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2004 Archive
Why
Old Scandals Wouldn't Hurt Bush: A reader makes some important
points:
The
mistake the pointy-headed Democrats don't get is that Bush was a
bad boy. He 'fessed up and was redeemed, saved, born again, long before
he ran for President. Hence anyone who tries to dig up dirt on Bush from
the 60's or 70's or even 80's or early 90's (perhaps) will find it has
limited appeal to white Southern (and many Northern) Christians. The
internal response will always be, "Hell, he always said he was a
bad boy and changed his ways. So why do you Democrats keep bringing it
up?" There are limits, though. Tell us how Bush cheated on his wife
(a la Clinton) just last week, and we will cut him down like a dog.
Compare
and contrast with Kerry. As many Republicans and Democrats have pointed
out, Kerry has never 'fessed up to his youthful indiscretions of
slandering Viet Nam vets, even though everyone else realizes it was a
moronic thing to do. He still defends his 1971 statements, which is as
crazy as my defending my college womanizing and dope use to my
eight-year-old daughter. To this day he cannot surrender his soul to
Jesus and testify about what a sinner he was. He is living in sin,
wallowing in sin, and has not been redeemed. Hence, anything that is
thrown at him sticks fast. Kerry has never been "washed in the
blood."
Finally,
go read Susan
Estrich. Classic case of someone who just does not get it. She
attacks Bush and Cheney as the first "all-alcoholic
ticket."... she is beating a dead horse. Having forgiven Bush for
being a bad boy, the last thing most of us want to hear is someone else
not forgiving him.
***
Amazing
Football Statistics: Chris Harry and Charles Robinson of the Orlando
Sentinel write in "Endangered
Species:"
Since
Craig James ran for 1,227 yards and was voted to the Pro Bowl in 1985,
95 running backs have combined for 235 1,000-yard rushing performances
over those 18 years. None has been white.
While
minorities make up more than 70 percent of the NFL, running back is even
more exclusive. In 2003, 98 percent of the NFL's running backs were
minorities. The NFL kicked off the 2004 season Thursday night, but today
marks the traditional opening weekend, and none of the 32 teams has a
white tailback as a first- or second-teamer...
A
white running back hasn't led the NFL in rushing since Green Bay's Jim
Taylor ran for 1,474 yards in 1962 or been drafted in the first round
since Penn State's John Cappelletti was chosen 11th overall by the Rams
in 1974.
There
are 117 colleges playing Division I-A football in 2004, and none was
scheduled to start a white tailback this weekend. Two schools -- Nevada,
with Chance Kretschmer, and UAB, with Dan Burks -- have starting white
tailbacks who are injured. Kretschmer, who rushed for 1,732 yards and 15
touchdowns as a freshman in 2001, received no scholarship offers and
attended Nevada as a walk-on. Burks was a star high school player in
Birmingham who was thought to be too slow to play for any
"major" school...
A
second article, also posted on Jon
Entine's site, by this brave pair called "THE
BLACK QB COMPARISON: Getting people to talk is problematic"
documents that while it's hard to get the so-called experts to shut up
about the supposed shortage of black quarterbacks, almost nobody wanted
to talk on the record about why blacks 100% monopolize the glamorous
tailback position in the NFL. (Tailback is the second most glamorous
position after only quarterback. On the other hand, tailbacks seems to
get chewed up and spit out faster, with shorter periods of brilliance
than at other positions.)
Bobby
Bowden of Florida State, however, is so old and successful that he spoke
freely:
When
Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden was asked to explain the decline of the
white running back, he laughed so hard, he actually grabbed on to the
reporter posing the question...
"You
go with the best, and it just happens to be there are more minority
tailbacks than there are non-minority," says Bowden, who has spent
nearly 50 years in the college ranks. "Why? I don't know. There's
just more of them. They run better, jump higher.
"God
has made every man different. He's even made our races different. There
are some races that are smaller than others. There are some races that
are taller than others. There are some races, it seems like they have
more athletic ability than others. It just seems they [minority
tailbacks] have more talent as runners than my race. I think that has
something to do with heredity, you know?"
