The Dish

Well, I’m not the only one to notice the gloom and doom at NPR.

That’s my basic response to the scenes from Kabul. And it’s the subject of a great editorial today in London’s Daily Telegraph. But the most astonishing news is that late last night, according to the New York Times, “United States intelligence agencies reported … that members of southern tribes opposed to the Taliban were massing near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. In the strategic eastern city of Jalalabad, residents reported that the Taliban had announced they were pulling out and turning the city over to its previous civilian administration.” Could the Afghanistan war be over this quickly?

THE PRESS AND THE WAR II: An addendum. It’s also true, as a correspondent suggests, that the reporters and pundits and editors simply cannot bring themselves to admit they’ve been almost completely wrong about the war so far. First, Bush is an idiot who cannot run anything. (89 percent ratings and a secure grasp on scripted oratory, diplomacy and military strategy). Then, airpower wouldn’t work. (Tell that to the people of Kabul). Then Afghanistan would be a quagmire. (Tell that to the Special Forces). Then winter would destroy us (in fact, it will help us). Then the Northern Alliance is useless. (Until it won.) Wolfowitz is a madman. (He’s the guy behind a strategy that’s actually working). Hard to feel great after all that, so we should perhaps forgive them a little glumness.

TAKE AN ORWELL AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING: During this ordeal, I’ve been bucked up no end by reading Orwell’s only recently published war diaries. (They’re in the massive twenty-volume complete works set published in 1998 by Secker and Warburg.) I was up the other night till 3 am and couldn’t put them down. A few things: it’s clear that in Britain in 1939 and 1940, large swathes of the left-wing intelligentsia were deeply defeatist, just as they are now. Equally, large numbers of far-right upper-class types were willing to cave to Hitler, just as a few crackpot rightists are as well today. The disconnect between ordinary Brits and their elites was just as pronounced. I can just see Orwell being accused of being a fascist by David Talbot – Orwell was throwing around accusations of treachery left, right and center. Here’s one sentence: “The unconscious treacherousness of the British ruling class in what is in effect a class war is too obvious to be worth mentioning. The difficult question is how much deliberate treacherousness exists.” (That’s from his diary on June 27 1940.) Then there’s this wonderful passage in an April 1940 review of Malcolm Muggeridge: “It is all very well to be “advanced” and “enlightened,” to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognize it under strange disguises, and also sympathize with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Agnes Ortiz said her son is not a terrorist. ‘No way, he’s Navajo — Native American — from this country. We were here before all you people,’ she said.” – Washington Post. This is the funniest part of a pretty funny story about some poor schmuck who got arrested by air marshalls when he tried to go to the bathroom 15 minutes before landing. The unfunny part is that the guy, first released, has subsequently been charged with alleged weed possession. I think that’s called insult to injury.

BETTER NEWS FROM FRANCE: Baudrillard, mercifully, is not the only member of the French intelligentsia. In fact, in many ways, intellectuals in France have long abandoned the tortured nihilism that now infects many American campuses. An inspiring essay in today’s “Le Monde” is as clear a defense of this war as one can imagine. The authors compare civilian casualties in Afghanistan with those during the Anglo-American liberation of France in 1944 and 1945. They decry the extreme left position of moral equivalence between the Taliban and the West: “In fact, Bush and Blair are the elected leaders of the two oldest democracies. Their two countries share an unimpeachable commitment to liberty. Neither country was infected with the totalitarian virus, red or brown, which accelerated the decline of the European continent in the twentieth century.” Yes, the world turns.

Reading through the New York Times today over lunch was a truly weird experience. The paper is full of details about the stunning success of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance but the tone is of unremitting gloom. There is a grim photo-spread of a revenge killing by the NA troops against a Taliban soldier. There is much hand-wringing over the difficulties of winning over the Pashtun. There is worry over Pakistan. As I noticed last night, there isn’t a sentence of celebration in the editorial. The same mood prevails at NPR and the BBC, according to several emailers to me today. The question is why? I don’t think the Times, the BBC or NPR are actually hoping that the West loses in Afghanistan. I don’t think any of the major opinion-writers or reporters actually favor the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals, the extermination of Jews, the repression of any free press, or the promotion of world-wide terrorism. So why does left-wing NYT-BBC-NPR opinion essentially lament victory? Yes, there’s good reason for the press to ask hard questions about the war – but that doesn’t fully explain the gloomy mood among many, especially on the left. One thought I’ve had is that these characters are depressed because they feel disempowered by this war. They are used to determining – or believing they determine – critical events in national and international life. Their predecessors believe – with good reason – that they were critical in ending the Vietnam War and bringing down president Nixon. They like to be the arbiters of our fate, and for the current boomer generation controlling the media, this was a critical reason for their choosing this career path. But in fact, the real arbiters of our fate at moments like these are not liberal media-types. They are warriors from barbaric places in distant continents, hard-headed generals and airforce pilots, commanders of Special Forces units, and elected officials. In this war, the pundits and editorialists and cable news executives have been knocked down a few pegs in the social hierarchy. They have much less power than they had before September 11. And so, even though their minds tell them that they are glad we are winning, their self-interest perpetuates a kind of gloom not felt by anyone else. Of course, their (our?) social and political disempowerment is a very encouraging development of this war, and may well intensify. But in response, the media gloom may also intensify. My prediction: the media elites will get even angrier about this and will soon step up initiatives to throw doubt on the war, undermine it, and generally disparage it. Ignore them.

