about the rest of the United States somehow,” Putin said yesterday. “Except maybe for Alaska, which we sold to you. In my view, first of all, because, like in Russia, here in Texas the oil business is quite well developed, and we have numerous contacts in this area.” Numerous contacts? Well, at least one extremely high-level one. Part of the fun of watching this president is his own delight in saying little about what he’s really up to. You have to read the tea-leaves. And the oil stains.

THE UNABOMBER ON THE LEFT AND THE WAR: “15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.” I hate to say it, but that murderous nutcase was onto something, wasn’t he?

The BBC World Service, once a bastion of freedom and objectivity, continues its slide into moral relativism. According to today’s Guardian, the BBC will not describe the attack on the WTC towers as “terrorism.” It might alienate some listeners, presumably from the Islamic world. Perhaps they will soon begin expressing neutrality over whether the Jews were behind the attacks as well. Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.