Category Archives: The World

No finger-pointing

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Did anyone besides me note the extreme irony in this item on NPR this morning?

Asked by anchor Renée Montagne about how the rest of the country was reacting to the anger of many Pakistani quake victims over "inadequate response" on the part of their government to their plight, Michael Sullivan said:

Renée, I think everyone here understands that what happened was absolutely terrible, and that the Kashmiris, who were most affected, have every right to be frustrated by the fact that they are not getting what they think is timely relief from this terrible tragedy. But at the same time, I think that many people here … all over the country are actually pulling together…

And then he said (and this is the really good part),

And oddly enough, the political opposition here which often, oftentimes uh, just will go after the General Musharraf at the slightest drop of a hat, they’re not really doing that this time around. The leader of the main opposition parties are, the leaders are saying that, you know, we do have to pull together, this is a difficult time; fingerpointing can come later; let’s just do what we can do right now to help the people on the ground.

How about that? Here we’ve got a military dictator who has people among his political opposition who would literally like to slit his throat, and opposition parties are sufficiently civilized to say, in essence, this is no time for a "blame game."

Kind of reminds me of something I said in a recent posting, back when Democrats were blaming the president, and Republicans were blaming the governor and the mayor, for the mess in New Orleans. But hey, you can’t expect a primitive, savage, shaky democracy such as ours to produce politicians who are able to rise above partisan interest in a moment of national crisis, can you?

Dare we dream?

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Actually, the item on "Morning Edition" that followed the one referenced in my last posting holds much greater significance, and is worth listening to if only for this: It makes a passing reference to the possibility that Ariel Sharon, under attack from within his own party over the Gaza withdrawal, was thinking about forming a new, centrist party to challenge both Likud and Labour — if Bibi is successful in his attempt to overthrow him. (Which he was not — this time.)

Now set aside for a moment whether including "Sharon" and "centrist" in the same sentence constitutes an oxymoron (I would argue that it does not, given some of his moves lately — if you’ll let me ignore some of his other moves lately). What interested me about that was this:

If the leader of a nation who’s very existence is constantly under threat — a place where differences between parties are about the life or death of the nation, not just abstract ideology — can seriously think about minting a new party that charts a middle way, then why on Earth can’t we do the same here in the States?

Imagine a party in which John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden or our own Lindsey Graham might actually have a chance of getting the presidential nomination — or which, in the past, might have nominated a Scoop Jackson or a Howard Baker. Now that would be a party that might cause me to question my universal disdain toward the very idea of parties.

Exchange with Ted Rall

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Since some readers regularly e-mail me samples of his work, I thought there might be interest in this piece that Ted Rall sent me yesterday, and in the brief exchange we had on the subject. I think he was hoping I would buy the piece. He doesn’t know I’m not in a buying mode. In fact, he has my sympathy because fewer and fewer papers are likely to be in a buying mode.

Anyway, my initial reaction to the piece was as follows:

Actually, Ted, the only way we’re going to win is if it DOES become "boring"
enough that al-Zarqawi can’t get coverage any more. He can’t win, except by
demoralizing the American public to the point that it just wants to quit. And he
can’t do that without coverage.

But rest assured, Katrina will eventually fade into the background enough to
return to the daily suicide bombing being repeated over and over on the 24/7
boob tube news. And al Zarqawi will be a happy man, and won’t have to try so
hard to depress us.

Mr. Rall responded thusly:

It depends on whether we view al Zarqawi as the leader of a movement or just one more personality heading up one particular pyramid of insurgent cells (guess which one I think it is). I think the Iraqi insurgency is intrinsically undefeatable, first and foremost because the US isn’t willing to commit the half million troops that would have been needed to enforce total domination and law and order.

To which I responded,

I cite him as the guy taking credit for the biggest recent attempt to get our
attention. He and al Qaeda are indeed but one of the factions hoping we’ll just
get demoralized and go away…

Mr. Rall is right that we (if he means our leaders) have never been willing to commit enough troops. And he’s right that the terrorist attacks over there haven’t garnered the same kind of overplay in the U.S. media to which the terrorists are accustomed (due to Katrina). But he’s wrong about the rest. The various insurgents — al Qaeda, other assorted foreign jihadists, Sadr’s people, never-say-die Baathists, and so forth — can’t defeat us. Not unless we become so demoralized that we decide to let them.

Has America supported its wars?

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This really should be required reading for anyone out there laboring under the illusion that there is something uniquely awful and unAmerican about our involvement in Iraq — or in Vietnam, for that matter.

You think the American public is turning against the Iraq War in a big way? Well, get back to me when we’ve had a reaction as awful as the New York draft riots that Abe Lincoln had to deal with.

John Prine was not expressing such an unusual sentiment when he sang: "We lost Davy in the Korean war/And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore."

Basically, it’s tough to maintain public opinion in favor of military operations in a democracy, even when they are necessary. The reasons why a war may be just and necessary are usually far too complex to keep before the electorate for an extended period of time. That’s why you see oversimplifications. All anyone who is now against the war seems to remember is "WMD," when it was and is much more complicated than that.

Anti-war activists almost always have the advantage, because their message is simple: Stop the killing. That’s why in the long term,  opinion starts to sway their way. And that’s a serious problem when you engaged in something as extremely long-term as the War on Terror.

