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Saturday, August 19, 2006
Nedrenaline: The long comedown
19 Aug 2006 10:30 pm
by David Weigel
Two polls
showing the unbearable Joe Lieberman handily winning re-election as an
independent have forced liberal bloggers into a pow-wow on their
favorite subject: Liberal bloggers. Josh Marshall mulls:
Should progressives shift their money and attention from the Connecticut Senate race to more important contests? Absolutely.
...
I am all for multi-tasking: pay passing attention to the Connecticut race, while focusing with laser intensity on the races that will actually determine control of the Senate.... Rove may be goading Democrats into fighting like hell amongst themselves in Connecticut, but that doesn't mean we have to take the bait.
No self-respecting liberal wants to think he's abetting Karl Rove, but Atrios - who almost single-handedly created Lamont's buzz among liberal blogs outside the Nutmeg State - completely disagrees: "I'd like more of that advice going to, say, the people who gave money so that Hillary Clinton could have $22 million cash-on-hand."
It's tough to say goodbye; it'll be tough for bloggers to stop shovelling bucks at the first candidate they actually sorta-elected. But how much support does Lamont really need? The man is worth at least $100 million. Now that he's built his political cred and a successful campaign team, he's probably gotten all the blog help he needs.
And is a donation to Hillary Clinton's slam-dunk Senate campaign really counterproductive? I'm sure every donor thinks he's filling out Line 1 of the 2009 White House staff application.
The View From Your Window
19 Aug 2006 06:08 pm
South Portland, Maine, 8 pm.
Backlashes in Lebanon and Israel
19 Aug 2006 03:56 pm
By Michael J. Totten
Lebanon is not yet a mature liberal democracy. Syria still has agents in many high places. Iran all but dictates its foreign policy. Lebanon is partly, if not mostly, democratic even so. And now that the country has been torn apart by the unilateral actions of a warmongering street gang, the predictable backlash has begun.
Abu Kais at From Beirut to the Beltway calls Hassan Nasrallah The Decapitator. Raja at the Lebanese bloggers says ENOUGH. Rampurple goes further and tells Hassan Nasrallah to eff off. Opinion page editor Michael Young at Beirut’s Daily Star says Nasrallah is trying to turn Lebanon into a “gigantic Hizbullah barracks.” Druze chief Walid Jumblatt darkly suggests the civil war may ignite again if Hezbollah does not comply with the wishes of Lebanon.
The mood here in Tel Aviv is pretty grim, too. The Olmert government looks like it could collapse under pressure at any time. Hardly anyone in this country seems to think the air war over Lebanon was a good idea anymore. Hassan Nasrallah’s claim of “victory” sounds almost plausible after a month of hard fighting failed to produce many of the tangible promised results.
Yossi Klein Halevi at the New Republic says many of the last month’s disasters were self-inflicted and that the reckoning is already beginning. (Subscription required.) Yoel Marcus says “Never has a new government with a line-up of fresh faces and ambitious goals been entangled in so many foolish affairs within such a short span of time as the government of Ehud Olmert.” Haaretz published an absolutely devastating indictment of the government by Ari Shavit who said 2006 is “the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel.”
Israelis are far quicker to criticize their government during and immediately after a war than Americans are. Perhaps this is natural since Israel’s parliamentary system allows the people to change the political leadership without having to wait for the next scheduled election that could be years away. Maybe George W. Bush would no longer be president if Americans were able to pick someone else before 2008. It’s also possible that Israelis are just more self-critical for cultural reasons.
An even starker contrast is noticeable between Israel-supporters in Israel and Israel-supporters in America. Israel’s partisans in the U.S. often talk as though Israel rarely makes any mistakes, that because Israel is a democracy with a right to defend itself it can do no or little wrong. Israelis themselves rarely do this.
Greetings from your third guest-blogger
19 Aug 2006 03:27 pm
by David Weigel
Hi, everybody; I'm the third of Andrew's replacements in age, eminence, and good will. (He's spending some of his "fishing trip" in Amsterdam with my magazine and the creators of South Park. Jealousy is my right.) Heartfelt thanks to Andrew for giving me the chance to help fill in here. I've been reading his blog since its original design, that dark blue mass so opaque you could break a cornea trying to grok the text. It was always worth the pain.
I'm a creature of mainstream media in the worst way -- I did four years at a mainstream j-school and a year and a half at the editorial page of USA Today. My stint there began with the death of Ronald Reagan and ended, more or less, with the death of John Paul II. It overlapped with the 2004 conventions and the columnist stints of Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. In other words, I'm very happy to be here.
YouTube of the Day
19 Aug 2006 02:42 pm
The Philosophers' Drinking Song from Monty Python. From the Australian outback. It never gets old.
Greetings from Guest-Blogger A
19 Aug 2006 02:40 pm
by Ana Marie Cox
Hello gentle readers, I'm another one of the Andrew manques tasked with creating trouble while he frolics with the beagles or cruises Amsterdam or whatever excuse he gave. (He's really campaigning for Lamont, right?) I'm the former proprietor of Wonkette and the author of Dog Days; these days I hang out around the Time DC bureau and wait for someone to tell me it's all been a horrible, horrible mistake.
I'm pleased to see that Andrew broke the Jonbenet ice on the blog a few days ago, as that is the subject that's occupied my fleeting coherent thoughts of late. At first, a false confession seemed about as likely as Rove getting Karr to confess as a distraction from the war. (Though I haven't checked Democratic Underground yet...) Now the Rove theory seems more credible than Karr does -- the man is a pedophile, sure, but an UNUSUALLY CRAZY pedophile. It will make a truly awesome movie of the week.
