The Dish

Check out the new pieces opposite, on progress against terrorism and the extra-special relationship.

For some reason, my mood lifted this weekend. After the horror of September 11, the emotional exhaustion that followed, the anthrax anxiety, the war jitters, it felt as if some kind of rhythm was coming back to the country. There is still weirdness in the air – so many helicopters always above here in D.C., the delayed mail, and so on. But I also feel secure that most Americans now know we’re in this for a while, and are prepared to put up with more terror and a long and unpredictable war. I’ve begun to block out the defeatism of some of the elite. But I also realize – and this may sound odd coming from a journalist whose job it is to be skeptical – that I deeply believe that this president can see this through. I don’t think he’s going to let us down. This may sound even odder, but I honestly feel, in an odd way, that he was meant for this. At mass today, the Gospel was about Zacchaeus, the tax collector, climbing into a sycamore tree to catch a look at Jesus. This unpopular and unlikely figure was the man Jesus chose to stay with that night in Jericho. The priest said the lesson was that anyone can be called – anyone. I’m a religious person, so forgive me for saying I find something strangely comforting in the oddity of Bush, such an unprepossessing figure, being the man for this hour. I really do believe that this is an epic battle between good and evil, and that in such battles, the least predictable people are often called to serve. In Blair, Bush and Putin – the key leaders of the three key powers in this conflict – we have three religious and highly unusual allies. The revelation of the religious bonding between Bush and Putin by Peggy Noonan doesn’t surprise me in this respect. No, this is not a holy war, or a battle between Christianity and Islam. But it is a profound moral battle, and we are lucky or blessed to have men of faith conducting it. That’s what has lifted my spirits, I guess. Call it something I haven’t felt in politics for a very long time: trust.

MORE WORRYING NEWS FROM BRITAIN: My own newspaper in Britain, the Sunday Times, just commissioned a big poll of British Muslims that is more reliable than the radio poll I mentioned last week. A stunning 96 percent want an end to the campaign in Afghanistan; and a full 68 percent said it was more important to them that they were Muslim rather than British. It seems to me that what my other boss Marty Peretz has been saying for years – that many Muslim immigrants in recent years simply do not have allegiance to their new country – is palpably true. This isn’t true of all of them – some 14 percent in the Sunday Times poll said they were British before they were Muslims. And it shouldn’t justify any intolerance or discrimination toward Muslim Americans. But it’s disturbing nonetheless. Taken together with Daniel Pipes’ latest, excellent contribution to this debate, we have a real problem on our hands. One recalls that the exception to religious toleration in John Locke’s famous letter was with regard to Catholics. He believed that at that time in England’s fraught history, some Catholics owed political allegiance to a foreign power, and therefore didn’t merit religious toleration. As an English Catholic of the twentieth century, I found such views abhorrent. In a country where terrorism had recently been associated with Catholicism (the November 5 Gunpowder plot), it wasn’t quite so outlandish. Locke’s basic point was that religious toleration doesn’t mean toleration of groups whose political loyalty is questionable or outright treacherous. I think his point still stands. And it will soon raise dark and difficult questions that Islamism as a political entity will have to answer.

LETTERS: My clothes; NPR’s politics; Islam’s texts; and Rorty’s evasions.

ARAFAT ADOPTS JIHAD: Here’s a revealing passage from a recent speech by Yassir Arafat, good friend of Tony Blair’s, invoking Jihad, quoting the Koran, and deploying Islamic rhetoric to rally Palestinians: “My brothers, you represent this principle, and the strong foundations of this people, who struggled and waged Jihad; I have great hope in you and in your heroes, because we believe that we have in us the firm, solid, reliable, and sound principle [Qaida]… I say these words so all will hear them, from Sharon to Netanyahu, to the last of the [listeners] in America, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Russia, in the North and in the South: ‘The Palestinian people will determine its victory whether anyone agrees or not’; ‘they see this as far [from coming about], while we see it as soon to come, and we have patience’ [Koran], ‘and they shall enter the mosque, as they entered it the first time’ [Koran]. Allah will not break his promise, Allah will not break his promise … Out of our commitment to Allah, to the homeland, and to the Christian and Muslim holy places over which we are custodians, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey…”

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back — his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which has allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it… The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises — he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.” – G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.”

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “9/11 and its sequelae [sic] have definitely rehabilitated such traditional masculine values as physical courage, upper-body strength, toughness, resolve. The WTC attack is men vs. men–firefighters v. fanatics. (It would seem positively ungrateful to ask why, in a city half black and brown, the “heroes” were still mostly white, and, for that matter, still mostly male.)” – Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Note that she cannot use the word heroes without placing it in quotation marks.