Yet another column, w/ links

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Leadership wanted to explain need to succeed in Iraq
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    “I DON’T KNOW how long it’s gonna take. It’s gonna take a while. And it’s gonna cost more money, and it’s gonna cost more blood.”
    That’s what U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham told the Columbia Rotary week before last regarding Iraq. During that meeting, and in subsequent interviews, he talked about how important it is that the Iraq_mp_1 nation’s leaders explain to the American people — over and over — the connection between what we’re doing in Iraq and the war on terror, the absolute necessity of staying there until a stable democracy is achieved, and just how long and costly that is going to be.
    Not that we have a choice to make: “The American people have no option. It was never an option.” The fight that we are engaged in in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere started long before this date four years ago.
    “The root causes of this war had been building over time,” he said. “We ignored them. We disengaged. There were plenty of signs the terrorists were getting stronger and bolder, and we sent them the wrong signal.”
    Until Sept. 11, 2001. After that, we fought back. But there’s a lot more involved in achieving peace and security than just fighting.
    “There are elements of the War on Terror beyond the use of military force, and they are going to be expensive,” the senator said.
     Those elements are also the ones likely to take the longest time, he believes. People in Iraq and other Islamic countries have to realize that “Winner-take-all politics is not a democracy” — or at least, not the kind that works. They have to get not only the politics right, but the fundamental notions of the rule of law. “A courtroom is a place for the unpopular cause,” he said. “How long does it take to get honest judges? A long time.”
     And what about the home front? He agrees that we have to have a better energy strategy, and that includes both drilling in Alaska and an emphasis on conservation. It is, the senator said, “imperative that we get away from fossil fuels in general and Mideast oil in particular.” And we need to turn back to nuclear energy. Other countries, including France, have not had our qualms about using that cleaner source of power. “Surely we can be as bold as the French,” he told the Rotarians to general laughter.
     And then there’s hydrogen, although that is a long-term strategy. “We in South Carolina are going to become, if I have anything to do with it, the Detroit of the hydrogen economy — without the crime.”
    Meanwhile, in Iraq, “The more troops in the country, the better,” for the foreseeable future, the senator said.
    His explanation for why polls increasingly show that the American people want to pull out of Iraq is that they are not getting an accurate picture of what is happening. All they see is quick images of mayhem on television or “a few words in the paper” about the latest car bombing, and they despair. They think, “These people can’t help themselves; why should we help them?” Especially when it costs American lives.
    But Iraq is worth fighting for largely because of the courage of the Iraqi people — the majority that wants their country to be peaceful and free. It is “the one place in the world where people are standing up to terrorists right in their own backyards,” he said. That makes it one place where we have to win if we’re going to win the larger war that we only fully engaged four years ago.
    Aside from roughly 1,900 Americans, thousands of Iraqis have died in this cause, and yet they keep on trying. We have to “stand behind those who are willing to put their lives on the line to build a better Iraq.”
    “If you talk about leaving soon, you don’t understand the situation,” he said. And more than once, he told me, “I want to fire the next general who talks about taking one troop out next year.”
“We’re talking about an exit strategy when we should be talking about a winning strategy.”
    But what about members of Congress, including those in his own party, who are looking at the polls and talking “exit strategy”?
    “Make ’em vote,” he said. “Take (Sen. Russ) Feingold’s resolution (to create a timetable for withdrawing troops) or something and make them vote for it.” He seems quit
e sure they won’t.
    OK, fine. So we have to win in Iraq, the American people don’t fully understand why, we need more troops rather than fewer, it’s going to be more expensive than most taxpayers realize, and we have an administration in place that can’t seem to explain that, and that wants to cut taxes and do everything on the cheap. What about that?
    First, Sen. Graham says he and other supporters of the war in Congress share much of the blame — for being too optimistic about Iraq going in, and for not explaining the stakes well enough to the public.
    He also acknowledges that the president hasn’t done all he should: “His challenge is a constant focus that has been missing.” President Bush used to talk about the “long haul”; more recently he soft-pedaled that.
    But he has seen the president change in recent days. “I think the president is learning from Katrina. I see this president adjusting.” Yes, I’ve seen some of the same things. I’ve actually seen him, for once, admit error, and work hard to make up for it.
    Still, while I agree with pretty much everything that Sen. Graham has to say on the subject, I am Bush_honor_guard not as confident as he is that George W. Bush will exercise the leadership necessary to the situation. I agree with the senator, for instance, that the president gave some very good speeches explaining the stakes in the first days right after Sept. 11, 2001. But that was a long time ago.
    All of that said, I hope Mr. Graham is right. Because this is the president we’ve got; we don’t have any choice there, either. If leadership does not emerge, from Congress as well as from the president, we will fail in this war. And this nation — indeed, the civilized world — can’t afford that.
    Ultimately, as the senator said, “History will judge us not by when we left, but by what we left.”

Physicianow, heal thyself

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I was completely stunned when a regular correspondent shared this with me via e-mail. I could only respond thus:

What a presumptuous pile of pontification! How dare he presume to know the soul of another this way, and to pass judgment on it based upon such guesses? Does he think his literary license gives him the right to write omnisciently about real people the way he does fictional characters? Well, it doesn’t.

I’ve got major problems with this president, including many decisions he’s made (or not made) with regard to this crucial war. I often wonder whether I want us to succeed in Iraq more than George W. Bush does, and some days I’m quite sure I do.

But as healthy as my editorialist’s ego is, I would NEVER have the gargantuan gall to write something like this about another human being. I suppose one has to be a lionized author, sitting in the Hamptons contemplating in awe one’s own greatness, to produce rhetorical excess this extreme. Alas, we lesser lights must content ourselves with more humble assertions.

You know, he just plain looks a lot more intellectual than I do. Maybe if I grew back the beard, I could be more pompous, too. Not that I’d try to compete in HIS league.

The debate continues…

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Wow. I was so overwhelmed and lulled into a placid state by the kind comments in response to my Sunday column that I didn’t notice until just now that this debate was still going on (and this one, too, in a related vein).

Rather than continue to jump in with my answers and asides in the comments stream, I’m going to respond to a couple of my correspondents with this new posting — largely because I still haven’t mastered a way to insert links, much less files, conveniently into the comments format. I continue to admire those savvy folk who have figured it out.

