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October
1-15, 2004 Archive
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#marycheney
Why
is Mary Cheney a lesbian? One of the more unusual moments in the 3rd
Presidential debate
came when Bob Schieffer asked: "Do you believe homosexuality is a
choice?"
Bush
gave a reasonable answer: "You know, Bob, I don't know. I just
don't know."
Kerry
replied, "We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you
were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell
you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as."
Much
controversy has ensued over what Kerry's motivations were in bringing up
the fact that tough guy Veep Cheney has a lesbian daughter, but
certainly the subject was fair game since Mary Cheney's career is
being a Professional Lesbian Republican, doing outreach to lesbians
first for the conservative Coors Beer company and now for her father's
campaign.
I
haven't talked to Mary Cheney, but the
first thing to point out is that, contra Kerry's assumption, many more lesbians than
gay men are likely to attribute their sexual orientation to either a
conscious political choice ("striking a blow against the
patriarchy," etc.) or as the product of social conditioning. As I
wrote in my 1994 National Review article "Why
Lesbians Aren't Gay:"
The
New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic,
and the newsweeklies have been trumpeting, despite the highly
preliminary nature of the findings, evidence that homosexuality has
biological roots. Generally overlooked, however, is that most of the
research was performed on gay male subjects by gay male scientists and
then hyped by gay male publicists. Going largely unreported is the
lesbian population's profound ambivalence about this half-scientific,
half-political crusade. (For example, an attack on the theory that
lesbianism has biological causes is one of the main themes of Lillian
Faderman's fine history of American lesbians, Odd Girls and Twilight
Lovers.) This media reticence is noteworthy, considering that the
press otherwise so assiduously keeps us informed of the views of the
lesbian-dominated National Organization for Women on child-rearing,
marriage, beauty, men and, of course, What the Women of America Want --
subjects upon which lesbians might be presumed to have rather less
expertise to offer than on the question of why they are lesbians.
Many
lesbian-feminists deny that their sexual orientation is biologically
rooted, attributing it instead to what they perceive as our culture's
decision to socialize males to be domineering. They may claim this
simply to avoid contradicting feminist theory, which is, well, "biophobic."
(Yes, I know that this trendy practice of insinuating that those who
disagree with you politically must suffer from a mental disorder is
reminiscent of the imprisoning of Soviet dissidents in psychiatric
hospitals, but, hey, once you get the hang of it, it's kind of fun.) On
the other hand, the lesbian-feminists might be right and the gay
researcher/activists wrong about the nature of homosexuality. Or,
homosexuality might not have a single nature: at minimum, there could be
a fundamental difference between lesbians and gays.
To
learn more about Mary Cheney, I went to Google  Images
and pulled up a page of pictures of "Mary
Cheney." My eye instantly alighted on this snapshot at left, but that
turned out to be just what lesbian feminists would call my Male Gaze at work.
The Mary Cheney I looked at first was some other Mary Cheney, a (I would definitely venture to
guess) straight Mary Cheney, or, perhaps more descriptively, a
curvaceous Mary Cheney.
No,
the Mary Cheney who is the Vice-President's daughter turns out to be
this rather androgynous-looking creature at right,
whom, at first glance, I had vaguely assumed was Troubled Former Child
Actor Macaulay
Culkin ,
although wearing less lip gloss than usual.
For
comparison purposes, I've added a small picture of Elizabeth
Cheney, Mary's
heterosexual sister who has three children. As you can see, you wouldn't
have any trouble guessing which Cheney daughter is lesbian and which is
straight.)
This
all raises a number of difficult questions, such as, if the Vice President's
daughter caught men's eyes as often as the Mary Cheney who caught my eye
did, would she still be a lesbian? In contrast, for gay men, this
question doesn't seem very relevant. You never hear of a man deciding to
be gay because women didn't find him good-looking enough.
This
opens up a whole lot of chicken or egg questions. Clearly, the average
lesbian is less visually attractive than the average heterosexual woman,
but is that because lesbians work less at being attractive because they don't have to compete on looks as much because
women are less picky about their mate's looks? Or do lesbians not want to
try to make themselves look attractive because that's a feminine thing
to do and they tend to be more masculine in persona? Or are lesbians, on average, simply less feminine looking because of
hormonal differences? Or are they just less attractive looking overall,
rather than specifically less feminine-looking, and find they can
attract a better mate in the lesbian market than in the heterosexual
market?
I don't know. I just
don't know.
Of
course, Mary Cheney is the daughter of not just Dick but also of Lynne
Cheney, whose 1981 novel Sisters (click
here for long excerpts, although let me warn you that the Second
Lady's prose style is awfully eye-glazing) includes these ripely Sapphic
passages:
The
women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark
cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not
be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly
were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never
to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as
it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a
passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made
them. What comfort it gave...
The
young woman was heavily powdered, but quite attractive, a curvesome
creature, rounded at bosom and cheek. When she smiled, even her teeth
seemed puffed and rounded, like tiny ivory pillows...
Let
us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We
shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There
will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons
of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work
your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our
bed, my dearest girl.
This
may explain a little about Dick's grouchy mood.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#derbbc
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"Humankind
cannot stand very much reality" -- The Derb
on the 10th Anniversary of The Bell Curve in NRO. A reader
calls it: "Beautifully written,
cogent, very precise, lucid and remarkably moderate."
Jerry
Pournelle writes about the tenth anniversary of The
Bell Curve here.
By the way, one of Jerry's Ph.D.'s is in psychology (his specialty was
in the testing of individual differences, such as for Air Force pilot
selection). His other Ph.D. is in political science. In Germany, they'd
refer to him as Dr. Dr. Capt. Pournelle (he was a teenage artillery
officer in the Korean war).
Something
I'd add to my recent
VDARE.com article on The Bell Curve is that the
demonization of IQ by the media has made it almost impossible to bring
attention to bear on potential environmental interventions that look
like they could narrow the white-black IQ gap.