Would anyone have guessed that the Taliban would have essentially abandoned Kabul by now? Or that Washington would be trying to rein in military success? So much for the New York Times’ prediction of “quagmire.” (I notice that the Times today cannot bring itself to celebrate this success. Why not? What’s their problem?) What we are dealing with now is the first class conundrum of sweeping success. The most pressing task, as the Washington Post argues, is the use of the opportunity to inflict real damage on the fleeing Taliban forces and to find and kill as many terrorist leaders that we can. Yes, we also need to ensure order in Kabul. And yes, very little Pashtun territory has yet to fold. But to control almost half the country within a month can hardly be deemed a failure – and by airpower and special forces alone. Moreover, the psychological and propaganda impact of taking the capital cannot be under-estimated, as Charles Krauthammer powerfully argues today. Let’s take Kabul now. Then on to Kandahar and, at some point, Baghdad. Yes, Baghdad. We have a job to finish.

LETTERS: Dismay at victory at the BBC; why I was too kind to Gore; etc.

ISLAMIC CORRECTNESS: In what seems to be an editorial gaffe, the Guardian just published a superb and – yes! – liberal article, arguing for an honest inspection of the intellectual decay of modern Islam and a brutal investigation of what now passes for Islamic thought. Among the reasons Ibn Warraq cites for the West’s squeamishness in this regard are, as he puts it, “plain physical fear; and intellectual terrorism of writers such as Edward Said. Said not only taught an entire generation of Arabs the wonderful art of self-pity (if only those wicked Zionists, imperialists and colonialists would leave us alone, we would be great, we would not have been humiliated, we would not be backward) but intimidated feeble western academics, and even weaker, invariably leftish, intellectuals into accepting that any criticism of Islam was to be dismissed as orientalism, and hence invalid. But the first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth.” Wow. Such a simple statement. And in the Guardian, of all places. Are we really seeing a shift among the intellectuals after September 11?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Some intellectuals still don’t get it. For those of you who read French, here’s Jean Baudrillard’s dollop of evil pretension about September 11 in Le Monde. It’s endless, of course. It makes no real sense, and in so far as it does is repulsive. Baudrillard’s main point is that our uni-polar technologically-adept world somehow wants to be destroyed by terrorism. Here’s a classic bit: “Because with its unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing. That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic – that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it’s a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up. To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it.” At its best, I think, this is projection – a pseudo-intellectual gloss on French schadenfreude at the attack on America. Yes, that resentment and hatred is real – and I guess we all have some small nihilist part inside us. But to say it is definitive of all of us in this matter is obscene. What we have here is a classic example of an intellectual confessing that deep inside he loves murder and chaos and destruction. But we knew that already, didn’t we? Check this sentence out: “The allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is fortunately universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center, the perfect twins, precisely embodied such a definitive order.” Notice that “fortunately.” This is a man infatuated by murderous anarchy. He describes not our moral bankruptcy but his own.

KRUGMAN: Several of you have wondered if my revulsion at Paul Krugman’s increasingly hysterical attacks on the good faith of this administration is equivalent to supporting the pork-laden, corrupt and unnecessary “stimulus” package recently passed by the House of Representatives. You can infer from that sentence that the answer is no.

We’ve added a new section to the Greatest Hits. It’s called, simply, “The War,” and contains all my finished public pieces on the war against terrorism. The Dish archive contains all the other commentary. Check it out.