Anyway, Portia said I had explained my lack of military service — one of the great regrets, or perhaps I should say gripes (since it wasn’t my choice), of my life — in a recent column, but she couldn’t get to it to provide a link. I’ve mentioned it more than once, but I have a feeling that this is the one to which she refers. If not, I’ll go back and look for another one.

Also, the link that Mike C provided was interesting, and I recommend it (although I got lost in exactly what the late William Jennings Bryan Dorn‘s namesake was urging Woodrow Wilson to do; I really need to bone up on that period). But I bring it up here because its title, and this passage …

The profound interpretation recognizes that if there is an invasion the decision for it and for its sweeping historical consequences will be in the hands of one man, The President of the United States, and that he – and he alone – must take complete moral responsibility for this massive intervention in the fate of our species. And this fact is conveyed in the title of Mr. Hammerschlag’s article: it will forever be Bush’s War, no matter what the outcome.

… reminded me of an older column of mine (and here’s where I really had to go to a posting rather than a comment, since I had to attach a Word file, that piece no longer being online).

Oh, and in answer to "Amos Nunoy‘s" last question, namely, "Did you know it wasn’t about mass weapons the whole time? You didn’t say," I most certainly did NOT write "Hey, there’s no WMD." Why? Because I thought, like everyone else, that Saddam had at least one variety of WMD (he had used it in the past, after all), and was working feverishly to develop others. In fact, we mentioned it editorially among the reasons to invade at the time — partly because that cause was more important to others on our editorial board than it was to me, but also because it WAS part of the argument. It just wasn’t what was important to me, and would not have been reason enough alone to justify invasion in MY mind. You can tell this by what I did stress at the time, such as (at least in passing) in the column linked in the paragraph above. Or, more to the point, this one. In fact, the latter is worth quoting here, in case you have trouble calling up that old file:

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons – geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.

That was written, by the way, the month before the 2003 invasion. You’ll notice, "Amos," that while I didn’t specifically mention WMD (because, once again, I thought that threat, while insufficient, was real) I DID say that the president, for Realpolitik reasons, wasn’t frankly stating exactly WHY we had to go into Iraq — or at least, wasn’t stressing it enough to suit me. That’s why that column was headlined, "The uncomfortable truth about why we may have to invade Iraq." I thought it was important to state those reasons more prominently beforehand, so I did.

Jim DeMint meeting

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I’ve had trouble this summer keeping up with my commitment, stated back when I started this blog, to let you know about meetings the editorial board has with newsmakers and other guests — although I have reported the main ones. I did mention Gresham Barrett the other day, and today I’ll catch up by telling you about Sen. Jim DeMint’s meeting with us back on Tuesday. (And by the way, Demint_2the picture is not from our meeting. It’s an AP photo of the senator talking about bringing a new nuclear power facility to the Savannah River Site during a press conference in Aiken a week earlier.)

It was fairly uneventful — Lee Bandy, who was there as an observer representing the newsroom, didn’t write anything live off of it — but there were a few items of interest worth sharing:

  • First, he was fairly proud of having held the federal highway bill’s gargantuan total down to something close to what the White House had wanted, while managing to help South Carolina out in some significant ways. Since Cindi Scoppe is going to address that S.C. impact in the paper in the next few days, I’ll leave elaboration on that point to her.
  • Rest assured, Gov. Sanford — this is one Republican who is not coming after your job. Rather than criticize the governor’s performance on ecodevo, or complain that he’s hard to work with in that area, Sen. DeMint said, "We work well with him." He added that "I feel we’re poised for incredible growth in the state." Besides, "We’re not easy to reach, either."
  • He said he thought it strange that Majority Leader Bill Frist, who generally keeps a low profile on issues and works for consensus within the caucus, should choose to get out in front on stem cells, of all things. He also noted that folks keep defining the issue inaccurately: "The issue isn’t whether we do research; it’s whether the federal government pays for it." Good point, that.
  • It was good to hear him say that he’s learned a lot from traveling to the world’s hot spots and learning about foreign affairs. "You’re expected as a senator to be involved with that," he said. I’m glad he realizes that now. Last year, when I asked him to talk about America’s role in the world, he sort of blinked and said something along the lines of, "You mean, besides trade?"
  • He talked for a while about his health plan, which he said stresses "individual ownership" and portability. But the most interesting thing he said on the subject — and somehow we got onto another subject before following up with questions (something I need to do the next time I talk to him) — was this: "We’ve got to go there (meaning something like his plan), or we’re going to go to national health care relatively soon, because where we are is not going to work." At this morning’s board meeting, we were discussing that, and sort of kicking ourselves that we didn’t get him to elaborate.
  • Scared me no end by suggesting it would be possible to draw down U.S. troops somewhat in 2006. I continue to believe that would be suicidal; we need to go the other way, if anything.

I’ve been getting comments from anti-war folks upset because in my Wednesday column I said that withdrawing from Iraq now would be like "spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives." Well, I stand by that statement, and I add a corollary: If Republicans pull us out of Iraq in order to help themselves get re-elected, they’ll be doing something even worse than that.