Certainly,
but the interesting question here is not whether blacks have more
natural potential on average than whites at tailback (that's obvious),
but whether genetic differences fully account for the huge gap seen in
the NFL.
I
think it's likely that stereotyping against white tailbacks raises the
black percentage at the position from, say, 90% or 95% to 100%. It's
easy to picture, say, star Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher as a
tailback knocking over would-be tacklers as he powers into the end zone.
But, somebody probably told him somewhere along the way that he'd have a
better chance to make it to the NFL as a linebacker, and he's certainly
done that. The Caste Football
website makes the point that white football players at black positions
like tailback and cornerback are discriminated against.
When
you see a white walk-on rush for 1,732 yards as a freshman, like
Kretschmer did, you've got to figure that racial prejudice played a role
in his not getting any scholarship offers. (Just like it did in the case
of white 400m sprinter Andrew Rock, who won a gold medal as one of the
six members of the US 4x400m relay team, but ran for a Div. III college
because nobody would give him a scholarship. (White 400m gold medalist
Jeremy Wariner did get a scholarship to Baylor -- when you are that
fast, your race can't slow you down.)
I
think that the evidence for anti-white prejudice is true to a certain
extent, but it can also be rational, both on the part of both coaches
who have seen so many whites who looked great at all-white high schools
not measure up in college, and on the part of individual white athletes
who choose not to lower their chances for future success by trying to
prove a particular stereotype wrong, and thus decide to play safety or
quarterback or tight end or another position where whites are less
uncommon.
My
1996 National Review cover story "How
Jackie Robinson Desegregated America" is an in-depth depiction
of how the free market makes racial discrimination unprofitable. (It was
praised by Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker.) It's an article of
faith among economists that racial discrimination is irrational.
Yet,
I think economists should also consider the evidence that rational
profit-maximizing can lead to racial discrimination in cases like this
where the genetic gap between the races is very big, but not quite as
huge as it winds up looking in the NFL.
Unfortunately,
economists almost universally shy away from thinking about genetic
differences, so they tend to be complete nonstarters on issues like
this. Can anybody think of any economist who has ever contributed
anything interesting on the topic of biological racial differences?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#keyser
Government
official arrested for giving secrets to ally: Lately, we've heard a
lot from people like David
Frum
about how, when you think about it, it's almost downright okey-dokey for
U.S. government officials to give secrets to Israel. To prove the FBI
investigation into Neocongate "demented," Frum dreamed up a
"thought
experiment" about how nobody would object if an American
official shared secrets with one of our Asian allies.
Oops.
Donald W. Keyser, a top State Department expert on China, has just been
arrested and released on a $500,000 bond for passing secrets to agents
of our Asian ally, Taiwan. Details are in the Washington Post article:
"Arrest Shocks Former State Department Colleagues: Expert on China
Is Accused of Passing Documents and Taking a Secret Trip to Taiwan Last
Year"
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#forwardleaks
Forward:
"As
Leaks Dry Up in FBI Investigation, Activists Still Fear Jury." Ori
Nir writes:
Even
as a lull in government leaks appears to be short-circuiting the media
frenzy over the FBI's investigation of the pro-Israel lobby, sources
with access to the Justice Department say the probe is moving forward.
Sources
told the Forward that a federal grand jury is expected to begin
interviewing people in connection to the investigation, which is
believed to center on a Pentagon official suspected of passing on
classified documents on to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Investigators reportedly suspect that Aipac officials passed on the
information to Israel...
Meanwhile,
in the face of a rising wave of criticism from lawmakers, Jewish
organizations and neoconservative pundits, the leaks regarding the FBI
probe have stopped.
The
reasons for the lull are not clear, but journalists and Jewish communal
officials were floating several theories this week, including the notion
that the sudden silence came in response to the condemnations from
Jewish organizations and Capitol Hill.
"I
sure hope that this is the case and that there was a directive"
issued to stop leaking, said Abraham Foxman, national director of the
Anti-Defamation League. Last week Foxman sent a letter to FBI Director
Robert Mueller and to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that they
investigate who leaked the information and why.