MATH AND ME: As regular readers know, I can’t do math. The numbers in the item below are a function of a) my stupidity and b) the weird arrangement of data on our new server, which I misread. Anyway, the site is now attracting traffic at a rate of 360,000 unique visitors and 640,000 visits a month. Amazing, but not quite as amazing
as I first calculated. I’m sorry I screwed up.

Our traffic is rising so fast the last week in October seemed almost a different universe from the first week in October. Thanks for all your help in spreading the word. If you extrapolate from the last seven days (which weren’t affected by some weird, unique event), we are now averaging well over 1 million monthly visits from around 650,000 unique visitors. That’s more than triple our traffic in August, which was still our biggest month since we started. We still haven’t figured out a good way to convert this into a viable economic model – although your donation dollars have let us get a new server (just in time!) and a new design with features you’ve been clamoring for for a while (I know, I know, but it’s coming). But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a labor of love and if I have to do it for free for ever, I’ll keep at it. (By “we,” I’m not referring to some long lost royal ancestry, but me and my best buddy Robert Cameron at Fantascope who is largely responsible for everything but the writing.) But something tells me we’ll find a kind patron or mega-sponsor soon and we’re talking to lots of people all the time. Anyway, thanks for your dedication and querulous, constant feedback.

Now a major newspaper in Pakistan has received an anthrax package. No doubt it’s from some pro-life extremists in Utah. It will be very interesting to see what examination of the package reveals about its origin and whether it is connected to the American attacks. But guess what? Karachi is playing down the anthrax threat! According to a report last week in Pakistan’s News International, “Requesting anonymity a senior ministry of health official in Karachi confirmed that Aga Khan hospital has reported the first case of anthrax in Pakistan and the matter has been referred to top federal authorities in Islamabad who were considering the pros and cons of making a public disclosure about the advent of anthrax in the country.” Hmmm. More evidence that Karachi and Washington may well have serious information about the anthrax that they are keeping to themselves until the appropriate moment. I have no proof of this, and I could be wrong, but there’s an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.

WHAT COURAGE REALLY MEANS: “However, if the loftiness of spirit that reveals itself amid danger and toil [i.e. courage] is empty of justice, if it fights not for the common safety but for its own advantages, it is a vice. It is not merely unvirtuous; it is rather a savagery which repels all civilized feeling. Therefore the Stoics define courage well when they call it the virtue which fights on behalf of fairness. For that reason no one has won praise who has pursued the glory of courage by treachery and cunning; for nothing can be honorable from which justice is absent.” — Cicero, “On Duties” Bk. I, 62. I guess Susan “morally neutral” Sontag hasn’t brushed up on her classics for a while.

WAGING WAR AND PEACE: Here’s an editorial from the Boston Globe which beautifully captures the complete incoherence of what one might call the Talbot position, which is that we should wage war and peace at the same time. The Globe seems to believe that there is no moral difference between the collateral, unintended killing of civilians by forces acting in self-defense and the deliberate, intended massacre of civilians as an act of terrorist warfare. The inference is that unless America can fight a war with no civilian casualties on the other side, then the war is unjust or “unacceptable.” Taken to its conclusion, this is completely equivalent to saying that only a perfect war can ever be waged, which is to say that no war can be waged. It’s defeatism under the guise of moralism. And it is as immoral as it is incoherent.

One of the most interesting stories of the last few days was one by Elaine Sciolino for the New York Times. It recounts how the United States is actually scuppering a French effort to win Security Council condemnation of the anthrax attacks in New York and Washington. The Bush administration allegedly wants no such condemnation, since they apparently do not believe that a foreign source was behind the biological warfare launched on the U.S. “Let’s assume this was the work of a bunch of right-wing nuts or a Unabomber kind of thing,” one “senior administration official” told the Times. “That would make it a domestic criminal matter. The Security Council just has no legitimate role in this.” Another anonymous official tells Sciolino: “I’m not going to deny that there were two schools of thought on this.” Hmmm. Now ask yourself: what conceivable harm would it do to have the U.N. condemn this even if it turns out to be a domestic crackpot? I can’t see any problem at all – unless you’re a black helicopter type who doesn’t think the U.N. should have anything to do with any domestic matters in America. So what to make of the administration’s reluctance? Here’s my take: the White House completely believes that the anthrax attack is the work of al Qaeda via Iraq. They may even have evidence. But they don’t want to be forced into the awkward situation of having to respond to such a blatant act of state-sponsored biological warfare yet. With the Afghan war just starting, the last thing they want to tackle is the possibility of nuclear response against Iraq. So they are just batting this issue away, ignoring it, pretending it isn’t here for now. Have you noticed how completely silent the president has been about this? That’s my theory anyway. Give the administration a few months and then the evidence will suddenly be found. But at a time of their choosing.