For example, I have been arguing in VDARE.com
since 2000 that promoting breastfeeding among African-American women
(who currently nurse at only about half the rate of white American
women) looks like, based on the best current studies of the impact of
nursing on IQ, that it could eliminate about ten percent of the
white-black IQ gap:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_5.htm
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/brown_debate.htm
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/unthinkable.htm
The science isn't bulletproof on this yet, but it could be within ten
years for a relatively small sum. If this breastfeeding raises IQ (or,
alternatively, adding better nutrients to infant formula raises IQ)
theory pans out, a public service promotional campaign to encourage
black women to nurse their babies could be carried out for, say, half a
billion dollars. (There are no fundamental reasons why black women nurse
at so much lower rates -- it's just a matter of fashion.) If this could
eliminate 10% of the white-black IQ gap this way, it's hard to imagine a
better use of tax dollars.
Similarly, the recent report by the UN on
how to raise the IQ of poor countries (by putting iron in flour and
iodine in salt as was done in the industrial world a few generations
ago) got almost no attention in the American media because of the
embargo on talking about IQ. I wrote about it at length on VDARE.com:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/national_iq.htm
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/copenhagen.htm
More generally, the one standard deviation difference in average IQ seen
between African-Americans (average IQ 85), who are no more than about
20% white, and sub-Saharan black Africans Africans (70) strongly
suggests that the huge environmental differences in nutrition, health,
intellectual stimulation, and so forth between life in Africa and life
in America are largely to blame, as I argued here:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/wealth_of_nations.htm
Most generally of all, the current ban on
high IQ elites discussing the implications of IQ does not, as is so
often assumed, work for the benefit of low IQ people. On the contrary,
it allows the high IQ elite of America to make arrangements most suited
for itself and gives it the perfect excuse to ignore the interests of
the left half of the bell curve. (See my 5-part series on "How
to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve" for details.)
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#bestme
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The
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven
Pinker and Tim Folger, is now on
sale. This anthology features my article from the January 13, 2003
issue of The American Conservative:
"Cousin Marriage Conundrum." An excerpt:
Many prominent
neoconservatives are calling on America not only to conquer Iraq (and
perhaps more Muslim nations after that), but also to rebuild Iraqi
society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the Middle East.
Yet, Americans know so little about the Middle East that few of us are
even aware of one of one of the building blocks of Arab Muslim cultures
-- cousin marriage. Not surprisingly, we are almost utterly innocent of
any understanding of how much the high degree of inbreeding in Iraq
could interfere with our nation building ambitions.
In Iraq, as in
much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or
second cousins to each other. A 1986
study of 4,500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found
that 46% were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989
survey found 53% were "consanguineously"
married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is
that of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.
By fostering
intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes
the development of civil society more difficult. Many Americans have
heard by now that Iraq is composed of three ethnic groups -- the Kurds
of the north, the Sunnis of the center, and the Shi'ites of the south.
Clearly, these ethnic rivalries would complicate the task of ruling
reforming Iraq. But that's just a top-down summary of Iraq's ethnic
make-up. Each of those three ethnic groups is divisible into smaller and
smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families -- each with their
own alliances, rivals, and feuds. And the engine at the bottom of these
bedeviling social divisions is the oft-ignored institution of cousin
marriage.
The fractiousness
and tribalism of Middle Eastern countries have frequently been remarked.
In 1931, King Feisal of Iraq described his subjects as "devoid of
any patriotic idea, ? connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil;
prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government
whatever." The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently
observed in countries such as Iraq appears to be in tied to the high
rates of inbreeding.
Muslim countries
are usually known for warm, devoted extended family relationships, but
also for weak patriotism. In the U.S., where individualism is so strong,
many assume that "family values" and civic virtues such as
sacrificing for the good of society always go together. But, in Islamic
countries, loyalty to extended (as opposed to nuclear) families is often
at war with loyalty to nation. Civic virtues, military effectiveness,
and economic performance all suffer.
Commentator Randall
Parker wrote,
"Consanguinity
[cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western
analyses of Middle Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists
seem blind to the importance of pre-ideological kinship-based political
bonds in large part because those bonds are not derived from abstract
Western ideological models of how societies and political systems should
be organized. Extended families that are incredibly tightly bound are
really the enemy of civil society because the alliances of family
override any consideration of fairness to people in the larger society.
Yet, this obvious fact is missing from 99% of the discussions about what
is wrong with the Middle East. How can we transform Iraq into a modern
liberal democracy if every government worker sees a government job as a
route to helping out his clan at the expense of other clans?"
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#ez
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The
EZ Way to Look Presidential: Stand on a stage with George W. Bush for
4.5 hours. Remember how just two weeks ago everybody thought Kerry
was a dismal nominee, and now he seems pretty darn Presidential. How'd
he do that? The answer would seem to be that he spent 270 minutes in
close proximity to the blinky, erratic, petulant little man who happens
to be President.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#vdhla
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Is
Victor Davis Hanson abandoning neocon utopianism? Lawrence Auster writes:
...
It may be a mistake to place too much stress on his apparent
abandonment of the universal democracy ideology, as perhaps I did in
my recent
item on him. Nevertheless, the reversal in his rhetoric is stunning.
Last April Hanson said that what we are fighting for in this war is a “free
and tolerant mankind.” But now he’s saying that if Muslim
countries give us trouble, we should rain down destruction on them and
not worry about rebuilding or democratizing them afterward.
Meanwhile,
The Derb wants to make clear he never was a Wolfowitzian on Iraq. In
reply to my posting a reader's email, John Derbyshire emailed me:
I appreciate your
reader's having visited my website, but object to being called "a
Steyn-like case on Iraq." For one thing, I don't know anything
like as much as Mark -- he's actually BEEN to Iraq, for example. For
another, there are traditional Wilson-Jackson factions among us
slavering warmongers. I suspect MS of wavering towards Wilsonianism,
while I myself am a firm Jacksonite.