“It is the duty of every Muslim to fight. Killing Jews is top priority.” – Osama bin Laden. He also echoes the view of a Kuwaiti cleric cited below (see “IS IT UN-ISLAMIC TO KILL WOMEN AND CHILDREN?”) and says quite simply: “”There are two types of terror, good and bad. What we are practising is good terror. We will not stop killing them and whoever supports them.” Another gem: “If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically.”

We can only pray it isn’t terrorism.

VINDICATION FOR BUSH II: Two addenda to my items written last night. Several readers have reminded me of the fact that the state was called for Gore before the Panhandle polls had closed. How many Bush-votes were lost? Well, even a couple hundred would have made a difference. Secondly, my friend Jim Glassman has an eye-opening piece in today’s Los Angeles Times. In a close study of the returns, he and John Lott find that “African American Republicans who voted in Florida were in excess of 50 times more likely than the average African American to have had a ballot declared invalid because it was spoiled.” The chances increased if the election supervisor was a Democrat and soared if the supervisor was a black Democrat. Hmmm. Having witnessed first-hand the intolerance of some gay leftists towards minority members who dare to leave the plantation, this doesn’t surprise me. But why hasn’t this been more widely reported? It strikes me as a bombshell.

My chat last week with Karl Rove – posted opposite.

One obvious victim of this weekend’s news: the notion that the Northern Alliance is a useless military entity. This was one of the many arguments used by those who don’t really want us to fight this war. In defense of the usual “we-can’t-win” rhetoric, allegedly hard-headed experts told us that the U.S. military strategy was way too slow and clumsy, that mere air-power wasn’t enough, that thousands of American ground-troops were necessary, and so on. As with every single recent prediction of the inadequacy of American airpower in the last few years, this nostrum is now looking a lot less cogent. Yes, the war has only just begun. Sure, the Northern Alliance doesn’t solve every problem. But by shifting the momentum of the war decisively against the Taliban, they have made victory much more reachable than a few days ago. I can see why the administration, so dependent on Pakistani intelligence, doesn’t want to alienate the Southerners in Afghanistan. But their extreme caution in assessing what is a smashing military victory disturbs me. Why not let the Northern Alliance re-take Kabul? The psychological impact on the Taliban will surely be profound. We can fix the city’s governance later. I suspect too much State Department micro-management here and not enough go-for-it military strategy. I was, as usual, dismayed by Colin Powell on Meet The Press. Why is this man declaring that we’d never contemplate using nukes against bin Laden? Why limit ourselves in any way? Why, in their public pronouncements, do the Bushies seem almost dismayed by their success rather than buoyed by it?

A VINDICATION FOR BUSH: Poring through the various media accounts of the mega-media-recount, one obvious fact remains. Here’s how the New York Times puts it: “[I]f Florida’s 67 counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida court on Dec. 8, applying the standards that county election officials said they would have used, Mr. Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.” Given what happened last November and December, this amounts to a re-re-recount of all the votes Gore and his allies wanted re-re-recounted. You could infer from this a further piece of evidence that Bush v. Gore was poorly decided, that the Supreme Court’s credibility was needlessly undermined by such a divisive and unsatisfying opinion. Or you could infer that it was entirely justified given the fact that no-one at the time could have known what the final result would be; that the methods for recounting were manifestly inconsistent with equal treatment of equal votes; and that the result was so statistically close, it was almost meaningless to give either candidate a technical victory and so the results of the first recount should stand. Either way, as the Washington Post succinctly puts it, “Gore’s election was not blocked by the high court, whatever one thinks of that intervention. Instead, Gore’s unrealized victory exists only under a controlled set of circumstances that even he was not seeking with his strategy of recounting votes in selected counties.”

A VINDICATION FOR GORE: At the same time, it’s clearer now that, by the slimmest of margins, in an ideal world in which voting intentions were immaculately reflected in actual votes, Gore would have eked out a win. Given the fact that there’s no way of knowing whether an actual state-wide recount of under-votes and over-votes in the practical circumstances of last December would have produced an identical result to the consortium’s, this is still a probability rather than a certainty. But it must comfort Gore that, in his own mind at least, he came about as close to being president as it’s possible to get without actually being president. No-one should begrudge him a small amount of satisfaction on that score. But it will come as no great comfort that his failure was ultimately of his own doing. It was his cynical and self-interested desire to count only undervotes in counties where he thought he could win that doomed him. Of all the options he could have picked after the election, he chose the sleaziest and ultimately the least effective. There’s some irony, isn’t there, in the fact that Gore was ultimately too hardball for his own good. He lost the presidency just as he lost the campaign: by an excess of guile. He was too clever by half – and lost his soul in the process.