With
Bush six weeks away from the election, it's not hard to guess why the
leaks have stopped. What's more interesting is why they ever started.
We
still don't know why news of the FBI's two year long investigation into
Neocongate leaked out, and why it leaked late on a Friday afternoon at
the end of August. Laura Rozen suggested that it might be a
"controlled burn" by the suspects or their allies in the
Administration to get the news out at the deadest time of the news year,
rather than have it leak out shortly before the election. Since the leak
terminated Larry Franklin's usefulness to the FBI, which had flipped him
a few weeks earlier and was using him to covertly
gather info on who leaked secrets to Ahmed Chalabi, this makes a
certain amount of sense.
Another
plausible suggestion is that whoever in the Bush Administration was in
charge of keeping this investigation of AIPAC covered up was on
vacation, and patriotic elements in the government used their one chance
to get the story out.
Anyway,
as I've said before, the notion that a scandal involving the
America-Israel Political Action Committee (which The Forward
describes as possessing an "image
of virtual omnipotence") is going to go anywhere in the
short term seems unlikely. On the other hand, a second term for the Bush
Administration is likely to resemble the second term of the Nixon
Administration, with the scandals of the first four years finally
bubbling to the surface.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#kia
Iraq
Casualties Understated?
(UPI)
Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and
Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly
cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press
International.
The
Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq. The
military has [also] evacuated 16,765 individual service members from
Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to
combat...
Among
veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed
with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone
problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800
soldiers who became psychotic.
On
the other hand, some of the wounded really were "merely
scratched," as Republicans like to say these days: 3,271
of the 7,245 wounded returned to duty within 72 hours. On the other
other hand, medicine has progressed so much that we are saving the lives
of severely mangled soldiers who would have ended up in the Killed In
Action column in previous wars, but now are merely maimed for
life.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#white-ified
Your
Tax Dollars at Work: Joel Achenbach pens an often hilarious article
in the Washington Post entitled: "Taking
Off the Color Blinders: Geneticists and Historians Grapple With the Gray
Areas of Race"
"[Race]
doesn't exist biologically, but it does exist socially," said Alan
Goodman, incoming president of the American Anthropological Association,
which sponsored the meeting at the Holiday Inn in Old Town.
The
event served as a brainstorming session for a $4 million project, funded
by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, to create a
traveling museum exhibit on race. If all goes well, the exhibit will
debut in two years at the Science Museum of Minnesota, in St. Paul. The
working title is "Understanding Race and Human Variation."
Beyond
that, things get fuzzy.
It
will take a long time for people to grasp the illusory nature of race at
the biological level, Goodman said. ...
He
identifies himself, incidentally, as a white person.
"Culturally
I'm white-ified," he said. "People see me as white. That has
something to do with how I look, but it has nothing to do with
biological variation."
In
terms of biological variation, Dr. Goodman is actually chartreuse, but
he periodically dips himself in a vat of Sherwin-Williams Antique White
latex paint, which is why people see him as white-ified, culturally
speaking.
But
seriously, folks, allow me to de-fuzz the meaning of race and ethnicity:
A
racial group is a partly-inbred extended family. (See my essay,
"It's
All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective" for a full
explanation of this sentence.)
An
ethnic group is a group of people who share cultural traits that are
often, but not exclusively, passed down within biological families such
as language, religion, surnames, fraternal feelings, and cuisine.
UPDATE:
John Derbyshire responds:
It
seems to me that the official dogma on race -- promulgated by all media
outlets, academia, schools, etc -- is as follows.
"Race
does not exist. DOESN'T EXIST! Well, it kind of exists, but you
shouldn't notice it. DON'T NOTICE IT! OK, you can't help noticing it
once in a while; but you mustn't find it interesting. IT'S NOT
INTERESTING!"
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#silvercity
"Silver
City" and "Bush's Brain" -- Two anti-Bush films are
reviewed by me in the new American
Conservative, available electronically
to paying subscribers this weekend. Here's an excerpt:
The
liberal-dominated movie industry has mobilized to defeat George W. Bush,
but films, even low-budget quickies, are slow, unwieldy dreadnoughts
compared to the swift boats of cable news and talk radio.