Here, in fact, is
the lad himself, writing
in the 10/2 Spectator
"The
American Right, on the other hand, is supposed to be split from top to
toe between 'neocons' and 'paleocons', the latter being the isolationist
Right and the former being sinister Jewish intellectuals who've turned
the Bush administration into an arm of Israeli foreign policy. One
problem for those who see conservatism in terms of this epic struggle is
that one side doesn't exist. The 'paleocons' boil down to a handful of
anti-war conservatives, the most prominent being Pat Buchanan, who in
the 2000 presidential election got 0.42 per cent of the vote. He's no
BNP [British National Party, immigration-restrictionist], never mind
Ukip [United Kingdom Independence Party, anti-EU]. The real divide is
between the neocons (for want of a better term) and the 'assertive
nationalists' - that's to say, those who think we ought to bomb rogue
states, smash their regimes and rebuild them as democratic societies,
and those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes,
and then leave them to stew in their own juices, with a reminder that if
the next thug is foolish enough to catch Washington's eye, then (as
Arnie says) 'Ah'll be back!' This difference can seem like a big deal -
those who think we need to win their hearts and minds vs those who think
they're mostly heartless and mindless, so who cares? But in truth it's
only a difference of degree."
Color me
"assertive nationalist." I don't give a damn about the Iraqis,
and doubt they can be civilized; I just want the Middle East Muslims to
know that if they vex us, we'll come and smash their stuff and kill
their leaders. Which is a thing I believe they need to know, and which
we shall have to teach them several times over before the lesson sinks
in.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#bringemin
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Bush
to Mexicans: "Come on in!" -- Recalling his disastrous
"Bring
'em on!" challenge to Iraqi insurgents, in the Third
Presidential Debate Mr. Bush encouraged poorly paid Mexicans to
illegally immigrate to America:
"If
you can make 50 cents in the heart of Mexico, for example, or make $5
here in America, $5.15, you're going to come here if you're worth
your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your
families."
Presumably,
Mexicans who don't violate our immigration laws aren't worth their salt
in the President's eyes.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#3faces
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The
Three Faces of George: A reader writes:
I thought Bush
was a disaster in Debate 1, terrific in D2, and now I turn on D3 and
what am I seeing? He's keeping his face in this odd attitude, almost
staring wide eyed at Kerry while Kerry is speaking, smiling excessively
and inappropriately, seeming very untogether. It made me nervous
watching him. Meanwhile Kerry seemed solemn and presidential. I couldn't
stand watching it--three debates, three Bushes!--and turned it off after
35 minutes. However, after midnight, I watched it on C-SPAN and Bush
seemed to get somewhat better in the later part of the debate.
But remember, in
three debates in 2000 we had three Bushes (or maybe 2 1/2 Bushes) and
three Gores. That's 5 1/2 candidates in three debates. This year we have
4 candidates in three debates. So 2000 was even more of a harrowing
psychodrama than this year.
And what do you
think of Kerry's facial expressions--those weird smiles while he was
listening to Bush, the way he keeps bunching up his mouth, it was
bizarre. But I think I know where this comes from. His advisors said he
has to try to seem nice, not so disdainful. So he made a concerted
effort to have a polite smile, courteous on his face while Bush was
speaking. Actually this is kind of appealing. But all those other things
he kept doing with his mouth were weird. And what about the way he keeps
sticking his tongue out. How come his advisors don't tell him to
stop that?
Maybe he thinks it makes him look like Michael
Jordan?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#lottlbj
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Bush
as LBJ: Jeremy Lott beat
me to the comparison that Bush in 2004 is a lot like Lyndon Johnson
would have been in 1968 if he'd stuck it out and run on his record of
land war in Asia and increased domestic spending.
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#fritz
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Sen.
Fritz Hollings, age 82, on everything: After seven terms, Hollings
is retiring, so he's free to speak his mind. The Washington Post reports:
But it doesn't
take much to get that tart tongue going. Just ask him to rate the eight
presidents -- from Johnson to Bush -- he's worked with.
"Well, it's
easy to rate who's the most inadequate," he says. "And that's
the present president. Jesus! He doesn't want to be president. He just
likes the politics. He likes to get elected. He likes Air Force One. He
starts out nearly every day with a fundraiser. He appears at some police
station or some fortified something with policemen and firemen. You
know, you gotta get the right pictures for the 7 o'clock news. Then he
comes in and works out and sees a movie and goes to sleep. And he allows
Condoleezza and Cheney and Rumsfeld to run things."
After that,
Hollings is warmed up, and he proceeds to offer a variety of candid
opinions.
The war in Iraq:
"People say they didn't have an exit plan. Well, hell's bells, they
didn't have an entry plan! And it's one big quagmire."...
"The black
church is the stability of the African American community," he
says. "There isn't any question about that. And they're all fine
and I work with 'em, but they expect the money to get out the vote. . .
. I can tell you of one race -- the minister is now dead. This is 20-odd
years ago. He kept saying, 'I gotta get the money. I gotta get $10,000.'
I got a friend to give him the $10,000 to get the black ministers to get
the vote out. And, by God, [Republicans] came around after us and said,
'I know you need a steeple on that church -- here's $15,000, just don't
hurt me tomorrow.' And that minister went up to Anderson, S.C., because
his aunt got very sick and he had to go. And the
Republicans took that [precinct]. . . .
He rips into
George W. Bush again, scoffing at the president's plan to bring
democracy to the Arab world.
"You can't
force-feed democracy," he says... "But to walk into a place
where religion is stronger than freedom -- they're not looking for freedom,
they're looking for religion. Five times a day, they're down on
their knees, man. You can't find that in America. You can't get 'em
to go on their knees on Sunday -- "
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#tfritz
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Sen.