Wednesday column, with links

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Where have all the heroes gone?
Nowhere, actually
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    APPARENTLY, there are no war heroes any more. At least, there are none that America feels like lifting up as examples and celebrating. This was the premise of a piece in The New York Times’ Week in Review section Sunday that explained some things to me.
    There are, of course, actual heroes in the war on terror. The Times piece gave the names of three of them.
    The problem is, I hadn’t heard of them. You probably hadn’t, either. And the contrast between that ignorance on our part, and the way Sgt. Alvin York and Audie Murphy (whose picture, portraying himself in the autobiographical Hollywood movie, “To Hell and Back,” was the dominant feature of the section’s front page) were lionized during and after their wars, is striking — and shocking. And stupid, if, as the story suggests, it reflects a deliberate policy decision on the part of our government.
    The three mentioned were:

    In an earlier age, Sgt. Hester would have been brought home and sent across the country to sell War Bonds. But we don’t do that today, and not only because there are no War Bonds. (Remember, in this war, the homefront is not being asked to sacrifice in any way whatsoever; instead, we have tax cuts and soaring deficits.)
    The NYT piece gave the following, admittedly speculative, “reasons” for this: “(P)ublic opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”
    Amen to that last. Who get portrayed as heroes? Jessica Lynch and football star Pat Tillman — both victims. One was wounded and captured, the other killed by friendly fire.
    And we hear about the mostly unsung victims who are killed, without any chance to fight back, by roadside IEDs. The message we get from that? “There’s just no use in continuing to try.”
    The actual heroes do get mentioned. President Bush spoke of Sgt. Peralta — a Mexican immigrant who enlisted the day after he got his “green card” — at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast (surely you heard about it). And Sgt. Smith’s name pops up 154 times in the last two years in the news databases I searched. It’s sort of hard to keep the one Medal of Honor awarded in Iraq a complete secret, after all.
    But compare Sgt. Smith’s name recognition to Brad Pitt’s. Or Sgt. Hester’s to Janet Jackson’s. Or Rafael Peralta’s to Rafael Palmeiro’s. See what we elevate as worthy of our attention?
    Let’s confront another rationale the Times identified: Divided public opinion gives all the more reason to stress the nobility and achievements, not only of those who perform traditional acts of valor in combat, but of those who build schools, or train the new Iraqi army.
    Our leaders fear to confront attitudes such as this one, expressed by one Kevin Canterbury in a letter to The Boston Globe:
    “I am disgusted by the American media’s glorification of the blood sport we call war,” he begins. (What glorification? Has this guy seen the news?) “Truly sincere, honorable people like Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who make almost superhuman sacrifices to protect freedom and democracy in America, are used as props to personalize and humanize the big lie that the Iraq debacle is a just and noble endeavor.æ.æ.æ. There is nothing romantic about this war.”
    No war was ever romantic. It is always an unbelievably horrible, nasty, bloody business. Society used to hide that, and do its best to romanticize combat. But to me, heroism means a lot more when depicted against the brutal reality: Are you more impressed by Audie Murphy in the sanitized battle scenes of “To Hell and Back,” or by the portrayal of Dick Winters’ deeds in HBO’s painfully realistic “Band of Brothers”?
    Those of us who believe this war is necessary should not flinch from its horrors. We should hold up what heroes manage to accomplish in spite of it all. Are we squeamish about the fact that the heroism of Sgts. Smith and Hester involved killing the enemy? Yes, we are; even I am. But I think most Americans would appreciate what they’ve done, if they knew enough about them.
Confront directly the attitudes of those like Mr. Canterbury who take the untenable stance of “supporting the troops but not the war.”
    As a political tactic, this is a smart improvement over the Vietnam-era practice of spitting (figuratively if not literally) on returning veterans. But when people say “support the troops by bringing them home,” I see it as spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives. That’s what abandoning Iraq would mean.
    Soldiers kill. Soldiers get killed — and not in pretty ways, keeling over saying “They got me,” without a trace of blood. They get killed in the manner of Sgt. Peralta, whose remains could only be identified by a tattoo on his shoulder.
    If we can’t face that, let’s give up on the whole thing. Let’s disband the military altogether, and just hope the rest of the world decides to show its gratitude by being nice to us from here on.
    Or we can face a grim task, and openly respect those who distinguish themselves in performing that task for us while we sit on our broad behinds watching the Michael Jackson trial.
    On the day after Sgt. Peralta died, his little brother received the first and last letter the Marine ever wrote to him. “Be proud of being an American,” he wrote. Young Ricardo Peralta should take that advice. And America, returning the favor, should be proud of his big brother.

Left meets right

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Who says left and right are polarized and will never get together? Not I.

Today I received copies of this same piece in The Independent from two very different people.

The first was Tom Turnipseed, whose anti-war views arise naturally from his leftist leanings (naturally to him, anyway — I continue to believe it’s ironic that "conservatives" support, and "liberals" oppose, what is a liberal war in the JFK mold).

Breaking my own rule about not responding to e-mail, but being in one of those moods in which I can’t help myself, I wrote back to Tom to say:

Well, that’s helpful. I suppose we should all go jump off a bridge or something, seeing as how everything is so hopeless.

What this writer misses is that it was already a Big War. I believe it was Tom Friedman who wondered, in the week after Sept. 11, 2001, whether we all realized that we were engaged in World War III. We were then (and had been for some time; it’s just that few Americans turned their attention to the jihadists until they pulled off something really big right here on our shores), and are now.

And it was never, ever going to be small or easy. And it’s going to go on for a long time.

Moments later, I received the exact same article from Rebekah Sutherland.

That’s quite a combo. Seeing as how "Reb" once informed me I was a socialist (and she was not joking), I wonder what she would call Tom?

If these two folks can be so in sync that they send me the same piece to read on the same day, there’s hope for more conventional "liberals" and "conservatives" a little closer to the center to get over their "red state/blue state" alienation and start interacting in a more civil manner.

And if there’s hope for that, there’s hope for all of us. I guess I won’t jump off that bridge just yet.
 

Refreshing intellectual honesty

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In a professional sense, there is nothing I admire more than intellectual honesty. It is one of the reasons why I rail against political parties and ideologies, because they encourage people to approach an issue or event thinking, "What’s in this for me and my side?" or "How do I spin this to support my preconceived notions?" instead of "What’s really going on here, and what are its true implications, regardless of what I want them to be, and what is the best course for the greater good?"