Now, where were we?
Introduction
19 Aug 2006 11:43 am
By Michael J. Totten
Hello to my fellow guest-bloggers Ana-Marie Cox and David Weigel. And thanks to Andrew Sullivan for inviting the three of us to keep the blog warm while he’s away.
I flew to Tel Aviv to cover the Israeli side of the Hezbollah war, and I’ll be sticking around here for a little while longer to cover the aftermath, the political fallout, the ongoing trouble in Gaza, and whatever else happens in this country that never lacks for a story.
War coverage from the Israel/Lebanon border is still fresh on the main page at my own blog. More will be posted here shortly. Thanks for reading.
Friday, August 18, 2006
See You Labor Day
18 Aug 2006 11:15 pm
Good news for Mickey Kaus: I'm taking a vacation for two weeks starting tonight. Better news for you guys: my guest-bloggers will be three in number. They're Ana-Marie Cox, the former star of Wonkette and now the Washington editor of Time.com; Michael Totten, who'll be blogging directly from the Middle East; and David Weigel, one of the sharpest young bloggers in the libertarian universe. This trio will be a blogging ensemble until Labor Day, when I hope to return all rested up. Give them a warm welcome.
Yglesias Award Nominee
18 Aug 2006 09:01 pm
It goes to Heather Mac Donald, whose dogged refusal to acquiesce to the usual juvenile nonsense from JPod earns her some cred. Here's part of her latest attempt to disentangle conservatism from the fundamentalist vines now strangling it:
I agree with Jonah that the truth claims of religion are “slippery.” Yet I hear them made all the time. A recent article on The Da Vinci Code in The American Spectator stated that it was a matter of “historical fact” that Jesus was born of a virgin and ascended to heaven after the crucifixion. I simply don’t know what to make of that statement or its appearance in a powerful, justly respected journal of conservative opinion. It does not conform to what I thought was a common understanding of “historical facts.” Ditto when the president claims that freedom is God’s gift to humanity. He is not talking here about free will. I see little evidence in the Bible that God advocated the democratic government that we are bringing to (or imposing on) Iraq, not to mention the gender quotas that we fixed for the Iraqi National Assembly. The Bible seems to be relatively easy about slavery, patriarchy, and despotic tribal leadership; its concerns lie elsewhere. And if the freedom that we have created in the West is indeed God’s gift, it sure took a long time for us to open it. If it turns out that our conception of political freedom is in fact a human creation growing out of very specific cultural soil, that may explain why it is not blossoming forth as we expected it to following the invasion of Iraq.
Ouch.
The War Revisited
18 Aug 2006 08:31 pm
A reader writes:
There's one aspect of your Cheney & Rumsfeld theory that really is paranoid. I very much doubt that they actually WANTED democratization to fail in Iraq -- I just think that they had little belief that it would succeed, and believed that in any case it wasn't worth the huge amount of military and economic effort we would have to pour into it to be reasonably sure of making it work. The trouble is that their alternative Shock & Awe strategy hasn't worked, either - Iran and the various terrorist groups are singularly Unshocked & Unawed by us now.
Morever, if Woodward's quotes are correct, Bush agreed with them on this from the start - if a modest, short effort succeeded in reforming Iraq, fine, but if not he didn't believe in wasting any more time or military effort on it. What tripped all of them up was the fact - the one real shock of the war which caught absolutely everybody off guard -- that Saddam had gotten rid of all his WMDs. So, to avoid making it look to the entire world as though the war had been totally unjustified (after all, we hadn't even given the UN inspectors time to finish looking for WMDs before we went in), they grabbed for "democratization" as an alternative justification - while still being unwilling to provide the huge supply of resources (probably including a draft) that would have been necessary to give it a good chance of success. They just kept trickling support in and hoping that a miracle would happen and the place could be reformed anyway.
That miracle hasn't happened. And in the process the US has managed to look spectacularly impotent and incompetent militarily speaking to Iran and the Islamic Fascists, which of course is not what C. and R. had in mind at all. They seriously overestimated the degree to which our jumping up and down and yelling "Boogabooga!" would scare the Iranians and the theocratic Moslems in general.
I think that's about the best inference right now. Some in the administration and among Bush-supporters, like me, believed in democratization as well as WMD-removal as twin pillars of the war. But the war-plan proves that this was not what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush really had in mind. The most plausible interpretation is that they expected the discovered WMDs to provide complete justification for the war - and then wanted to get out as fast as possible, with a friendly exile like Chalabi installed. They wanted merely to send an intimidating signal. And they have achieved exactly the opposite. And so they have made us less safe, with more enemies, who are more dangerously armed and less intimidated.
The View From Your Window
18 Aug 2006 07:30 pm
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 8.55 am.
God and Conservatism
18 Aug 2006 04:28 pm
There's been an interesting exchange over at NRO. Just scroll for the last couple of days. The Buckley view, apparently, is that it is perfectly possible for a conservative to be an atheist, but that respect for religion and a lack of disrespect for the faithful is also part of conservatism. I tend to agree. The only thing I'd add is that "religion" is a very broad and inchoate term for the purposes of this discussion. It matters a great deal what kind of religious faith we're talking about. Faith is not, to my mind, an on-off switch, in which you either believe completely or not at all. This model is shared by fundamentalists and atheists, but not by many, many Christians.