Fritz Hollings, age 82, on everything: After seven terms, Hollings
is retiring, so he's free to speak his mind. The Washington Post reports:
But it doesn't
take much to get that tart tongue going. Just ask him to rate the eight
presidents -- from Johnson to Bush -- he's worked with.
"Well, it's
easy to rate who's the most inadequate," he says. "And that's
the present president. Jesus! He doesn't want to be president. He just
likes the politics. He likes to get elected. He likes Air Force One. He
starts out nearly every day with a fundraiser. He appears at some police
station or some fortified something with policemen and firemen. You
know, you gotta get the right pictures for the 7 o'clock news. Then he
comes in and works out and sees a movie and goes to sleep. And he allows
Condoleezza and Cheney and Rumsfeld to run things."
After that,
Hollings is warmed up, and he proceeds to offer a variety of candid
opinions.
The war in Iraq:
"People say they didn't have an exit plan. Well, hell's bells, they
didn't have an entry plan! And it's one big quagmire."...
"The black
church is the stability of the African American community," he
says. "There isn't any question about that. And they're all fine
and I work with 'em, but they expect the money to get out the vote. . .
. I can tell you of one race -- the minister is now dead. This is 20-odd
years ago. He kept saying, 'I gotta get the money. I gotta get $10,000.'
I got a friend to give him the $10,000 to get the black ministers to get
the vote out. And, by God, [Republicans] came around after us and said,
'I know you need a steeple on that church -- here's $15,000, just don't
hurt me tomorrow.' And that minister went up to Anderson, S.C., because
his aunt got very sick and he had to go. And the
Republicans took that [precinct]. . . .
He rips into
George W. Bush again, scoffing at the president's plan to bring
democracy to the Arab world.
"You can't
force-feed democracy," he says... "But to walk into a place
where religion is stronger than freedom -- they're not looking for freedom,
they're looking for religion. Five times a day, they're down on
their knees, man. You can't find that in America. You can't get 'em
to go on their knees on Sunday -- "
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#tguesswho
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Reaction
to my article
on The Bell Curve: One of the two or three most distinguished
social scientists in America wrote to me:
Your
commentary was a wonderful reprise of The Bell Curve. Dick
[Herrnstein] was one of my closest friends, and you captured him
beautifully. The book is a masterpiece.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#teamam
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I
review three movies in the new American
Conservative, available this weekend to electronic subscribers:
In
October, three films about stage actors debut. Annette Bening plays a
leading lady of the 1930s West End in "Being Julia;"
Billy Crudup portrays the last youth to appear as Desdemona before King
Charles II legalized actresses in the 1660s in "Stage Beauty;"
and Trey Parker of "South Park" notoriety provides the voice
of the "best actor on Broadway," who uses his thespian skills
to infiltrate terrorist gangs in the R-rated marionette movie "Team
America: World Police."...
In
the puppet picture "Team America: World Police," young Gary
Johnston is slaying Broadway audiences in "Lease: The Musical"
with his show stopping protest number "Everybody's Got AIDS."
A top-secret anti-terrorist commando squad recruits him to worm his way
into a Chechen operation buying WMDs in Cairo. He succeeds, but his
comrades, while in hot pursuit, accidentally blow up the Sphinx and the
Great Pyramid. When Alec Baldwin, head of the Film Actors Guild,
protests Team America's destructiveness, North Korea's sinister (but
Elmer Fudd-like) Kim Jong Il invites the lefty members of F.A.G. to a
Pyongyang "peace" conference to further his fiendish plot.
While
quite funny, be aware that "Team America's" language is
brutally filthy because the "South Park" guys graphically
spell out the buried meanings of common obscenities, which originated in
those bad old days of predatory bisexuality that poor Ned Kynaston of
"Stage Beauty" endured. Don't be fooled by the puppets: keep
your kids away.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#lbj
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The
Essential Problem with this whole benighted election is that the
incumbent has put together a record rather resembling Lyndon Baines
Johnson's in 1968, but his challenger is, by nature, even farther to the
left. Kerry realizes there is a gaping opening to the right of Bush, so
he makes feints toward traditional conservatism on foreign policy, the
deficit, and immigration, but his heart just isn't in it.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#3debate1
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3rd
Debate: [Updates continuously added below, including transcript of
the immigration question]
The
same John Kerry always shows up at all the debates, which is boring but
reassuring. With Bush, you never know who is going to show up tonight. I
haven't quite been able to put my finger on who tonight's Bush is
(Casual Bush? Snickering Bush? Blinky Bush?), but he's different from
the last two Bushes at the previous debates: Church
Lady Bush and Overcaffeinated Rottweiler Bush. Maybe tonight was the
best of the Bushes, but, still, it's disconcerting to live in a country
where the President seems to be auditioning for the lead in a remake of
the old Sally Field split personality TV movie "Sybil."
-
I really wish Bush would not smirk while talking about partial
birth abortion.
-
Kerry made a joke about the President lecturing him on fiscal
responsibility is like Tony Soprano lecturing him on law and order, but
you couldn't tell it was a joke until the joke was over. In contrast,
Bush always appears on the verge of making a joke but he almost never
says anything funny. Can't he afford a jokewriter?
-
So, is there going to be an immigration question tonight? Probably not
-- after all, the debate is being held in Arizona where nobody is
concerned about immigration.
-
Yes! The moderator says, "I got more email about this issue than
any other this week -- immigration." Surprise, surprise.