This is human nature (in the sense that it is something that someone who wants to be a better person should strive to rise above). And the moment one declares a party affiliation or embraces an ideology, one has surrendered to the temptation to follow this easy path. That’s why I avoid doing those things (one reason, anyway). But am I immune to the pull of this corruption? Of course not. I make my living laying opinions out before the public, and it is in my nature as much as it is in anyone else’s to approach each issue or event wanting to find in it justification, rather than refutation, of the position that every reader knows I have taken. After all, a portion of my reputation, such as it is, depends upon my opinions holding up reasonably well to scrutiny. But my reputation is worthless if I’m not able to able to resist that temptation sufficiently to see things as they are.

Whether I succeed in that or not, I leave to others to judge over time. My purpose in this posting is to recognize such intellectual honesty in another writer.

I get so sick of both knee-jerk criticism and knee-jerk defense of what our nation is doing in Iraq, that when I see someone approach the issue in an open-eyed manner, it is refreshing, and renews my faith in the potential of the human race. So it is that I would like to bring this piece from The Washington Post to your attention. It is written by an expert (which I am not) who supports our mission in Iraq (as I do) and has done so since the start (as I have), but because he cares so much about the mission, is enormously frustrated with mistakes the Bush administration has made in this critical endeavor (as am I). So you might say I think this guy is intellectually honest because I agree with him (mostly, anyway). And you may be right.

But there’s one important way in which this writer is different from me — his son is a soldier, and "Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated…." That gives a particular urgency to Eliot A. Cohen’s soul searching. And his own display of honesty is all the more admirable because he has been identified, fairly or not, with a particular ideology. The piece is well worth the read.

Probably my favorite part appears at the very end. I include it here in case you have trouble getting to the link:

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders’ chief concern. If we fail in Iraq — and I don’t think we will — it won’t be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth — an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

Both the cheerleaders and those who are doing all they can to make public support for the war "shaky" should read this realistic assessment. Then they should drop their simplistic poses and think about how we proceed from here.

Shame we must not forget

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This week we mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, and I wonder what we have learned about evil and how we should respond to it. We’ve learned a lot of details about what happened, from testimony before the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. We know that some of the monsters responsible for it, such as General Ratko Mladic himself, are still at large.

But then, he’s not the only one responsible, is he? How about all the nations that stood by and let it happen, even though Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, supposedly under the protection of UN (specifically, Dutch) troops. I don’t really get a say in what monsters Srebrenica1 choose to do. But all of us who live in liberal democracies have a say in whether our nations act when they have the power to do so.

The awful thing is, Western democracies have tended to wait until the worst has already happened before acting. Consider the last part of The Economist‘s reflection on the subject last week:

Visiting the cemetery in September 2003, Bill Clinton also gave a remarkably blunt, and politically astute, analysis of the political effects of the massacre. "Srebrenica", he said, "was the beginning of the end of genocide in Europe. It enabled me to secure NATO support for the bombing that led to…peace." In other words, without Srebrenica, America could not have won the support of its European allies for a sharp switch to a war-fighting (and thus war-ending) strategy in Bosnia.

On this reading, at least, Srebrenica was a sort of genocide to end all genocides (in one part of the world, anyway). It was also a necessary prerequisite to the dropping of the "bombs for peace" — which, by triggering a final, vast wave of forced population movement, left Bosnia’s military balance, and above all its ethnic balance, in a state acceptable to the region’s power-brokers.

For the bereaved mothers and widows gathering at the cemetery this week, that surely raises a hard question: was the shock of a massacre the only thing that could make the western powers change policy, and settle their own differences? Was there no other way?

Was it really necessary for 8,000 men and boys to be murdered in cold blood right under the noses of the troops of advanced Western nations for civilization to rouse itself from its torpor and confront evil? And if so, how long does that inoculation against fecklessness and indifference last? Must we keep on getting booster shots — in Rwanda, in the Sudan, and yes, in New York and Washington on Srebrenica2 9/11 for us to be willing to confront the menace. And how long does each of those updates last? Seldom long enough.

Today’s column, with links

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You want fear? Outrage? Londoners won’t give you the satisfaction