The most natural religious complement to conservatism is a faith in God, tempered by a deep humility about our ability to know surely much about what God is, an emphasis on mystery, on charity, individual responsibility, and sacramental worship. But when religion becomes absolutist and abstract and political, when it become fundamentalist, it is much less compatible with conservatism, and, in the end, actively hostile to it. What we are seeing resurgent in the world today is the rise of a religious sensibility - in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity - which has far more in common with the statist absolutist totalitarianisms of the last century than with, say, Anglicanism or post-Vatican II Catholicism. In fact, as I argue in my book, I think the collapse of the last centuries' totalitarianisms has opened a cultural and psychological vacuum for this kind of religion to occupy, as it once did before the Enlightenment. A passage from my upcoming book makes the point:
In this non-fundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. This is the Christianity that the conservative clings to; and it is a form of Christianity the fundamentalist rejects. That is his right. But it is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
Alas, many conservatives have conflated these rival forms of faith. And, often with good intentions, they have thereby helped erase conservatism's critical, definitional distinction between transcendent truth and practical wisdom. From that confusion, so much damage has been done. So much - in so short a time.
YouTube of the Day
18 Aug 2006 04:24 pm
Lewis Black on quail-"hunting". I worship him.
Quote of the Day
18 Aug 2006 02:23 pm
Gerard Baker has been one of the British journalists most open to supporting the Bush administration, most prepared to give neoconservatism the respect it deserves, most willing to give president Bush the benefit of the doubt. Here's what he's writing now:
[T]he US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.
It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases — start by aggressively supporting Israel, then go all peacenik, holding hands with the UN in a touching chorus of Kumbaya.
Now we have the worst of all worlds. Not only is the US despised around the globe, it can’t even make its supposed hegemony work.
It’s one thing to be seen as the bully in the schoolyard; it’s quite another when people realise the bully is actually incapable of getting anybody else to do what he wants. It’s unpleasant when people stop respecting you, but it’s positively terrifying when they stop fearing you.
He regards Bush's foreign policy as in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
Malkin Award Nominee
18 Aug 2006 02:02 pm
"I'm watching an AP video of this freak, and he seems more like a homosexual pedophile to me. According to this story, Karr was married with children," - LaShawn Barber, commenting on the suspect in the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. (Hat tip: Malcontent.)
Islamism Update
18 Aug 2006 01:52 pm
A woman gets her throat slit in Italy for dating a non-Muslim.
Addiction and Fundamentalism
18 Aug 2006 01:13 pm
This piece about the British converts to Islamism prompted some thoughts. Money quote:
Myfanwy Franks, a researcher who has studied converts to Islam and is the author of "Women and Revivalism in the West: Choosing Fundamentalism in a Liberal Democracy," said, "Being troubled does not necessarily lead people to conversion — people who aren't troubled convert — but it could lead to extreme radicalization."
Mentioning reports in the news media that Mr. Waheed was a heavy drinker and drug user before turning to Islam, Ms. Franks added: "I think there's a tendency for some people, when they stop using some kind of addictive substance, to be left with a big hole in their lives. To do something extreme is the easiest way to go, because it fills that big hole."
The path that some addicts take - not to go into lengthy, difficult recovery but to adopt, cold-turkey, the most absolutist religious position as the panacea for their addiction - is a fascinating one. I think it helps explain the strange management style and worldview of the current president.
The NSA Ruling
18 Aug 2006 10:36 am
Jack Balkin agrees with the result, doesn't much like the reasoning. Money quote:
It is quite clear that the government will appeal this opinion, and because the court's opinion, quite frankly, has so many holes in it, it is also clear to me that the plaintiffs will have to relitigate the entire matter before the circuit court, and possibly the Supreme Court. The reasons that the court below has given are just not good enough. This is just the opening shot in what promises to be a long battle.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Were the Neocons Conned?
17 Aug 2006 08:47 pm
A reader adds to the debate on the real motives for the Iraq war for Cheney and Rumsfeld:
The funny thing about your speculative theory is that it doesn't really make the duped neo-cons look any better. After all Rumsfeld was quite upfront about the troop strength that would be used. The administration did nothing to free up money for the building of democracy or for maintaining troop strength during lengthy nation building. The neo-cons cannot claim they were lied to. They have to claim that they were told the truth which was unfair because it was unreasonable to expect them to have believed it.
My own guess is that Cheney and Rumsfeld did not care much about whether democracy arose, and certainly had no interest in the nation building required to bring it about. They thought the invasion would make a statement to the world and that is what justified it. That statement included the ability of the US to depose Hussein without great expense or great troop numbers. This was a misguided idea, but in some sense at least coherent. Contrast it with the people who wanted to do things that required great resources and great numbers of troops but supported the war anyway when it was clear that that wasn't what we were doing. Such people existed both to the right and left. Friedman might be the clearest example of someone who was defending a completely different invasion than the one that was clearly going to be waged.
I plead guilty too. I bought the democratization line and the WMD threat and was passionately pro-war. My only defense is that within days of the invasion, I started to worry about the troop levels, and the dissonance between what I had been told and what was actually being done opened up. Then Abu Ghraib; then the refusal to add more troops; well, you get the picture. The bad news is: in a long, dangerous war of ideas, the Bush administration has somehow managed to muddy the moral high-ground against the evil of Islamism. It will take decades and countless innocent lives for us to recover.
