The Dish

“Any prince who has come to depend entirely on promises and has taken no other precautions ensures his own ruin. Friendship that is bought with money and not with greatness and nobility of mind is paid for, but does not last and it yields nothing. Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared. The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so; but fear strengthened by a dread of punishment is always effective.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVII.

AMERICAN ANTHRAX: In all the welter of conflicting data about the form of anthrax being wielded against Americans, I found the following article from New Scientist helpful. It leads to the notion that the fine anthrax used, in combination with certain chemical treatment, may well a residue of American experiments ceased and apparently destroyed in the 1960s. This doesn’t mean, of course, that domestic terrorists are the culprits. But it does mean that whoever is doing this is smart and capable of far worse.

It seems clear enough to me that one of the reasons for the lack of sudden progress in the war has been our reluctance to endorse and give full backing to the Northern Alliance. Anne Applebaum has a good, counter-intuitive piece in Slate, pointing out the need to junk this strategy. Whether we like it or not, these guys are the only force capable of ousting the Taliban, short of a massive commitment of ground troops in a terrain treacherous to foreigners and difficult to master. I think we should stop worrying about how popular these people are, and aim directly for our objective, which is the end of the Taliban and the death or capture of every single al Qaeda soldier we can get our hands on. That means backing the Northern Alliance with meaningful force. Similarly, I hope we are preparing to pounce on the alleged thousands of Islamo-fascists gathering on the Afghan border to join the fight. The minute they enter Afghanistan, we should do all we can to bomb these forces with the intent of killing as many as possible. Their gathering in one place is a mighty convenient way to counter-attack. Salon editor David Talbot recently urged, with typical inanity, that we should wage war and peace at the same time. I say this is loopy. We are at war. The only objective in war is victory. Magnanimity and peace-mongering can come afterwards. Meanwhile, intensify, intensify …

While the media keeps pouring cold water on the war, I received a forwarded email from a young ensign aboard USS Winston Churchill (DDG-81) to her parents. It’s verified on the ship’s website. It happened a while back, but it’s the first i’ve heard of it. If you need cheering up, read on:
“Dear Dad,
We are still at sea. The remainder of our port visits have all been canceled. We have spent every day since the attacks going back and forth within imaginary boxes drawn in the ocean, standing high-security watches, and trying to make the best of it. We have seen the articles and the photographs, and they are sickening. Being isolated, I don’t think we appreciate the full scope of what is happening back home, but we are definitely feeling the effects. About two hours ago, we were hailed by the German Navy destroyer, Lutjens, requesting permission to pass close by our port side. Strange, since we’re in the middle of an empty ocean, but the captain acquiesced and we prepared to render them honors from our bridge wing. As they were making their approach, our conning officer used binoculars and announced that Lutjens was flying not the German, but the American flag. As she came alongside us, we saw the American flag flying half-mast and her entire crew topside standing at silent, rigid attention in their dress uniforms. They had made a sign that was displayed on her side that read “We Stand By You.” There was not a dry eye on the bridge as they stayed alongside us for a few minutes and saluted. It was the most powerful thing I have seen in my life. The German Navy did an incredible thing for this crew, and it has truly been the highest point in the days since the attacks. It’s amazing to think that only half-century ago things were quite different. After Lutjens pulled away, the Officer of the Deck, who had been planning to get out of the Navy later this year, turned to me and said, ‘I’m staying Navy.’
I’ll write you when I know more about when I’ll be home, but this is it for now. Love you guys.”

In the English town of Luton, the call to Jihad is real and strong, especially among some of the young. This report from the Times of London is deeply chilling. Here’s Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant, in his own words: “There are people leaving all the time. Not just in Luton, but all over Britain. We, as Muslims, don’t perceive ourselves as British Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. All we want to do is go to Afghanistan to defend the honour and sanctity of Islam.” The British government has now said that such individuals, if they returned to Britain, would be tried for, among other things, treason. Good for Blair. Meanwhile, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, a poll of 500 British Muslims between the ages of 20 and 45 found that, “an overwhelming majority – 91 per cent – believed the war was between the Christian West and Islam, while 98 per cent would not fight for Britain. In marked contrast, 48 per cent said they would fight for bin Laden or for Islam.” Okay, if that is not a fifth column, could someone please tell me what is?