    THE MAN arrived at Queen Alexandra’s House, right next to the Royal Albert Hall, just as expected Thursday.
     “I’m here to deliver the carpet,” he said. “Isn’t this a mess?” He then went about his business delivering the carpet.
     “This,” of course, was the bombings that struck the London Underground and one of the city’s emblematic double-decker buses, killing dozens of Britons in a few moments that shook the world.
    But aside from those immediately involved, it didn’t shake up Britons all that much. The above anecdote was related to me by our own Randle Christian, whose fuller account of her impressions appears on the facing page.
     You will also find there the observations of Phil Lader, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He wrote the piece on his Blackberry Friday while riding from London, through the Chunnel and on to Paris. To Mr. Lader, who wears more hats with more prestigious firms here and over there than I have ball caps in my closet, this is not an atypical day.
     We sort of played phone and e-mail tag throughout his journey, and finally made voice contact as he arrived in Paris.
    With apologies — which I assured him were quite unnecessary, as I knew exactly what he meant — he suggested that watching American TV news Thursday night from London, he was struck by how the tone and emphasis of it was a bit… off.
     You’d have thought from the U.S. telly that there was pandemonium throughout the city, and Britain6terror the length and breadth of Britain. Hardly. There was “no sign of panic,” he said, even in areas close to the actual incidents.
     There had been much more excitement on Wednesday, when Britons were literally dancing in the streets over having snatched the 2012 Olympics away from Paris. When I observed that such behavior as that didn’t sound much like the British (even with the added sweetener of having stolen a march on their neighbors across the channel), he ascribed it to the fact that “The pubs did a very good business” that day.
     They did all right on Thursday as well. Andrew Sullivan’s blog quotes one Londoner this way: “Work’s over but there’s little chance of getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub until the traffic has died down. It’s not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it’s quiet defiance.”
     Or as Mr. Sullivan quoted from a site called “The London News Review:” “What the (expletive) do you think you’re doing? This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us….”
     In describing this unflappability, Mr. Lader worried, “You risk dismissing the human tragedy.” But the thing is, the Brits just don’t lose their cool about this sort of thing. In America, the nation weeps, mourns and shakes its fist in avenging rage. Even allowing for the significant gap in magnitude between 9/11/01 and 7/7/05, our reaction was qualitatively different, not just quantitatively. Perhaps terrorism on our shores shattered the sense of invulnerability that two oceans gave us for most of our history, whereas the British populace has coped much more directly and much more often with attacks, ranging from Hitler to the IRA.
     Even when the English get worked up enough to fight about it, they don’t let it interfere with their routines. In 1944, Americans were frequently flabbergasted when they had the Germans on the run, and the Yanks were all hot to press the advantage, and their British allies would stop, build fires and have their tea (Note: Search that page for the word, "brew"). If there had been a pub handy, they likely would have stopped for a pint. Lacking that, they made do (once again, search for "brew"). It wasn’t for lack of courage; British pluck is just different from its gung-ho American cousin.
     Mr. Lader had his own anecdote from that war: He told of German pilots using the Greenwich monument that marks the spot where the world begins its system of telling time as a navigational landmark for their bombing runs. Greenwich civilians would look up, see the Heinkel and Junkers bombers making their turns overhead, and then go on about their business, though fully aware of the aircrafts’ purposes.
     It was those people’s children and grandchildren that Mr. Lader’s daughter Mary-Catherine went to work with at Reuters on Friday, the day after the attacks. If not for people casually relating their inconvenience stories from the previous day — the Tube was tied up, after all — he said you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. I pictured workers speaking in the same tones characters in the BBC’s “The Office” used to moan about how many pints they’d had the night before.
     Mr. Lader spoke of the “resolve” and “determination” he saw among Lon
doners, which he thinks Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public comments on Thursday perfectly captured.
     But, I asked, resolve and determination to do what? To address the sources and causes of terrorism, or simply to go on about daily life (which actually, except for our volunteer armed forces, is pretty much what we’ve ultimately done over here — carry on as though nothing happened)?
     Mr. Lader didn’t know. He expected that some who have been furious at the PM will “have to look at Blair’s decisions in a different light.” But was this a “tipping point” in either British attitudes orTonygeorge the resolve of advanced nations to address terrorism aggressively, from fighting poverty to waging war? “Not necessarily.”
     While there might be some new “momentum” toward renewing the viability of the Western alliance, “It’s going to take more than that” — his “that” being the same as the carpet man’s “this.”
     The world, unfortunately, has become somewhat inured to such horrific incidents.
     So who knows what happens next. But one thing is clear: You don’t (same expletive again) with the Brits and hope to accomplish anything. You won’t get fear, or surrender (as in Spain) or even the polarizing hatred that Osama bin Laden hopes to sow between Mideast and West. The lads in the pub are just not going to give you the satisfaction.

A painful process

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I sometimes have a strange reaction to catastrophic news events. For instance, on 9/11, I didn’t experience the typical sadness, or fear, or any of that. I felt anger, but it was also mixed with an excited sort of anticipation. Don’t get me wrong; if I could go back and risk my life to save any one of the innocent Americans who died that day I would. But I couldn’t. I could only look to the future, and in some ways I believed the future would be better than the obnoxious status quo.

I actually believed that all of the partisan divisions in our country that so sickened me, and which are the bane of my daily working life, would be muted by an overwhelming sense of national unity. And I was right; that happened — for about five days. It wasn’t exactly WWII all over again. Instead, the president asked us to do nothing but take our tax cuts and go enjoy ourselves while the all-volunteer military did our fighting for us. We could watch it on TV if we were interested, but we didn’t really have to be interested. So we turned away from each other, and naturally, politics as usual returned with alacrity.

So on Thursday, we once again experienced death and destruction — not here in the United States, not technically, but about as good as — and once again (after I learned that people I knew who were in London were safe) my mind turned to what would happen next. This time, I was a little more subdued in my optimism, but I saw reason for optimism nonetheless. You’ll see some of that optimism expressed in today’s editorial, which I wrote. (Yes, I wrote it. I haven’t written many editorials the last few years, but Nina Brook’s departure has forced me to take up honest toil again.)

Seeing President Bush, my hero Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac standing together, reading of the unanimous UN Security Council resolution expressing solidarity against terrorism, and other signs Unity tell me that we’ve got another chance at forming a solid coalition of civilized nations to oppose this atavistic, nihilistic madness we call terrorism. And that would be a very good thing. (By the way, I couldn’t tell for sure from the wire caption whether this picture was taken before or after the bombings. I suspect it was before — Mr. Blair looked a lot more grim in subsequent photos. But even if so, the unity the photo session was meant to convey on combatting poverty and disease was mirrored by the unity these leaders and the rest expressed even more vehemently after the bombings, so it illustrates much the same thing.)

Last night, to a class I’m taking at Beth Shalom synagogue about Jewish beliefs concerning the Messiah (yes, I’m Catholic, but I’m very aware that the founder of my religion was a Jew, and I have a hunger to learn what I can about the faith that was his, and without which ours would not exist), Rabbi Hesh Epstein said, "The bombings that took place today in London are part of a process — a painful process" of the world becoming a better place. Specifically, he was talking about our moving closer to the coming of the Mashiach. We Catholics would speak instead of the return of the Messiah, but the end result is much the same.