Liquid Bombs
17 Aug 2006 07:49 pm
How plausible are they, as sketched in the UK terror plot? Kevin Drum asks some questions. Meanwhile, a discovery in an English wood. As yet, still sketchy data.
Faith and Incompetence
17 Aug 2006 07:37 pm
A reader writes:
I'm entertained by the theory that Cheney and Rumsfeld meant for the war to go this way. Depending on which bad mood I'm in, I'll now vacillate between this and the incompetence theory. Both work for me. I'm probably still more convinced by the incompetence theory, but not because I believe they're stupid. They're not. But they have approached their political theory the same way they have been taught to approach their religious faith: unquestioningly. Once this theory of the domino-effect/wildfire blaze of the spread of democracy/beneficent contagion of western values/etc became ingrained in their own heads, they've asked their supporters, just as the great revivalists and zealots of the past and present have, to accept as gospel the righteousness of their mission, the infallibility of the logic, and pre-ordained superiority of the outcome.
I think their incompetence is triggered by a zealous need to believe that their theory is so righteous as to be unassailable. To alter it, or to adjust to circumstances is to be unfaithful. It's the same godlike worship of the free market, as though that was also some directive from On High. There are similar examples of unquestioned reverence on the left, but I see too many parallels between GWB's religious faith (I am a Christian too, I should say) and his faith in his more secular principles. I think he sees no distinction. I think the same of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I believe that this is the source of their incompetence, and is indeed the very thing that hamstrings lots of smart and faithful people: the inability to reconcile one's heart and mind.
I'm also intrigued by this aspect of what the second chapter of my upcoming book calls the "fundamentalist psyche." I don't think you can understand the actions of this administration - i.e. make them make internal sense - without understanding the depth of the president's fundamentalist mindset. He's a fundamentalist convert and an alcoholic. Faith is the one thing that rescued him from a life of chaos. So fundamentalist faith itself - regardless of its content - is integral to his entire worldview. And fundamentalism cannot question; it is not empirical; it is the antithesis of skepticism. Hence this allegedly "conservative" president attacking conservatism at its philosophical core: its commitment to freedom, to doubt, to constitutional process, to prudence, to limited government, balanced budgets and the rule of law. Faith is to the new conservatism is what ideology was to the old leftism: an unquestioned orthodoxy from which all policy flows.
Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, do not strike me as the same. They're just bureaucratic brutalists, thrilled to have complete sanction to do as they please because they have the mandate from the leader-of-faith. Bush and Rove provide the fundamentalist voters; Cheney and Rummy get on with the war they want to wage. If they have to condescend to Bush's recently discovered faith in democratization, they'll humor him, while they bomb, wiretap and torture along what they think is the only path to security. They are enabled by the Christianist; but they're just plain old "bomb 'em to the stone-age" reactionaries.
Rudy in the South
17 Aug 2006 06:06 pm
He's a hit.
The UK Terror Plot
17 Aug 2006 05:29 pm
More data - from Kashmir.
The Saudis and Gays
17 Aug 2006 05:12 pm
It's not news that Saudi Arabia has arrested 20 men for celebrating a gay wedding. What's news is that gay men in Saudi Arabia have realized that they too are part of the global movement for gay dignity and equality. Inside one of the mnost despicable theocracies on earth, freedom still beats in the hearts of some.
YouTube of the Day
17 Aug 2006 05:10 pm
Ramesh Ponnuru previews his next book on the Democrats: "The Party That Eats Their Own Children". It's Colbert on fine form.
Just For The Record
17 Aug 2006 05:04 pm
I'm a conservative of doubt on this JonBenet arrest.
YouTube of the Day
17 Aug 2006 05:04 pm
Ramesh Ponnuru previews his next book on the Democrats: "The Party That Eats Their Own Children". It's Colbert on fine form.
Email of the Day
17 Aug 2006 04:52 pm
A reader writes:
Your most recent post on the details of the terror plot investigation was superb. You did your homework. We all need to know the facts and make our own decisions about what is, or is not, going on. The decision to go public with the plot seems to have been initiated by the forced confession of this guy in a torture chamber in Islamabad and NOT based on the actual facts of the case as developed by MI5 and others. What is even more concerning is that the Bush administration balked when the Brits wanted to let the one guy go ahead with his dry run, perhaps providing more information and more suspects. Why? That is a bit concerning to me. Seems Bush may have done more to jeopardize the investigation than anyone else.
When you are on the extremes it is easy to get caught up in the spin. Those who have been quick to judge and condemn you are perfect examples of what I call "goose steppers". They obviously have NOT done any due diligence and quite frankly, I would imagine that they could care less about the actual facts. We cannot win this war on terror without knowing all the facts. Those in the center, like yourself, must continue to raise their voices and be heard. It is hard to be heard above the extremist din but it is necessary for our survival.
We'll find out more at some point. But skepticism seems to me to be in order at this point.
The UK Terror Plot, Ctd.
17 Aug 2006 03:34 pm
More details are emerging. The Brits didn't want to arrest all the suspects but plans shifted after a Pakistan detention:
In contrast to previous reports, one senior British official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports. The sources did say, however, that police believe one U.K.-based suspect was ready to conduct a "dry run." British authorities had wanted to let him go forward with part of the plan, but the Americans balked.