GOOD NEWS WATCH: I’ve become so depressed these past couple of weeks, I’ve decided to add a new feature to the site called simply “Good News Watch.” One nugget captured my attention on the way back from Los Angeles today (where I had a great dinner and discussion with an as.com reader and her friends). A report in the Los Angeles Times focused on the startling decline in domestic homicides in the past two decades. According to the Times, “National crime data released last week show that although homicides between spouses increased slightly in 2000, the numbers remain close to a 25-year low at an estimated 900 or so per year. That’s down nearly 60% from the more than 2,000 that occurred yearly in the late 1970s. Killings between unmarried lovers also have fallen, to an estimated 732 in 2000, down from about 900 in the mid-1980s.” The question is: why? The Times posits the most plausible explanation: divorce. I’ve long felt that the conservative worry about high divorce rates got only part of the picture. Yes, no-one should doubt the importance of stable two-parent families (gay or straight) for the rearing of children. But no-one should doubt either the horrors that were also part of a marriage system in which women were virtually imprisoned, had few employment opportunities, and were sometimes driven to desperate measures by abusive husbands. That interpretation is borne out by the fact that the biggest drop in spousal murders has been among those committed by women against men. Those women who were driven to kill are now able to escape. That’s an unmitigated good thing. And one reason that the looser divorce laws of the last few decades have not been entirely bad news. It seems to me that any critique of higher divorce rates should at least take this aspect of the matter into account.

TOM WOLFE ON SUSAN SONTAG: “The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan’s line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period.” – from “In The Land of the Rococo Marxists.”

Have we been nuked already?; a libertarian recants after September 11; etc.

TWO NEW PIECES: My recent output just posted opposite: a reflection on the anti-semitism behind Islamo-fascism; and an assessment of Bush’s faith and how it impacts this crisis.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “A strong case can be made that the Government regulations, along with a lack of private property responsibility, contributed to this tragedy, but what is proposed? More regulations and even a takeover of all airport security by the Government.” – libertarian Ron Paul, proving that it’s not just lefties who are having a hard time adjusting to the new world.

The media was full of panic stories over the weekend. We’re losing! Bin Laden is still alive! Abdul Haq was killed! Quagmire! The usual panic-mongers – poor Maureen needs a vacation – are having cows. The cynics, like Frank Rich in Saturday’s Times, can’t wait to get back to lambasting the president for his corporate ties and the mess that’s pretty evident in our attempt to mount a homeland defense. Some of such criticism is valid and important. The administration does need a kick in the butt on its passivity and disorganization in the face of bio-warfare. But much of the rest is so September 10. Look, this is going to be a long, long war. To his great credit, president Bush told us as much weeks ago. The Washington Post gets it right today with another sane editorial (the Post is fast becoming the essential national newspaper in this conflict). Sure, we need to adjust. More ground troops and fiercer attacks on the Taliban are necessary, as John McCain has argued. Military considerations – acts of self-defense, remember – should take immediate precedence over diplomatic coalition-managing. What Powell doesn’t seem to understand is that there’s no more persuasive diplomatic argument than military victory. So I’m sorry, but Ramadan should provide no respite for our war. And we have some good news. Much of the Taliban hard infrastructure is history. Much of the military machinery for an effective campaign are now in place. If Bob Woodward is to be believed, the anthrax campaign might have been pioneered by domestic crackpots. If this is true (and I still have my doubts), then it’s very good news. It means that whatever second strike al Qaeda was planning against us has either failed or been postponed. It means that the gruesome logic that would have meant massive escalation in response to a foreign government’s bio-terror can be avoided. We’ll see. But I’m an optimist on this war. We’ve already taken a much-delayed strike at al Qaeda’s network; we have revamped our laws to get a better grip on them; we have cut off their financing; we have set up a credible if still imperfect international police effort to track them. Let’s keep our perspective and keep our nerve. These are very early days. And the cause is just.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The London “Left” intelligentsia are now completely defeatist, look on the situation as hopeless and all but wish to surrender. How easy it ought to have been to foresee.” – George Orwell, July 1940. It took the left intelligentsia almost a year in 1940 to submit to defeatism. It has taken them three weeks to get there today against a far less formidable foe. I was reminded of this quote by a terrific piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Sunday’s Observer. Orwell also got something else uncannily right: “These people live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events, not even the turning out of a single shell.” Orwell: now more than ever.