Echoing author Thomas Cahill, the rabbi said, "This is what Judaism gave the world — the idea that we were headed somewhere" — a linear view of history that bothered to count the passing years, as opposed to seeing life as a series of endless, hopeless cycles. And that "somewhere" is a much better world than the one we currently live in. This, I would add, is a notion that has been appropriated by many who don’t wait for the Messiah — humanists, communists, economic developers and pretty much anyone who believes in progress of any kind.

What happened in London Thursday was horrible beyond words, which may be one reason why I’m not dealing with it directly. But since it’s done and there’s no undoing it, I look forward, and I believe we have another chance to band together across borders to make this a world that simply doesn’t produce terror bombers. That, of course, was why the G-8 leaders were meeting in Scotland — to talk about African poverty, AIDS, global warming and other quality of life (and life-and-death) issues. The bombings emphasized something else we need to work on, and I hope we don’t blow this opportunity, the way we (and by "we" I mean people all over the world) have largely done with the last one. (I wonder whether Tony Blair can show us how it’s done — pull a nation together and keep it together, while strengthening and maintaining strong alliances. If anyone can, he can.)

We must mourn the dead. And as Rabbi Epstein said, the prayer that Jews are most familiar with having to do with the Messiah has to do with death. It’s the Kaddish. But it’s more than just a prayer of mourning; it’s an evocation of the time when God’s justice will be established on Earth. "Sometimes we see death, when there really is redemption," said the rabbi.

Oh, I hope so. And pray so. There has to be a way through this "painful process," to a better end for all.

"This world was made to be a paradise," said the rabbi. "Don’t ever give up hope."

Languages are cool

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So I’m registering to get an outpatient lab test done at Lexington Medical Center (you don’t want to know — suffice it to say that a really annoying abdominal virus has slowed down my blogging, and everything else, for several days), and there’s this sign on the desk. Under the headline, "Interpretation Service Available" are the following two sentences in English:

Point to your language.

An interpreter will be called.

Under that is the same message translated into 20 other languages — Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, French, German, Hindi, Hmong, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Laotian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.

At first, I’m really impressed that the Lexington Medical folks can whistle up such a veritable United Nations from among their staff at a moment’s notice (I mean, it’s a good hospital and all, but whoa), but then I realize this is a phone service — Language Line Services, to be precise. Basically, it seems you call them up and get them to tell you what the patient is saying.

Anyway, as the lady is asking me insurance questions, I’m getting lost in the fascination of contemplating the myriad ways all these foreign chaps have of relaying one simple message. I don’t just mean that the words are different; I’m talking about the fact that they’re almost never a literal translation, thanks to the magic of idiom — and culture, and (in at least one case, I suspect) politics.

Note that I’m not claiming to be conversant in all these language — even the western European ones. But you pretty much know that there’s something really different going on when the first of the above English sentences is rendered this way in French:

Montrez-nous quelle langue vous parlez.

… and this way in Spanish:

Señale su idioma.

…and this way in German:

Zeigen Sie auf Ihre Sprache.

The plot thickens when you contemplate the differences between the two Iberian languages. Compare the Spanish above with the Portuguese:

Aponte seu idioma.

Note that the Portuguese is the closest of all those listed thus far that is almost exactly a literal interpretation of the English, "Point to your language." Except that apparently "aponte" conveys a meaning that renders the preposition "to" superfluous.

Whereas if you take the Spanish literally, it says "Signal your language." (And says it politely, using "su" instead of the intimate "tu.") Apparently, señalar (to signal) is one way you can say "point to" in Spanish. But I also find that the more literal apuntar can mean the same thing. So why wasn’t the literal version used? Does it have a slightly more accurate connotation? Does it depend upon which of the many nations the Spanish-speaker happens to hail from? Do more people who call into the service come from countries or regions that prefer señalar, or does this sign merely reflect the whim of the particular interpreter who helped put this sign together?

And while I’m on a questioning jag, why in the world are Spanish and Portuguese so different? Oh, I understand the history and all (or I did 30 years ago when I had it in college), but why do they not even sound like related languages? Spanish is the only one of these 20 languages I have ever been fluent in (the result of living in Ecuador as a kid), but when I hear Portuguese it might as well be a Slavic tongue, for all I understand. I can (sort of) follow Italian much more easily — it sounds like Spanish, to my ear. Maybe the two years of high school Latin have something to do with tying them together for me. Which brings up another question: Why is it that Spanish seems a purer derivative of Latin than Italian? Is it the echo of empire? Is it for the same reason that some forms from Elizabethan English that died long ago in Britain can be heard today in Appalachia?

(If you’re wondering what the registration lady is doing all this time while I’m grooving on the sign, I kept her pretty busy with the fact that I didn’t have my insurance card with me. So she tries to call me up by name, and gets my Dad instead. I ask her for a scratch sheet of paper, my eye on the translations. Then I suggest she look up my daughter, who had had my card when she came in for a test last week, which was why it wasn’t in my wallet. Eventually, she straightens it all out. When I’m on my way out from my test, she catches me back at the sign still copying translations, and asks if I’d like her to make me a copy of the whole thing. "Um, yes, I would. Uh, thank you very much. See, I work for the newspaper, and …" oh give up, there’s no way to explain this behavior. She was amazingly sweet to indulge my eccentricity so.)

Enough of this. Probably no one will read it. Well, one last point — the "political" difference. It struck me that only the French interpretation had to include both the masculine and feminine article with one of those awkward "slash" compromises that the politically correct resort to: Nous vous fournirons un/une interprète. (At least, I assume those are the masculine and feminine articles. I’m sort of reaching the limit of my linguistic abilities here. As near as I can tell, that means, "I think I can reach it from here with my four iron.")