Bush
wants a "temporary worker card" "that allows a willing
worker and a willing employer to mate up" for "$5
dollars an hour, $5.15." That makes it sound like Bush is fighting
to lower the costs of the white slave trade:
"My
fellow Americans, it has come to my attention that Eastern Europe -- the
Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Lithuania -- is full of nubile young
ladies with wheat colored hair, willing workers who want to mate up with
you willing American employers for $5 dollars an hour, $5.15, but our
antiquated immigration laws are keeping these willing workers out of our
country, forcing you to pay 30, even 40 dollars per hour to mate up with
sullen, lazy native-born workers who probably aren't even natural
blondes. I say, we must issue these ash blonde beauties temporary worker
cards so they can mate up with you. But only temporary cards, so
we can kick their skanky butts out when they get old and wrinkly. And
may God bless America."
Kerry
says "we should crack down on illegal hiring." Obviously,
Kerry didn't want to emphasize immigration -- he wasted half his time
responding to an earlier Bush riposte on taxes. But, in his short
rebuttal, even Kerry managed to get to the right of Bush on immigration.
Four thousand
people a day are coming across the border.
The fact is that
we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the
border.
And we're not
doing what we ought to do in terms of the technology. We have
iris-identification technology. We have thumbprint, fingerprint
technology today. We can know who the people are, that they're really
the people they say they are when the cross the border.
We could speed it
up. There are huge delays.
The fact is our
borders are not as secure as they ought to be, and I'll make them
secure.
It
can't help Bush with his base to be to the left of Kerry on the issue
that attracts the most emails.
-
A reader writes:
Ok,
I just rewatched the debate. That the immigration question was the most
asked seemed to surprise Bush a good deal. He was visibly taken aback.
He seemed to understand amnesty was unpopular because he tried to say
Kerry was for that. But he doesn't seem to grasp that most regard his
plan AS amnesty.
Kerry
didn't get it at all because he finished up an earlier point before
moving into the immigration question. He also seemed unconcerned with
Bush's attack and didn't even deny he was for amnesty.
What
Bush is doing is defining "amnesty" not in the normal sense of
the word -- as forgiving lawbreakers for their crimes and allowing them
to continue to reap the benefits of their lawbreaking -- but in a
special sense aimed solely at Republican Congressman who don't want
Democratic-leaning illegal immigrants to get the right to vote. He's
defining amnesty as giving citizenship to illegals. (Of course, their
children born in America get citizenship under the current, but dubious,
interpretation of the 14th Amendment, so in the long run it doesn't make
much difference -- the Democrats still benefit.)
But
what Bush is proposing is much more monstrous, and I use that term with
all due respect, than just giving current illegals amnesty. He's
proposing virtual Open
Borders in which anybody in the world who can get a job offer at, as
Bush made explicit, $5.15 per hour, can move to America, "so
long as there's not an American willing to do that job" -- i.e.,
not willing to do that job at $5.15 per hour ($10,712 per year). Bush's
plan would reduce the standard wage for tens of millions of jobs to
$5.15 per hour.
Kerry,
in contrast, wants current illegals to be put on track to become
voters because they will mostly vote Democratic. On the other hand, he's
never said he wants anything resembling Bush's Open Borders plan for the
rest of the world to move to America.
-
All this talk about someday training 125,000 Iraqis -- there must be a
million men in Iraq under age 40 with military training. Not terribly
good training, but how good is our training going to be with the
language barriers and all the other problem we're having? No, the
problem is making them want to die for Allawi and for America. That's a real
challenge.
-
Bush danced around on affirmative action and said nothing. Kerry is for
it. Kerry wants to energize his African-American base, but Bush did a
good job staying to the right of Kerry, where most Americans are.
Compare that to immigration where a Republican candidate ought to find
it easy to box Kerry in as a leftwing extremist on immigration, but Bush
ended up making Kerry look like the sensible moderate.
-
Schieffer said, "Mr. President, when you were going to invade Iraq,
you were asked if you had checked with your father, but you said, 'I
checked with a Higher Authority.'"
My
son asked, "Cheney?"
-
I never want to hear about Pell Grants again.
-
Why is Tom Brokaw wearing bright olive green pants with a blue suit
coat, blue shirt, and blue tie? I don't have much fashion sense, but I
know enough not to wear that combination to a Presidential Debate. Is
his Inner Preppie emerging at an inopportune moment?
When
Bush was asked what he would say to an unemployed worker whose job went
overseas, he said he's fixing grade school education.
Here's
the Washington
Post's transcript of the immigration exchange:
SCHIEFFER: Let's
go to a new question, Mr. President. I
got more e-mail this week on this question than any other question. And
it is about immigration.
I'm told that at
least 8,000 people cross our borders illegally every day. Some people
believe this is a security issue, as you know. Some believe it's an
economic issue. Some see it as a human-rights issue. How
do you see it? And what we need to do about it?
BUSH: I see it as
a serious problem. I see it as a security issue, I see it as an economic
issue, and I see it as a human-rights issue.
We're increasing
the border security of the United States. We've got 1,000 more Border
Patrol agents on the southern border.
We're using new
equipment. We're using unmanned vehicles to spot people coming across.
And we'll
continue to do so over the next four years. It's a subject I'm very
familiar with. After all, I was a border governor for a while.
Many people are
coming to this country for economic reasons. They're coming here to
work. If you can make 50 cents in the heart of Mexico, for example, or
make $5 here in America, $5.15, you're going to come here if you're
worth your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your families.
And that's what's happening.
And so in order
to take pressure off the borders, in order to make the borders more
secure, I believe there ought to be a temporary worker card that allows
a willing worker and a willing employer to mate up, so long as there's
not an American willing to do that job, to join up in order to be able
to fulfill the employers' needs.
That has the
benefit of making sure our employers aren't breaking the law as they try
to fill their workforce needs. It makes sure that the people coming
across the border are humanely treated, that they're not kept in the
shadows of our society, that they're able to go back and forth to see
their families. See, the card, it'll have a period of time attached to
it.
It also means it
takes pressure off the border. If somebody is coming here to work with a
card, it means they're not going to have to sneak across the border. It
means our border patrol will be more likely to be able to focus on doing
their job.