SONTAG REMEMBERED: Mercifully, no professor ever forced me to read Susan Sontag and the only things I had really read were “Illness As Metaphor,” which I read when I got HIV and found completely useless, and “Notes on Camp,” a slight attempt to posture as someone who’s hip enough to understand gay subculture. (To be fair, she made several good points.) I hadn’t read any of Sontag’s other work, and so was surprised to find how deep her hatred of America is. No-one should have been surprised by her knee-jerk blame-America-first reaction to September 11. Here’s a quote sent to me by a reader from the penultimate essay in “Styles Of Radical Will,” first published in 1966. It speaks for itself: “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization? The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the “Mongol” hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.” Now, the question is this. When someone hates this country that much – and in a dark, racist way – how is one to interpret her ambivalence about a war for the survival of American and Western freedom?

I have to say that V.S. Naipaul, the new Nobel laureate, has some very arresting things to say about September 11 in the New York Times Magazine. Since they resonate with my own views – but from someone with an infinitely vaster knowledge of the subject, I’m particularly struck. Here’s a selection of the interview:

“Q: What makes Islam’s appeal so potent?
A: I’ll tell you something from the eighth century. The first province of India to be conquered was the province of Sindh, which is today part of Pakistan. The king of Sindh resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people. That idea of brotherhood is very powerful.
Q: What about nonfundamentalist Islam?
A: I think it is a contradiction. It can always be called up to drown and overwhelm every movement. The idea in Islam, the most important thing, is paradise. No one can be a moderate in wishing to go to paradise. The idea of a moderate state is something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and there.
Q: What do you think were the causes of Sept. 11?
A: It had no cause. Religious hate, religious motivation, was the primary thing. I don’t think it was because of American foreign policy. There is a passage in one of the Conrad short stories of the East Indies where the savage finds himself with his hands bare in the world, and he lets out a howl of anger. I think that, in its essence, is what is happening. The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach. The oil money in the 70’s gave the illusion that power had come to the Islamic world. It was as though up there was a divine supermarket, and at last it had become open to people in the Muslim world. They didn’t understand that the goods that gave them power in the end were made by another civilization. That was intolerable to accept, and it remains intolerable.”

MBEKI’S MADNESS: Much of the world has long criticized South African president Thabo Mbeki’s criminal lack of response to the AIDS epidemic in his country (although some would rather hammer the pharmaceutical companies who have made HIV a manageable disease). Many, including me, have also hoped that Mbeki would soon see the light. Recent speeches suggest otherwise. Last Wednesday in a speech to parliament, Mbeki called anti-retrovirals a plague in themselves: “I’ve said to the Minister of Health, have we looked at the radically revised guidelines from the US government issued at the beginning of this year, about treatment with anti-retroviral drugs, where they have said that these drugs are becoming as dangerous to health as the thing they are supposed to treat.” A few weeks before, he played the race card against those South African doctors who dissented from their government’s dangerously negligent policies. “And thus does it happen” Mbeki argued, “that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease… Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.” This is just kooky – an attempt to dispel Western medicine as equivalent to bigotry. And it would be merely absurd if it weren’t leading to the early deaths of millions.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “In the West, we have become habituated to a certain picture, according to which puritan zeal had accompanied the early stages of emergence of a modern economy, but in which its culmination was eventually marked by a very widespread religious lukewarmness and secularization. . . .The virtue inculcated by puritanism leads to a prosperity which subverts that virtue itself, as John Wesley had noted with regret. In the world of Islam, we encounter quite a different situation. Though long endowed with a commercial bourgeoisie and significant urbanization, this civilization failed to engender industrialism; but once industrialism and its various accompaniments had been thrust upon it, and it had experienced not only the resulting disturbance but also some of its benefits, it turned, not at all to secularization, but rather to a vehement affirmation of the puritan version of its own tradition. Perhaps this virtue has not yet been rewarded by a really generalized affluence, but there is little to indicate that a widespread affluence would erode religious commitment. Even the unearned oil-fall wealth has not had this effect.” – Ernest Gellner, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion” (1992).