So we have one Islamist planning a dry-run. We have no evidence that any of the others had even bought airline tickets. Malkin-stand-in Karol Sheinin produces a week-old story from the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail to bolster her view that an actual threat to innocent lives was "imminent". All I can say is that, since August 11, new data have cast that unsourced information more suspect, and if Sheinin were a little more savvy about the British press, and had absorbed information unveiled within the last week, she'd be a little more skeptical. From the Guardian today:
A security official said: "There was a mastermind, there was a planner, and there were the executioners." He claimed the al-Qaida link to the alleged plot in Britain had been established and that it had been at the planning stage when it was interrupted in London last week. [My italics].
I don't know about you - but "a planning stage" does not mean "imminent" to me. But tell that to Karol Sheinin. If torture is permissible to get information for plots in the "planning stage," well you see how the narrow case for torture always expands as soon as it is entertained.
Still, there's little doubt that there was a serious plot in the works. The Independent - a virulently anti-Blair paper - reported the following last Sunday:
It was the arrest of Rashid Rauf about a week to 10 days ago that triggered the security operation in Britain last week, according to accounts in Pakistan. After he disappeared from contact, a panicking fellow conspirator telephoned the UK to tell the bombers to bring the plot forward and go ahead immediately after Mr Rauf disappeared from contact. The call was intercepted, and the British police mounted an emergency operation to stop the bombers. [Apologies for the nutball site where the piece was reprinted.]
This kind of thing is always a tough call. But the danger is that you seize people too soon, don't have enough evidence to detain them, and lose potential valuable intelligence. If what triggered this panic was a tortured confession that exaggerated the imminence of the attack, then we may have bungled again. Again, this plot was well-known and closely monitored for months:
The official shed light on other aspects of the case, saying that while the investigation into the bombing plot began "months ago," some suspects were known to the security services even before the London subway bombings last year.
He acknowledged that authorities had conducted electronic and e-mail surveillance as well as physical surveillance of the suspects.
Monitoring of Rauf, in particular, apparently played a critical role, revealing that the plotters had tested the explosive liquid mixture they planned to use at a location outside Britain. NBC News has previously reported that the explosive mixture was tested in Pakistan. The source said the suspects in Britain had obtained at least some of the materials for the explosive but had not yet actually prepared or mixed it.
So: no solid evidence of a) passports, b) tickets, c) prepared explosives. So far- and this may change, of course - we know of one individual allegedly prepping for a "dry-run." Everyone else was already under intense surveillance. And yet this group of potentially lethal Islamists was arrested suddenly, perhaps forfeiting subsequent evidence or intelligence, and maybe rendering a successful prosecution impossible. One wonders why. Faulty tortured evidence from Pakistan? Jitteriness in Washington? There did not seem to be much jitteriness in Downing Street in the week before the planned "dry-run." Tony Blair decided to go on vacation, and never left it. Most of the leading British officials were chilling. Brown was in Scotland. Two suspects have already been released without being charged. The British authorities are asking for time extensions on detaining the rest - not a good sign for the prosecution.
Turkey's Drift Away From the West
17 Aug 2006 02:38 pm
It's been accelerated by the Israel-Hezbollah war, argues the Times' Bronwen Maddox. Participating in an army in Southern Lebanon has increased the tension. Money quote:
As the columnist Yusuf Kanli put it in the Turkish Daily News: "Things are changing in Turkey. People are becoming more conservative. Conservatives are becoming more nationalist. And nationalists are becoming racist." He asks, like many of Erdogan's critics, why "Turks [should] die in Lebanon for the security of Israel but not ... in northern Iraq for the security of Turkey"? Lebanon is a diversion, some argue, from Turkey's own battle against Kurdish separatist rebels in the southeast.
Many others say it will distract the Government from the arduous and expensive task of qualifying for EU membership — and of persuading an increasingly sceptical public that this is still in Turkey’s best interests.
Quote for the Day
17 Aug 2006 02:04 pm
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy. Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy," - a "military affairs expert" who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month.
I have long wondered whether Cheney and Rumsfeld ever believed that their job was to build a new democracy in Iraq. Rumsfeld had dealt with and supported Saddam in the past; Cheney was extremely suspicious of occupying Iraq in 1990. One subversive theory - which I'm not endorsing, just airing - is that both merely wanted to turn the Saddam regime to rubble, and then play along with neocon democracy supporters, while making sure that the military was never given enough resources to do nation-building. Then Cheney and Rumsfeld could prove their point about the impossibility of reforming the Muslim world, and promote the view that we need merely to pummel enemies, project military fear across the region, and deter Islamo-fascism by "shock and awe." The Likud strategy, in other words.
Under this interpretation, Bush was too trusting or dumb to understand the deviousness of their plan to fail in Iraq; Wolfowitz saw it too late and got out; Rice is stuck managing the debris that a democracy-promoting president and a democracy-hostile Pentagon created. The troops were just pawns in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's strategy. This interpretation would mean that incompetence is not the issue. Cheney and Rumsfeld have succeeded: they have turned Iraq into a failed state, removed its capacity to make WMDs, and detonated a regional Sunni-Shi'a war. Now they want to use the same brutalist strategy against Iran. This theory is probably too complex and subtle to be true. The screw-up theory of history is more often the most plausible. But it does make some internal sense - if you assume that Cheney and Rumsfeld are not complete incompetents.
The View From Your Window
17 Aug 2006 12:28 pm
Mill Valley, California, 6.30 am.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Kaus and Coulter
16 Aug 2006 07:21 pm
The love affair continues.