Now, it's very
important for our citizens to also know that I don't believe we ought to
have amnesty. I don't think we ought to reward illegal behavior. There
are plenty of people standing in line to become a citizen. And we ought
not to crowd these people ahead of them in line.
If they want to
become a citizen, they can stand in line, too.
And here is where
my opponent and I differ. In September 2003, he supported amnesty for
illegal aliens.
SCHIEFFER: Time's
up.
Senator?
KERRY: Let me
just answer one part of the last question quickly, and then I'll come to
immigration.
The American
middle class family isn't making it right now, Bob. And what the
president said about the tax cuts has been wiped out by the increase in
health care, the increase in gasoline, the increase in tuitions, the
increase in prescription drugs.
The fact is, the
take home pay of a typical American family as a share of national income
is lower than it's been since 1929. And the take home pay of the richest
.1 percent of Americans is the highest it's been since 1928.
Under President
Bush, the middle class has seen their tax burden go up and the
wealthiest's tax burden has gone down. Now that's wrong.
Now with respect
to immigration reform, the president broke his promise on immigration
reform. He said he would reform it. Four years later he is now promising
another plan.
Here's what I'll
do: Number one, the borders are more leaking today than they were before
9/11. The fact is, we haven't done what we need to do to toughen up our
borders, and I will.
Secondly, we need
a guest-worker program, but if it's all we have, it's not going to solve
the problem.
The second thing
we need is to crack down on illegal hiring. It's against the law in the
United States to hire people illegally, and we ought to be enforcing
that law properly.
And thirdly, we
need an earned-legalization program for people who have been here for a
long time, stayed out of trouble, got a job, paid their taxes, and their
kids are American. We got to start moving them toward full citizenship,
out of the shadows.
SCHIEFFER: Do you
want to respond, Mr. President?
BUSH: Well, to
say that the borders are not as protected as they were prior to
September the 11th shows he doesn't know the borders. They're much
better protected today than they were when I was the governor of Texas.
We have much more
manpower and much more equipment there.
He just doesn't
understand how the borders work, evidently, to say that. That is an
outrageous claim.
And we'll
continue to protect our borders. We're continuing to increase manpower
and equipment.
SCHIEFFER:
Senator?
KERRY: Four
thousand people a day are coming across the border.
The fact is that
we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the
border.
And we're not
doing what we ought to do in terms of the technology. We have
iris-identification technology. We have thumbprint, fingerprint
technology today. We can know who the people are, that they're really
the people they say they are when the cross the border.
We could speed it
up. There are huge delays.
The fact is our
borders are not as secure as they ought to be, and I'll make them
secure.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#decon
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Jacques
Derrida, RIP: A computer engineer named Chip Morningstar provides
the single best guide to deconstructionism in "How
To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure."
Deconstruction,
in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the
commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or
television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job
and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can
legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula
in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula,
step-by-step:
Step 1 -- Select
a work to be deconstructed. This is called a "text" and is
generally a piece of text, though it need not be. … You want to pick
your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever
and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to
say or there is anything important to say about it. .. The text can be
of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single
sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F.
Kennedy was not a homosexual."
Step 2 -- Decide
what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in
the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you
pick something that it really does say. This is called
"reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John
F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.
Step 3 --
Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. … It is a
convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman,
good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our
example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though
a really clever person might be able to find something else.
Step 4 -- Convert
your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by
asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy,
superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the
distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a
justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers
and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting
of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an
established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we
can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence
was uttered and therefore assert that it presumes superiority of
heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Step 5 -- Derive
another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring
to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which
contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of
the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is
really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling
this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you
get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately,
you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the
rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be
frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to
authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard
of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of
other word games. You are allowed to use the word
"problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that
the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the
works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and …
Least credit is
given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly,
though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being
gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure.
And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible
argument to go with our example:
It is not
generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not
an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not
a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader
is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been
there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a
homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and
forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was
a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further
justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a
negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's
mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the
fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is
ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the
question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion
that it is making.
Of course, no
real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph
and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical
abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I
also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an
English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I
already have my degree so I don't care.
Another minor
point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but
that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are
making things up.
That's
basically all there is to it, although there is an enormous variety of
stylistic complication that is added in practice.
The
one point I would add is that the obscurantism of college English
departments is driven by a specific economic pressure: the supply of
people who would like to teach English to college students and who would
be quite competent at it is enormous, probably much greater than for any
other college discipline. Retiring advertising copywriters, high IQ
housewives facing an empty nest, the list could go on and on, of people
whom colleges could hire to teach English. Not surprisingly,
professional full-time English professors fight back by trying to make
the barriers to entry to their field as daunting as possible. Thus,
ideologies as brain-twisting yet boring as deconstructionism are highly
popular.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#larkowl
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Debate
preliminaries -- Does anybody know if Kerry is a morning person
(like Bush) or a night person (like Clinton)?
Bush
is an extreme morning person, which no doubt hurt him in the first
debate in Florida, where his tiredness and petulance was obvious. It ran
from 9pm to 10:30pm local time in the East. As the debates move West, he
should have a chance to do better, if his handlers give him time to
acclimate to the local time zone. The second debate in St. Louis, where
he seemed less like Dana
Carvey's Church Lady, started at 8pm local time. Tonight's debate in
Arizona is the Mountain Time Zone but they don't have daylight savings
time in Arizona so that means it's really ... it's really going to make
my head overheat trying to figure this out ... okay, I think it will
start at 6pm local time in Arizona. That should help Bush. (Unless I've
got it backwards and then it starts at 8pm local time.)
Over
at the lefty Science
and Politics blog, it says that Bush has been campaigning out West
for several days, which should help him get on local time. Of course,
drinking three Red Bulls before the debate can also help, but it's more
artificial.
Back
in December 2000, I wrote this little essay for UPI comparing Bush and
Clinton as classic larks and owls.