GROVER’S BUDDIES: Frank Foer does an effective job of showing how Grover Norquist’s attempt to bring Muslim Americans into the Republican fold has become a nightmare. Several of the new members of the Republican coalition turn out to be Hamas and Hezbollah supporters – and Norquist was partly responsible for the fact that the president invited several Muslim extremists into the White House for a photo-op (as first reported by Jake Tapper). I completely understand why Republicans might want to bring new ethnic groups into their big tent. But pure ethnic pandering, without careful inspection of the views or principles of some of the key figures you’re courting, is a recipe for disaster. The Dems have their Sharptons and Jacksons. The Republicans have their Falwells and Dobsons. But a bunch of Jew-hating terrorist-sympathizers seems another dimension of misfortune to visit upon the Bushies. Hey, Grover. Stick to the gays in future. And make sure they don’t meet the Muslims.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself, the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait… this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites – where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violent, though with a different odor.” – Friedrich Nietzsche on the Osama bin Ladens of his day, “Genealogy of Morals,” First and Second Essays, Sections 10 and 11.

ROSIE LOVES BUSH: And this was news?

Here’s another terrific piece from Will Saletan dissecting the blather, self-importance, deceit and general defeatism of much of the press covering this war. I love his analysis of how they use the word “haunt.”

LETTERS: From Susan Sontag’s neighbor; a Rawls defender; a Naipaul critic; etc.

“[T]he closer scientists look at the spores that have traveled through the mail, the more impressed and concerned they have become. Alan Zelicoff, senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, said investigators need to begin to focus less on the microbiology than the physics, which is impressive. “We didn’t think that anybody could come up with the appropriate coatings for anthrax spores to make them float through the air with the greatest of ease,” Zelicoff said, adding that exposing 28 people with a single opened envelope “is no mean trick.” And C.J. Peters, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas at Galveston, said that someone who has learned to produce two grams of anthrax spores milled to one to five microns — as was true of the spores mailed to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) – could just as easily produce two kilograms of the stuff.” – Washington Post. What are the odds that a domestic crack-pot group would have been sufficiently prepared to capitalize on September 11 by having this kind of sophisticated anthrax ready and waiting? It seems clearer to me every day that biological warfare has already been launched on the United States.

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.” – Winston Churchill, “My Early Life,” 1930.

SHOULD IT BE A ‘WAR’?: British historian Michael Howard gave a penetrating speech yesterday warning of the dangers of this war. His critique deserves serious thought. His is a criticism that doesn’t come from defeatism or leftist relativism. He wants us to win, and his critique is designed to facilitate that. Besides, his analysis of the broader context seems to me to be correct, i.e. “the huge crisis that has faced that vast and populous section of the world stretching from the Mahgreb through the Middle East and central Asia into South and South-East Asia and beyond to the Philippines: overpopulated, underdeveloped, being dragged headlong by the West into the post-modern age before they have come to terms with modernity. This is not a problem of poverty as against wealth, and I am afraid that it is symptomatic of our western materialism to suppose that it is. It is the far more profound and intractable confrontation between a theistic, land-based and traditional culture, in places little different from the Europe of the Middle Ages, and the secular material values of the Enlightenment.” Nicely put.

STILL A WAR: At the same time, I think Howard is wrong in asserting that the very denomination of this conflict as a ‘war’ is a mistake. He’s right to point out that al Qaeda and other fanatical sects gain some prestige by being named a formal enemy. But they had already gained that prestige by the stunning success of their brutal assault on America. Besides, they are also a de facto state, since the Taliban regime is essentially a client of the terrorists and indistinguishable from them. So ‘war’ is indeed the correct term for the first part of this campaign, and this war needs to be conducted with as much ferocity as possible against the Taliban regime. That regime must be destroyed; and al Qaeda’s nerve center must be obliterated. Perhaps in the second phase, such terminology can be relinquished – as the campaign goes beyond al Qaeda to terrorism in other states and entities. Howard’s judgment as to the qualities required for such a conflict seem to me to be right on: “secrecy, intelligence, political sagacity, quiet ruthlessness, covert actions that remain covert, above all infinite patience.” He is right too that “all these are forgotten or overridden in a media-stoked frenzy for immediate results, and nagging complaints if they do not get them.” But that is where we are in Afghanistan, and the best response is to wage a full war now, and transform it into a calmer, but just as ruthless campaign thereafter.