Email of the Day
16 Aug 2006 07:00 pm
A reader writes:
Though your blog is frequently insightful, the post about Sri Lanka is idiotic. Why has not the Sri Lankan government received greater scrutiny from the MSM?
Well why have not the Sri Lankan people received any MSM coverage over the past two decades during which they have been victims of a degree of terrorism worse than anything Muslim fundametalists have yet to do. Yet we know about each Israeli who has been killed over the past decade.
The MSM will take interest in the Sri Lankan government probably after it starts taking an interest in Sri Lankan people.
Quote for the Day II
16 Aug 2006 06:12 pm
"As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of 'I am woman, hear me roar', there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — 'the world's number one terrorist' as the marchers would have it," - my friend and colleague Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times.
The U.K. Terror Plot II
16 Aug 2006 06:09 pm
The usual suspects have deployed the usual rhetorical tropes against my questions about the evidence in the alleged terror plot based in Britain. Jeff Goldstein has me on an AIDS "dementia watch." Another had this charming metaphor:
Hell hath no fury like a man-bitch spurned.
They don't even need a blood-level of 0.12, do they? A Malkin stand-in writes:
Of course, the fact that [Sullivan]'s hysterically arguing that there was no terror plot out of London makes his charges against me, let's say slightly less believeable.
Well, read the post. I'm not arguing that "there was no terror plot". I'm asking questions about the evidence provided. So far: none. Maybe there's an explanation for that - and we'll find out in due course. But the Malkinian had previously written the following words in defense of torture in Pakistan:
An attack was imminent, and the information had to be obtained, no matter the method.
I have yet to read any evidence that an attack was "imminent". All the stories I've read have argued that the plot was for a dummy-run. Maybe Karol Sheinin has sources that I haven't read. If she has, she should provide them, or correct her post. If she has a different understanding of the term "imminent," then it would be helpful for her to say so. My point about the use of torture is related to the reliability of the evidence. Torture is renowned for providing faulty information, even in totalitarian states whose techniques some conservatives now endorse. My question is about whether the evidence is indeed faulty. We don't know. If there's not much there and the British are forced to release the suspects without charging them, the backlash against Blair will be enormous. And that will make future counter-terrorism harder. I should add I don't think I can be accused of disbelieving the potential of terrorists to strike again. I have a cover-story in the current New York Magazine premised on exactly that - on a far larger scale than anything alleged recently.
Malkin Award Nominee
16 Aug 2006 05:51 pm
"Not one word about the Webb campaign's dirty trick in having one of its volunteers, camcorder in hand, harrassing Allen as he campaigns around Virginia," - NRO's Mark Levin, outraged that a racist remark in a public speech by GOP senator George Allen could actually be recorded by a political opponent. (Hat tip: Kevin.)
Iraq Reconstruction
16 Aug 2006 04:31 pm
I guess if Bush and Rumsfeld had really hoped to reconstruct Iraq (and I now find that dubious, given the troop level they assigned), they might have found a better sub-constractor than Halliburton. Like, say, Hezbollah. Still, to give credit where it's due, Bush has essentially handed what's left of the Iraqi state to a Hezbollah clone in the Shiite south, so maybe the reconstruction will now actually begin - and serve the enemy's propaganda message, rather than ours. And the beat goes on.
The View From Your Window
16 Aug 2006 04:26 pm
Guildford, England, 3 pm.
Cheney, Incompetent Wimp
16 Aug 2006 02:43 pm
From Israel, we get the following headline:
Many Israelis Furious at How War Was Run
Didn't they get the Cheney-Rumsfeld memo? Don't they realize that, according to Joe Lieberman, no citizen in a democracy should criticize the conduct of a war while a terror threat is in place? Don't they understand that their job is to support their political leadership at all times and that any criticism is simply playing into the hands of terrorists? And yet few in Israel are saying these things. Apparently, the Israeli democracy, a democracy that is barely fifty years old, is much more robust than America's. America is too weak to allow its leaders to be criticized in wartime, its citizenry too pathetic to distinguish between assailing an administration for bungling a war to an almost comic extent and supporting terror - at least in the mind of Dick Cheney. Tom Friedman (TimesDelete) has the best response to Cheney's brutally consistent incompetence:
If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you 'tough guys' fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?
Bottom line: Mr Cheney, you're an incompetent wimp who didn't have the will to win in Iraq, or the integrity to uphold American values while fighting a deadly foe. You have thereby made us all less safe, and stained the reputation of America for decades. Your incompetence and brutality have made us both less feared and more despised in the world. Why is that not the rallying cry for the opposition this fall?
(Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP.)
YouTube of the Day
16 Aug 2006 02:24 pm
It's Dennis Leary, the Red Sox, a Jewish first baseman, and Mel Gibson - from last night's TV. Classic. Sublime. The best commentary on Gibson yet.
(Hat tip: Seth Mnookin's great blog and Deadspin.)
The Catholic Hierarchy vs Gays
16 Aug 2006 02:16 pm
The Viriginia hierarchy back a state constitutional amendment to strip gay couples of any legal protections for their relationships, deny their partner health benefits, access to hospital rooms, inheritance rights and simple human dignity. Read the statement and see if you can find any outreach to the minority being targeted for discrimination, any argument that treats the minority as human and deserving of respect. This is what the Catholic hierarchy now prioritizes: targeting social outcasts for further marginalization.