-- The
Presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush represents
not just a shift from Democrat to Republican, but also from
"owl" to "lark." While President Clinton enjoys
staying up late, President-Elect Bush likes to be in bed at 9:30 p.m.
every night. He even managed to stick to this schedule during much of
the campaign. As a morning person, Bush will run the government far
differently than Clinton did.
In government and
business, managerial and planning positions attract morning people. On
the other hand, the more creative and improvisational but less
responsible jobs fill up with night people.
Although morning
people often believe deep down that night people are just plain lazy,
and "nocturnal activists" complain about the "tyranny of
the day people," there are practical reasons for this division of
labor.
This diversity of
schedules may have originated far back in prehistory. Daniel McGraw,
founder of The Nocturnal Society, theorizes, "Given the critical
importance of having someone watch over the fire and guard the home
against invaders during the night, it is logical to assume that
evolution would provide for individuals whose natural inclination was to
be awake after the others had gone to sleep."
In the modern
world, there are numerous jobs best done by one or the other. In roles
where the amount of time it takes to finish a day's work is highly
unpredictable, night people will tend to do better. For example, if
there's a big presentation tomorrow morning, a night person can stay
eight hours late to debug a computer program or draw storyboards for a
commercial. Similarly, some of Clinton's finest moments came during
all-night negotiating sessions over Northern Ireland, when his phone
calls encouraged exhausted bargainers to press onward to a deal.
Morning people
seldom thrive in this kind of role, because their performance
deteriorates rapidly during the evening. A lark might claim that all he
has to do is come in early tomorrow morning, but no morning person in
history has ever gotten to work eight hours early.
Of course, people
who have been up all night have a hard time just dragging themselves to
the big presentation the next morning where the decisions are normally
made. Throughout the Cold War, Presidents religiously started their
mornings with a national security briefing. The Washington Post reported
in 1994, however, that during 1993, "Sometimes the briefing was
canceled four or five times in a week." When word leaked out to the
press, Clinton reinstated daily briefings.
Many Democrats
blamed the Clinton Administration's shaky initial performance on the
President's undisciplined use of time. Critics compared the Oval Office
in 1993 to a free-floating all-night college bull session with various
staffers wandering in and out as their interest waxed and waned. People
who assume they are going to stay up late working are often in danger of
wasting time before getting down to business. For instance, during
Finals weeks at many colleges, when students frequently pull
all-nighters to prepare for tests, it's traditional for students to
devote the pre-midnight hours to practical jokes; water balloon attacks
on other dorms, and playing childish games with big red rubber balls.
Finally, in July
1994, Clinton hired the respected former director of the Office of
Management and Budget, Leon Panetta, to bring order to the Oval Office.
He instituted a key staff meeting every morning at 7:30 and put the
President on a fairly strict schedule...
While owls tend
to be better at dealing with erratically long duties, morning people
thrive in a well-scheduled environment. If there's a monthly report that
always takes two hours to do, then morning people are very good at
coming in at 6 a.m. to pound it out before the 8 a.m. status meeting.
Although Bush is
not known for being terribly hard working, he is considered an orderly
and efficient delegator. He prefers to move briskly through a
well-defined agenda. Democrats frequently criticized him for scheduling
only a strictly limited amount of time to consider each clemency appeal
from Death Row inmates. Yet, quick decision-making is a characteristic
trait of morning people. They know from experience that agonizing late
into the night over a problem won't help them make a better choice.
Bosses who get
their best ideas early in the morning tend to be easier to work for.
They delegate assignments soon enough in the day to give their staffers
time to complete them during regular working hours.
In contrast,
working directly for a leader who thinks best at night, such as Winston
Churchill or Adolf Hitler, can be exhausting. A minion must stay up late
to receive orders from the his boss, then come in early the next day to
communicate them to lower level employees who work a nine to five
schedule.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#fray
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"Insurgent
Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah: Locals, Fearing Invasion, Turn
Against Foreign Arabs" reports the Washington Post. Iraqi
xenophobia seems to oppose both pan-Arab jihadism and American
occupationism. Perhaps we should appeal to Iraqi nationalism by offering
a firm deadline for American withdrawal, and state that in the meantime
we will help the Iraqis drive out the foreigners, then leave ourselves.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#2georges
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What
was Saddam thinking? ParaPundit has an item
about an LA Times article
reviewing Saddam's thought processes. Essentially, Saddam figured that
the CIA knew perfectly well that he had destroyed his WMDs way back in
1991 and terminated his programs in 1996 (after all, the CIA had
infiltrated the UN weapons inspectors), but he didn't want his regional
rival Iran to be sure of that.
Further,
he assumed that Washington wanted him in power as a check on Iran. The
LA Times reported:
In
Hussein's view, the U.S. priority in the region was to ensure that
Iran's Islamic Revolution did not spread to other nations and give
radical Shiite clerics a chokehold on global oil supplies. He was
convinced that Washington's national interest lay in containing Iran's
suspected nuclear arms program, not in toppling his regime.
My guess is that Saddam assumed that George Bush the Second would eventually go have a talk with George Bush the First who would explain that the reason he left Saddam in power in 1991 is because a weak but still standing Saddam was the ideal situation from the American perspective: too weak to threaten his neighbors but still strong enough to restrain Iran.
And George II, being a good son, would mediate upon his wise father's
words and decide to do the same.
Back
on February 27 2001, on the 10th anniversary of George H. W. Bush's
decision to settle for liberating Kuwait rather than going on to occupy
Iraq, I wrote
for UPI an endorsement of Bush 41's decision :
Second,
the post-war era would have been even more chaotic and dangerous if
American had occupied Iraq.
We
like to dream that we could have converted Iraq into a peaceful
democracy, just as we did with Japan and West Germany after WWII. The
peoples of those two great industrial nations, however, had at least
already learned how to work together with trust in the economic sphere.