I’ve spent the last couple of days in New York City and I must say it’s cheered me up no end. Apart from friends, the great pleasure has been the frustrating, irritating, grungy normality of it. I was stuck in traffic on Madison Avenue today and I almost felt happy to be there. A new friend even said she felt relieved to see people having fights on the sidewalk again. It reminds me of a button designed by my friend Art Carlson, the philosopher king and opera queen of C.F. Folks’ diner on Washington’s Nineteenth Street. He got it made a couple of weeks after September 11 so he could wear it on an upcoming trip to the Big Apple. In red, white and blue, the button screamed, “We’re Tourists! Act Normal. Jerk Us Around. We Love You, New York.” Well, it was great to see New Yorkers jerking people around again – uplifting actually. The place seems far calmer than D.C. My pet theory is that it’s because most people in this city have real jobs and don’t have to think about the war all day long. In D.C., everyone is thinking about it all the time. It’s enough to give you nightmares. But New York’s hustle has helped me banish some of those. And then just when you think you’ve got your life a little integrated again, you smell that weird breeze of burnt plastic and molten metal from as far away as Chelsea, and the dread begins again.

My friend Robert Wright writes a typically incisive piece in Slate about why he believes Islam hasn’t become as tolerant of other faiths as modern Christianity. Read the piece to see his arguments in full. His basic point is that economic and social development – by sheer chance in some respects – encouraged a more individualistic and tolerant form of Christianity after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The monolithic rule in non-European parts of the world didn’t allow for these experiments in democracy to take root and flourish, and so the Islamic world remains mired, for the most part, in economic stagnation and religious intolerance. I buy some of this, but not all. Here’s where I differ. Wright argues that the Islamic texts and Christian ones are virtually interchangeable with regard to the use of violence, and that therefore social and economic context is the primary way to understand why they developed differently. I think this is demonstrably untrue. The call to war and intolerance in Islam is strikingly more pervasive than in Christianity. And although there is plenty of war in the Old Testament, the call to peace – even turning the other cheek to violence – is the principal message of the New Testament, which is the central text for Christians. I think it’s impossible to read the Gospel of John and the Koran and not believe that they represent not just different but radically different views of morality. This is particularly true when you realize that Islam came about several centuries after Christianity’s moral and spiritual revolution. The fundamental meaning of the Cross is the paradox of triumph through surrender – a thought far, far less prevalent in Islam. That’s why the critical argument for social peace in the 17th century – the argument that won – was not just about social peace but about Christian morality itself. Locke argued that forcible conversion was a violation of Christ’s teachings – and so should be abandoned. It would have been and still is extremely difficult to make such a Lockean argument from the texts of the Koran as a whole. That’s not to say that socio-economic factors weren’t involved in Christianity’s softening, as well as the sheer experience of gruesome religious wars. It is to say that the meaning of the faith was also central to the shift.

BACK-EDDIES OR TIDE?: The secondary problem with Wright’s argument is that modernity is not necessarily the cure for religious fanaticism. You might even argue, as I have, that the withdrawal of Christianity from warfare ironically paved the way for worse, secular fanaticisms from 1789 to 1989. In fact, the alienation of modern life can actually intensify such fanaticism, religious and secular. Wright may be right that in the long run, this might soften. And he fairly concedes that the process could be wrenching. But quite how long the long run is I don’t know. Looking at many Muslims in the West – in Northern England and parts of America, for example – one sees a dogged resistance to assimilation by many, as well as integration among a few. The Muslims of France also seem radicalized by their presence in a modern state. What I was trying to explore in my New York Times essay (“This Is A Religious War,” posted opposite) was the drama of this relationship between modernity and fundamentalism. I guess, my doubts about a happy resolution stem from my far less optimistic view of world history than Bob’s. I don’t see faith withering away as the world ages. I see it resurgent and permanently dangerous when allied to political and revolutionary goals – prone to emerge at any time and place. Look at the rise of some fanatical fundamentalism in America in recent years. Only our constitution – not our socio-economic success – keeps this at bay. In the Middle East, we also have a couple of examples of secular democracies dealing with religious fundamentalism, in Israel and Turkey. In both countries, modernization has brought with it less cultural secularism and more militant fundamentalism than, say thirty years ago. You can argue that these are mere back-eddies in a larger tide. But that’s scant comfort to those who drown in the meantime.

“We’ve heard this song before, right? In the fifties there was a blacklist, and it ruined lives. If you’re anything like me, when you watch any of the dozens of films that have been made about the blacklist, you look at that and think, my God, if I could only transport myself back in time to this period and knock a couple of heads together and say, are you out of your mind? Well, we’re there, right now. It’s happening all over again.” – Aaron Sorkin, West Wing creator, at an Occidental College forum. Thanks to Mickey Kaus for catching this one first.