Meanwhile, either the Italian (Un interprete sarà chiamato), the German (Wir rufen einen Dolmetscher an) and the Spanish (Se llamara a un intérprete) all assume that the masculine is inclusive, the way we once did in English (I know they do that in Spanish), or they don’t demand a distinction in the articles in these instances. Can it be that the French are really more like us than they would choose to let on?

Oh, well. None of this is why I went to the hospital. But wait — let me close with my personal favorite linguistic anomaly. In Tagalog, the message goes like this:

Pakituro po ninyo ang inyong wika.

Magpapatawag kami ng interpreter.

What a coincidence, huh? That’s almost as cool as people in Latin America playing béisbol…

By the way, I fully expect to be chastised as a Philistine for my ignorance by people who actually understand these languages. I’m even looking forward to it, because I’ll learn some things I don’t yet know about them. All I really know for sure is that languages are cool — to an unschooled geek like me, anyway.

Deep Threat

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To hear some of our anti-war friends tell it — and I do mean friends (Michael Berg, on the left in the picture below demonstrating in New York last summer, is a nice guy; so are most anti-war folks I know) — you have to turn to foreign media to get the straight dope on what the United States is up to in the world, because the corporate shills in the American media just parrot the administration line. (And of course, that’s one of the places where their argument goes about Negative00124a1_1 180 degrees from what I have observed.)
Well, this may not be quite the sort of thing they have in mind, but I thought it ironic that the day Michael’s letter appeared, two other things happened — we learned who Deep Throat was, and I received a release from the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project relating a scoop from Iranian television telling us what Watergate was really all about — something that, indeed, I had not read in the American press.
You can see the report on the group’s Web site. But for those of us deficient in Farsi (or lacking the right plug-in on our browsers), the release including this excerpt from the Iranian reporter’s narration:

Today, it has become clear that Nixon’s dispute with Israel and the Zionist lobby was among the main causes for his downfall. In fact, the reporters who exposed the Watergate affair and blew it out of proportion were Zionists, recruited to the ranks of the Zionist lobby. By using the media as its tool, Zionism tried to get one of its main opponents out of the way.

As evidence of the fact that President Nixon was one righteous dude, this excerpt from his memoir is quoted:

One of the main problems I had to face was narrow
mindedness and pro-Israel views.

And also:

In the 25 years since the end of World War II, these views spread and grew stronger to the point that many people consider refraining from supporting Israel to be antisemitism. I tried to make them understand that this is not true, but did not succeed.

So you can see, of course, why the great international Jewish conspiracy had to get rid of him, right?

This kind of anti-Semitic nonsense, intended to whip up those already inclined toward killing Israelis and Americans at every opportunity, is based in a world view that is our greatest enemy in the War on Terror — a term I am comfortable using, unlike my anti-war friends, without ironic quotation marks.
The kind of attitudes that can turn any news story into an opportunity to further engender hatred against Jews and their friends, is a real threat to the United States, and to the West, and to all the values that those of us who believe in liberal democracy hold dear.
And it’s worth fighting against — with our own ideas mostly (which is why the real-life abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are extremely harmful to the war effort), but also, when those attitudes are advanced by brutal tyrants, with our military.

You go, Tony

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Just got around to reading The Economist before last — part of it, anyway, the part that mattered. The part about my hero, Tony Blair, whom the Brits don’t properly appreciate. Although it is to be noted that while they did slash into his ruling majority, they Britain_elections_4 did elect him to an unprecedented third consecutive term. Consider the way they dumped Winston Churchill immediately after he saved their bacon in the war, and what the current PM just received from the British electorate qualifies as a big, sloppy kiss by comparison.

But they can’t bring themselves to work up any enthusiasm about it, which would make you think he was the kind of near-zero that the major parties keep forcing us to settle for over on this side of the pond. As the magazine-which-inexplicably-calls-itself-a-"newspaper" said of the UK electorate it in its cover story, "Like The Economist, it sees no clear alternative to Mr Blair, but it has come to wish there were one."

So they settled for a guy who most Americans would love to have a chance to vote for — a fact that The Economist acknowledges with the bemusement with which it often regards the colonies:

The strangeness does not stop there. Mr Blair’s eight years in office have won him extraordinary standing abroad, something which he plainly relishes. In America he is talked of reverently by Democrats and Republicans alike. In a country where politics has become ever more viciously polarised, it often seems that adoration of Mr Blair is the one thing the opposing tribes can agree on. Republicans love him for his unflinching support of America’s assertive foreign policy; Democrats because they see a towering figure of the centre-left, a man with the magnetism and the energy of Bill Clinton, if not quite the brains—and, would you believe it, no bimbos. They rightly give Mr Blair the credit for reinventing the Labour Party and transforming its electoral prospects. If only, they tell themselves, we could find a leader like that.

You can say that again. And who says Tony doesn’t have "quite the brains" of Bill? Mr. Clinton may have been a champion talker, but can one really watch the PM during the House of Commons’ "question period" and think that the ex-president could do better under similar circumstances? I can’t, and partly because Mr. Clinton lacked the requisite intellectual combativeness — at least in public. He wanted to be loved too much.

Note that The Economist gives different reasons for why Republicans and Democrats over here like Mr. Blair. This passage illuminates two things: Why I can identify with neither party, and why I like Tony more than any partisan could. The thing is, I admire him for both sets of reasons.

Oh, and could somebody explain to me again why it’s the Republicans and the Tories who admire him for his war stance, and not the more liberal parties? The use of Anglo-American military might to spread democracy among oppressed peoples is a Wilsonian enterprise — the sort of thing one would expect from a Roosevelt or a Truman or a Kennedy; not from, say a Calvin Coolidge. There’s nothing conservative about risking and sacrificing so much for strangers who may never fully appreciate what we’ve done. The old policy, that of maintaining the status quo so the cheap oil would keep flowing; that was a conservative approach.