American proconsuls Douglas MacArthur in Japan and Lucius Clay in West
Germany could thus extend that heritage of peaceful industrial
cooperation to the political sphere.
In
contrast, democratic "nation building" in Iraq probably would
have turned out about as well as it has in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and
Kosovo.
Further,
occupying Iraq would have presented the U.S. with severe geopolitical
dilemmas.
Immediately
after the war, Saddam's ethnic enemies within Iraq - the Shiite Muslims
in the south and the Kurds in the north - both rebelled. If we were
running Iraq instead of Saddam, we would have been presented with the
same urgent question: Do we let the Shiites and the Kurds break free and
set up their own nation-states? Or do we fight them to keep Iraq whole?
It would have been extraordinarily distasteful for us to capture Saddam,
only to then take on his favorite pastime of crushing breakaway
elements.
Yet,
for us to allow Iraq to break up into three small states would have
badly destabilized the balance of power in the Persian Gulf.
As
the stalemated Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988 showed, those two bitter
rivals are perfectly matched against each other. If Iraq had broken into
three mini-states, however, Iran would have become the dominant regional
power. This would have been especially troubling because the new Shiite
state centered on Iraq's Persian Gulf oilfields would have shared its
religion with the Shiite theocracy of Iran. This would have paved the
way for the Iranian army to threaten Kuwait's independence.
Too bad
that the simple Mesopotamian tyrant couldn't begin to understand the
convoluted relationship between the two Georges. Of course, I'm not sure if anybody does, including the two Georges.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#algiersdvd
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Finally
on DVD: "The
Battle of Algiers" -- The great hyperrealist depiction of
the Arab uprising against the French is finally out on DVD this week. I wrote
in The American Conservative last winter:
“The
Battle of Algiers” ignores France’s expensive efforts to buy the
hearts and minds of the Arabs and Berbers. Nor does it stress how the
insurgents, to prevent peaceful compromise, mutilated and decapitated
moderate Muslims and assassinated liberal Europeans. But what it does
show of Yacef’s 1956 terror bombings of bistros and discos is
horrifying enough. Alistair Horne’s exhaustive 1978 history, A
Savage War of Peace, confirms many of the film’s details. (Paul
Johnson’s tour de force summary of Horne’s book—furiously
illustrating how a few extremists can launch a vicious cycle of
provocation, reprisal, and outrage—climaxes his famous Modern
Times.)
In
despair, Algiers’ civil authorities hand policing over to the
paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu. This glamorous character was modeled
partly on the redoubtable Jacques Massu, partly on the intellectual
colonels like Marcel Bigeard, who had recently parachuted gallantly into
the doomed fortress of Dien Bien Phu. While an involuntary guest of
General Giap, Bigeard studied Mao’s theories and then used them in his
sophisticated counter-guerilla strategy in Algeria.
The
anti-French filmmakers give Mathieu most of the best lines. When
challenged at a press conference about torture, he answers with
Descartes’ logic and Cyrano’s panache:
"The
problem is: the FLN wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain …
Despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain …
Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should
France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept
all the necessary consequences."
The
paras liquidated the Casbah rebels’ leadership in 1957. In Algeria,
torture worked. What the film doesn’t show is that in France, though,
the public started to lose the stomach for the “necessary
consequences.” Alarmed that the politicians might throw away their
fallen comrades’ sacrifices, the paratroopers threatened to drop on
Paris in May 1958 unless Gen. Charles de Gaulle became France’s strong
man.
Once
in power, however, that great patriot resolved to cut and run. He had to
weather two coup attempts and countless assassination plots, but, minus
the Algerian tumor, long-suffering France emerged peaceful, prosperous,
and democratic.
When
I wrote this last Christmas, a couple of months before the Abu Graihb
scandal emerged, I assumed we too were using torture in Iraq -- it's
inherent in the logic of guerilla war -- but I didn't say anything about
it in my review because I don't believe in making unfounded charges
against our fighting men who are doing the best they can under rotten
circumstances.
By
the way, Jacques Chirac fought in the Algerian war as a young officer.
Paul Starobin reported
in The National Journal::
The
Algerian uprising [against France from 1954-1962] certainly made a
powerful impression on a young man destined for France's highest
political office: Jacques Chirac. Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23,
to serve as an officer in the French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in
an isolated mountainous region of Algeria. The mission was to keep
order. But order proved impossible to keep, with the local population
protective of the fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the
Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in
engagements with the guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were
killed. In a speech to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called
his time there the most important formative experience of his life.
According
to an old friend and adviser, Algeria principally taught Chirac that
occupation, even under the best of intentions, is impossible when
popular sentiments have turned against the occupier: "His
experience is that despite all the goodwill, when you are an occupier,
when you are seen [by the local people] as an occupier, the people will
want you to get out." And if Chirac was convinced of anything,
according to this source, it was that the Americans would ultimately be
viewed not as liberators in Iraq but as occupiers. He foresaw a kind of
re-enactment of the Algerian tragedy, the source adds, a "vicious
circle" in which increasingly violent acts against the occupier are
met with an increasingly harsh response -- a cycle that inevitably sours
local people against the occupation.
As
the French side tells it, this perspective was at the heart of a
disagreement between Chirac and Bush at a private talk late last
November [2002] in Prague, where U.S. and European leaders were gathered
to discuss enlarging NATO. (Although the pair talked on the telephone,
this was their main exchange before the war started six months later.)
According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten
transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the
major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to
go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the
dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the
prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy.
According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar
armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime --
but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see
the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush
that history would decide who was right. The White House recently
declined to comment on the meeting.
Greg
Cochran says that if the French were really our enemy, they would have
told us to invade Iraq.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#maori
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My
movie scenario comes to life: A reader writes:
I
saw this on Drudge -- Bill Gertz is reporting
in the Washington Times:
"U.S.
security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a
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