The Alleged UK Terror Plot
16 Aug 2006 12:58 pm
So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed imminent. Forgive me if my skepticism just ratcheted up a little notch. Under a law that the Tories helped weaken, the suspects can be held without charges for up to 28 days. Those days are ticking by. Remember: the British authorities had all these people under surveillance; they did not want to act last week; there was no imminent threat of anything but a possible "dummy-run," whatever deranged guest-bloggers at Malkin say. (Correction, please.) Bush and Blair discussed whether to throw Britain's airports into chaos over the weekend before the crackdown occurred.
Then we have the following comment from Craig Murray. Craig Murray was Tony Blair's ambassador to Uzbekistan whose internal memo complaining about evidence procured by out-sourced torture created a flap a while back. He is skeptical. Money quote:
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth ...
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why?
I'd be interested in the number of plotters who had passports. How could they even stage a dummy-run with no passports? And what bomb-making materials did they actually have? These seem like legitimate questions to me; the British authorities have produced no evidence so far. If the only evidence they have was from torturing someone in Pakistan, then they have nothing that can stand up in anything like a court. I wonder if this story is going to get more interesting. I wonder if Lieberman's defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn't find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.
Been there. Done that. Learned my lesson.
Quote for the Day
16 Aug 2006 08:34 am
"I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terrorized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they're just coming the long way around," - blogger John Rogers.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
MGM and FGM
15 Aug 2006 10:09 pm
A reader writes:
I realize that you may find male circumcision to be heinous and unnecessary, and for the record I agree with you, but I find your use of the term MGM to be completely distasteful. By using the term MGM, you're piggy backing on the FGM (female genital mutilation) cause and comparing male circumcision to FGM, which is dishonest to say the least. While male circumcision may diminish male pleasure, the vast majority of FGM results in the complete removal of a woman's clitoris and in the most serious case, infibulation, the removal of clitoris, all labia, and the closing of the wound into the size of a matchstick. As a result, both menses and urine pass through this hole and infection is often the result.
Childbirth results in severe tearing, and, unlike male circumcision which decreases the rate of HIV transmission, infibulation increases the risk. In short, one cannot compare male circumcision with FGM, because by doing so, you're merely making FGM look more innocuous. I urge you to find pictures and compare the two, you'll probably regret the comparison you're making.
I agree with everything this reader says, but one. FGM is exponentially morally, medically and psychologically worse than MGM. It's an evil practice. But it is untrue that MGM "may diminish male pleasure." It drastically decreases male sexual sensitivity. In the era of AIDS, some parents may believe that diminishing their child's future sexual pleasure is worth the benefit of extra protection from HIV. But the trade-off exists.
YouTube of the Day
15 Aug 2006 08:20 pm
How on earth did this classic blooper find its way into the head of Fox News Anchor Shep Smith? I YouTube. You decide.
The Murder of 61 Children
15 Aug 2006 07:06 pm
The BBC is on the case of the orphanage massacre in Sri Lanka. Good for them. But the MSM seems eerily silent. What do you think the coverage would be if the Israeli government killed 61 children in an anti-terror bombing campaign? Front-page A-1. Sri Lanka? Nada. And people wonder why some of us believe much of the media has an anti-Israel bias.
The View From Your Window
15 Aug 2006 07:00 pm
Little Italy, Cleveland, Ohio, today, in a celebration of the Feast of the Assumption.
Quote for the Day II
15 Aug 2006 06:33 pm
"Hezbollah killed more cows than people in Israel" - Michael Totten, in his latest missive from the Israel-Lebanon border.
Quote for the Day
15 Aug 2006 06:26 pm
"There were other (U.S.) government agencies who would come into the prison and handle prisoners. I can't say which agencies, but you can probably guess. One night, this Black Hawk landed at about 4 a.m., and a couple guys came in with a prisoner and took him to tier 1, put sheets up so that nobody could see, and spent the rest of the night in there. They told us to stay away, so we did. Then a couple hours later, they came back out. They were like, "The prisoner is dead." They asked for ice to pack him, and then they said, "You guys clean this up. We weren't here. Have a good day.' Got back on the bird and took off, left the dead body right there. Those guys can come in and kill a guy, and there's nothing you can do. There's no record of them. They were never there. They don't exist," - Joe Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, in this month's GQ.
Yep: a few rogue grunts on the night shift. Yeah, that's what it was. And is.
The Debate Over Conservatism
15 Aug 2006 05:15 pm
It speaks well of NRO that the resistance to the religious make-over of conservatism is finally being aired more thoroughly. Here's Heather Mac Donald yesterday:
It is just not the case that only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives.
Meanwhile, another reality-based, liberty-loving conservative, Andrew Stuttaford, states what is now undeniable, it seems to me:
Conservatism is being changed (to use a more neutral word) by the greater role that an explicitly religious activism is playing within it. Specifically, it's easy to discern a strain of conservatism emerging (and within the GOP and the administration it has emerged a long way) that more resembles European Christian Democracy (or, in its more robust forms, Gaullism) than the small government, skeptical, 'leave me alone' conservatism that brought so many into the fold and which (for what it's worth) I, for one, prefer.
It may be that turning conservatism into a religiously-centered Southern-based, big-government movement makes electoral sense. I doubt it. But my objection to it is not that it hinders Republican dominance, but that I disagree with it. I believe in a separation of church and state, balanced budgets, low taxes, law that is as neutral as possible between competing moral and religious claims, and a "leave-me-alone" presumption when it comes to government power. And I'm sick of being told that excludes me from being conservative any more. I venture to suggest I'm not the only one. Vive la resistance.