A VIRAL ANALOGY: I know it’s subjective, but I can’t help relating this struggle to the battle against HIV. At first we longed for a “cure,” and there was no breakthrough. Many experienced anger as the deaths mounted and the enemy seemed elusive. The first avenues of attack ran aground. But gradually, as our learning curve soared upward, and as anger turned to grief-stricken patience and iron resolution, progress was made. Even now, though, there is no absolute victory. The virus has not been defeated. It still exists in every single living person who was once infected with HIV. Infection cannot be reversed or undone. But success is measured by how powerfully it has been repressed, and by the ability of people with HIV to live as normal lives as possible. This is perhaps a model for countering terrorism in the long run. By eschewing the chimera of a cure, we can advance the possibility of a real treatment. And if the treatment is effective enough, it amounts, in the fallible world we live in, to a cure by any other name.

Interesting piece from Arab News, speculating on where bin Laden could be hiding. The author makes a plausible case that it wouldn’t be that hard to narrow it down, however difficult it might be to finish the job. I think we have to be wary of over-complicating our task in Afghanistan. It’s doable, if tricky.

WHERE’S AL?: The Onion has tracked the Democratic nominee down.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “America must have its vengeance. We’re not the kind of people to sit around and mourn a few thousand dead office workers when there’s some serious ass to kick. So we’ll bomb or invade or something. It won’t work, but that doesn’t matter. It’s what we do.” – columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall on why we should surrender to terrorism.

Here’s an essay you would never read in a major American newspaper (except perhaps the Wall Street Journal). It’s published in the left-wing magazine, New Statesman, which makes it all the more remarkable. It’s by Peter Watson, who recently wrote a book, “The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century.” For the book, he interviewed intellectuals and scholars across the world for an overview of the leading innovations and new ideas of the twentieth century. There was surprising consensus about the various breakthroughs in science, and the arts. Then he writes: “What shocked me were my interviews with scholars of non-western cultures. Here, I am referring not only to western specialists in the great non-western traditions, but scholars who were themselves born into those traditions – Arab archaeologists or writers, economists and historians from India and China, poets and dramatists from Japan and Africa. All of them – there were no exceptions – said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note.” No non-western ideas of note. The man will be accused of ethnocentrism, of course – but then why do all the non-western scholars agree with him? It seems to me they’re onto something, and this knowledge, which is largely verboten in civilized society, is a critical part of our current situation. One way of dealing with the vast disparity between western and non-western achievement is simply to negate the rationality of any such judgment – hence postmodernism. Another is to blame everything on Western colonialism – hence post-colonialism. Another, among the less deluded, is simply rage. If you grew up in a place that was, to all intents and purposes, culturally and intellectually moribund, how would you feel about the cultural and military hegemon? I think it would take enormous open-mindedness not to feel some resentment and envy. A more likely response among the not-so-virtuous is simply hatred for the symbols of such glaring cultural and material success. I do believe a certain kind of politico-religious fanaticism is a part of the Islamo-fascist equation. But I also think that Nietzsche was right in diagnosing that one of the most powerful and destructive forces of our time is simply resentment of others’ achievements. This crisis has highlighted the most extreme form of that resentment in the Islamic world – and all the pettier forms that are busy rallying, half-embarrassed, half-terrified, to its defense.

WORTHY OF CLINTON: “‘We want to brand Tom Ridge,’ a White House official said. “When people see him, we want them to think, ‘My babies are safe.”” – from Tuesday’s Washington Post.

REPUBLICANS AND GAYS: Two recent stories show how deep the shift is among Bush Republicans toward greater acceptance and equality for gay citizens and their families. An Associated Press story highlights the appointment of openly gay Scott Evertz to oversee policy towards HIV and AIDS and of Michael Guest and his husband to the American embassy in Romania. In these two appointments, Bush outdid Clinton, although the number of openly gay appointees in this administration is still woefully tiny. The story also points out the Bush administration’s maintenance of anti-discrimination policies in the federal government. It might have added the defense of pharmaceutical profits and therefore HIV research. We’re not close to equality yet, but these steps show a real and sensible thaw, and give the lie to those who argued last fall that the Bush administration would have meant a huge step backward for gay equality. Frankly, I’d rather have these gay appointments made entirely on the basis of merit without a song and dance about it than the gay quota-mongering and financial shake-down operation of the Clinton years. Then yesterday, yet another leading Republican came out in favor of equal treatment of gay and straight couples: former president Gerald Ford. In an interview with the dependably fair Detroit News columnist, Deb Price, Ford was asked about gay couples. Ford said: “I think they ought to be treated equally. Period.” He went on: ‘I have always believed in an inclusive party, in welcoming gays and others into the party.” So we now have Republican titans Ford and the late Barry Goldwater on the side of gay inclusion, leading lights like Alan Simpson and Mary Matalin on board, and a current president edging clearly toward acceptance. They make some of the anti-gay hysteria on the radical right seem even more irrelevant than it was even before September 11.