BEAUTY AS A DRUG: Another blow for the notion that beauty and sexual attractiveness are entirely socially constructed comes in a study published in the Boston Globe. The sight of a sexy woman triggers all sorts of chemical responses in a heterosexual male brain, responses that are hard-wired and similar to those prompted by various drugs. ”This is hard-core circuitry,” [study author Hans] Breiter said, comparing its basic job to the same function found in lizards. ”This is not a conditioned response.” He went on: “‘These guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.” And this is a surprise? Has he been to a strip-bar in his life, I wonder? Now, the study I really want to read is whether similar responses in female brains can be found for male beauty. I bet it’s a much weaker response.

IS IT UN-ISLAMIC TO KILL WOMEN AND CHILDREN?: We’ve been told many times that it is. We’ve also been told that only nutcases like OBL believe such random murder is permissible under Islam. So it’s worth looking at a pre-9/11 piece from the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Watan, which discusses the issue. The conclusion? It’s OK to kill such civilians if they are implicated in any war effort, especially if they’re Jews. Such implication extends to voting for a government. Another case “when the killing of civilians and women is permitted is when Muslims must launch a comprehensive attack against their enemies or shoot them from afar. If civilians, women or children are to be killed in such attacks – although they must not be deliberately targeted – there is no blame on those who kill them, as these things happen in wars when bombs are fired at military posts situated between residential buildings, especially when these are the posts of the occupying army situated on Muslim lands. In such incidents civilians, women, and children are unintentionally killed, but Muslims get killed as well.” So because civilian workers in the WTC were involved in financial or economic affairs that support the American military through taxes, they are fair game. The only exception is a child-care center, if adults are reliably absent. All in all, according to this writer, Islam permits the murder of almost anyone and anything. I’m not sure whether it’s encouraging or dismaying that this piece was written before September 11. But it’s disturbing nonetheless.

YES, THERE IS ISLAMIC HUMOR: A heart-warming little piece in the London-based Al Hayat newspaper, where the Egyptian satirist Ali Salem muses about setting up a terrorist-training kindergarten. The message to send to the little ones? “”Dear children: ‘Hate the beaches. Hate the flowers and the roses. Hate the wheat fields. Hate the trees. Hate music. Hate all manner of artistic, literary, or scientific endeavor. Hate tenderness. Hate reason and intellect. Hate your families and your countrymen. Hate others – all others.
Hate yourselves. Hate your teachers. Hate me. Hate this school. Hate life and everything in it.'” Slowly, the cracks in the extremist Islamist façade are showing. Let’s do all we can to widen them.

TALIBAN PROPAGANDA IN THE OBSERVER: Take a look at this piece in Sunday’s Observer in London. It’s an interview with a Taliban-supporting suicide killer. To interview him, without alerting the authorities, the Observer clearly acquiesced in the possible murder of British and American soldiers. There is barely a word of context or criticism in the article. Every conceivable piece of pro-Taliban propaganda is relayed. Notice how the Observer quotes this man’s rabid anti-Semitism – “‘The American leadership has put too much attention to the short-term interest of the Zionist financiers, rather than the safety of the American people” – without comment, and even some praise. The would-be murderer’s rant is a “thoughtful conversation.” Can you imagine a newspaper interviewing, say, a member of the Waffen SS in the early days of the Second World War in order to encourage Brits that their struggle was hopeless, that “Zionist financiers” were behind the Allied effort, and that their enemy could not be stopped. Meanwhile, on the same day, the Taliban forces essentially collapsed across whole swathes of Afghanistan. No doubt a gloomy day in the Observer’s editorial offices.

INTELLECTUALS AND TYRANNY: Ever wondered why so many intellectuals – Heidegger, Sartre, Said, Chomsky – are somehow drawn to violent tyrannies, and in some ways romanticize and long for them? Here’s a useful little dialogue in the New York Times with my old friend Mark Lilla, now at the University of Chicago. I’m a third of the way through his book, “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals In Politics,” and highly recommend it for those of you with time and patience for philosophy. Mark’s dissection of Heidegger, for a brief survey, is close to being definitive.

“It is now clear that, at least as far as domestic policy is concerned, the administration views terrorism as another useful crisis… [T]he administration favors “stimulus” proposals that have nothing to do with helping the economy, but everything to do with its usual tax-cutting agenda.” – Paul Krugman, New York Times. Would it be possible for Krugman to concede that some of us sincerely believe that lowering people’s taxes actually stimulates productivity, growth and creativity? Or would that mean he’d have to argue with his opponents rather than demonizing them?