Kerry Was Right
15 Aug 2006 04:15 pm
That's George F. Will's conclusion today:
Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates' debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."
Military force is still essential, although it can sometimes be more powerful withheld as a deterrent than unleashed in an asymmetrical war. Few also doubt that democratic reform would help the Middle East in the long-term. In the short-term, however, it might be terribly dangerous, as the increasingly popular Hamas and Hezbollah regimes in the West Bank and Lebanon are proving. But what has struck me in the last year or so, as someone who has always supported democratization as one tool to defang Islamism, is whence many of these religious fanatics are coming. Many of the most lethal Islamist agents of terror have been coming from democratic societies, like Britain. Many are middle-class or even aristocrats, like bin Laden. If the real root causes are in the fundamentalist psyche, then police-work and internal religious reformation are indeed our most effective weapons. I regret my decision to ditch Bush in '04, despite my extreme distaste for John Kerry, with less and less regret.
(Photo: Charlie Niebergall/AP.)
Bunker News
15 Aug 2006 03:23 pm
Andy McCarthy is now calling John Podhoretz a leftist. Excuse my unseemly enjoyment.
In Case You Were Wondering ...
15 Aug 2006 02:44 pm
The miraculous YouTube is down for repairs. The embedded links will return at some point.
If 9/11 Hadn't Happened
15 Aug 2006 02:03 pm
I blog from a parallel present in an alternative universe in this week's New York magazine. Here's how it begins:
September 1, 2006, 7:32 a.m.
After a somber beginning, the president finally found his voice last night. It’s been hard for him to connect viscerally to the public, and the formality of a congressional address doesn’t exactly help. He remains awkward, stiff, emotionally detached. That strange interlude in the 2004 campaign, when he finally seemed human enough to be elected, has evaporated again—just when he needs it most. His approval ratings still haven’t gotten past the mid-fifties—and it doesn’t help, of course, that he lost the popular vote the one time it counted. Karmic payback, I suppose.
But the facts are on his side. As he amassed the evidence for WMD materials and hundreds (possibly thousands) of trained terrorists in Afghanistan’s camps, as he made the case for what he calls “aggressive defense” against the Taliban, as he linked this threat to the newly belligerent regime in Tehran, he gained a certain logical and emotional traction. At least I hope he did. This is what he ran on, and although it’s taken him almost two agonizing years to get to this moment, he still gets credit in my book. Yes, it took aerial photographs of alleged chemical factories in Kandahar to get him to closure. But he got there—which is more than Bush ever did in four years.
Yep, without 9/11, Gore was elected in 2004. And he ran to Bush's right on Islamo-fascism. Read on ...
George Allen's Gibson Moment
15 Aug 2006 01:02 pm
So we now have evidence that he is also happy to use ethnic putdowns for people supporting his opponents. Money quote:
"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great," Allen said, as his supporters began to laugh. After saying that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls. Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."
It's almost classic populist bigotry: create an enemy out there - fags, Indians, Jews, Hollywood, immigrants, whoever - and use them to build support for you as representing the "real world of Virginia." In one word: Rove. Yes, the word was deliberate and Allen knows what it means. Some background on his racist college prank here and his fondness for the Confederate flag here.
Authorizing Cruelty
15 Aug 2006 12:37 pm
Marty Lederman has an important take on the latest draft war crime bills the White House has been circulating on the Hill. Marty - who has emerged as the most perceptive and subtle legal analyst on the whole torture issue - thinks the whole Bush-critic emphasis on exculpating civilian officials from war crimes charges is off-base. (I'd be included in his criticism.) His interpretation of the draft legislation is that it is designed to ensure that the CIA retain the right to cruel treatment of detainees, including potentially "water-boarding." Money quote:
I happen to think it would be a mistake to exclude humiliating and degrading treatment from the WCA. But many will disagree with me. What's important is to realize that this dispute about how "degrading" treatment should be handled is not why the Administration is proposing an amendment to the WCA. Their public focus on subsection (1)(c) of CA3 - the provision dealing with humiliating and degarding treatment - is a feint to throw everyone off the scent. The real issue is the CIA. And that agency is not so interested in making use of the stupid and offensive techniques that were used on Al-Qahtani at GTMO - religious degradation, underwear on the head, etc.
What they are interested in are the "enhanced" techniques that they've been authorized to use -- including hypothermia, threats of violence to the detainee's family, stress positions, "long-time standing," prolonged sleep deprivation, and possibly even waterboarding. With respect to these techniques, the issue isn't the ban on humiliation or degradation - it's that they are "cruel treatment," perhaps even "torture," under subsection (1)(a) of Common Article 3.
And so the administration wants to rewrite the War Crimes Act to permit the CIA to continue the KGB-innovated "cold cells", the immersion in freezing water, the threats to wives and children, and the "water-boarding" techniques that the Bush administration has made part of American military practice. Knowing how passionately Cheney and Rumsfeld feel about retaining the right to inflict cruelty on military prisoners, this makes sense to me.
The View From Your Window
15 Aug 2006 09:22 am
Gilroy, California, 8.30 am.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Ressentiment and Our Time
14 Aug 2006 07:44 pm
A reader writes:
You are correct in saying that the Muslim mind set is that of Nietzsche's ressentiment. However, you err in saying "but with God re-attached." We all know that Nietzsche had his Zarathustra declare that god is dead (god was dead, at least in those days). But the