Fact
and fiction don't so much collide as exchange glancing blows in two new
anti-Bush movies. The documentary "Bush's Brain" presents
talking heads complaining about the symbiotic relationship between the
President and his campaign consigliere
Karl Rove. The roman à clef
detective film "Silver City," an ensemble effort
helmed by veteran lefty auteur John Sayles, features Chris Cooper as a
grammar-challenged conservative candidate based on Bush, Richard
Dreyfuss as his Machiavellian manager Charles Raven (i.e., Karl Rove),
and Danny Huston as the private eye investigating Republican
corruption...
That
Cooper, a late-blooming but brilliant character actor who won an Oscar
as the motormouth orchid poacher in 2002's "Adaptation,"
portrays the President sounded promising. I'd hoped that Cooper could
make sense of Bush's complex personality, which long ago dazzled Rove
with its political potential: gauche in public but commanding in
private; cocky with peers but intimidated by his father; cunning at
politics but bored by policy.
Sadly,
Sayles' script simply renders Cooper's candidate as inarticulate to the
point of brain damage. You wind up feeling sorry for this harmless
halfwit … and for the misguided liberals like Sayles who think they
can beat Bush by claiming to have higher IQs.
By
the way, Charles Murray and I calculated from Bush's 1206 SAT score that
his IQ falls around the 95th percentile, which the late leftist
historian Jim Chapin estimated would put Bush only a little below
average for a President. Senator John Kerry's test scores and grades are
kept under tighter security than the Pentagon's Iran secrets, so there's
little reason to assume Kerry is any brighter than Bush, although he
does seem more interested in current events.
In
the President's lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West
Texas, the victor stressed Bush's two Ivy League degrees. Bush resolved
never to allow himself to be outdumbed again. And the Democrats haven't
outsmarted him since.
I
reviewed the
book that the documentary "Bush's Brain" is based on for VDARE
back in May of 2002.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#prodigal
Bush
as the Prodigal Son: I've long had a hard time figuring out why so
many people really like President Bush as a person. By all
accounts, he's a bit of a mean, nasty little son-of-a-gun -- not a bad
person, but a small man for his big job -- but then it dawned on
me that I never truly understood the appeal of the parable
of the Prodigal Son either. I always identified with the
Non-prodigal Son, the other brother who is peeved when his father kills
the fatted calf upon the prodigal's return:
"And
he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee,
neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never
gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as
this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou
hast killed for him the fatted calf."
"Good
point," I always thought. (I wonder if Jeb Bush feels the same
way.)
But,
obviously, I was missing the point of the parable and I think I was
missing the point of the George W. Bush story, which is that most people
like the Bad Boy who Repents more than the Goody Two Shoes who just does
what he's supposed to his whole life. That was a big image problem Al
Gore had in 2000. I suppose he could have gone around saying things
like, "Man, I used to be so stoned
that I flunked
out of Divinity School!" But Gore still would have
sounded lame.
In
contrast, George W. Bush is living the American Dream: party hearty
until your 40th birthday, then find Jesus, straighten out, and get
elected President. You gotta love that ... or at least a lot of people
do.
Seriously,
I think the Oprah aspect of the Bush story is greatly underestimated.
What percentage of the population is struggling, or has a loved one who
is struggling, with the substance abuse problems that Bush overcame on
his way to the Presidency? 50%? The George W. Bush story gives a lot of
Americans hope.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#Muammar
Question:
Whose website is this really? A reader writes:
The
best thing I ever read about Turkey & the EU was an article by none
other than..... Mumar Qaddafi. Check his website out:
http://www.algathafi.org/turkey-eng.html
It's
statesmen-like in its forbearance. It almost makes me forget he's a
crazy dictator. The multiple self-ingratiating posed photos on his
website homepage keep
me grounded, though.
This
is very strange. Here's another not unreasonable op-ed
by the old mad bomber on how to solve the Korean problem. Has Khaddafi
actually taken up punditry in his old age? (He seems to be about as good
at it as, say, Thomas Friedman or Jim Hoagland and better than William
Safire or Frank Rich.) Is this some kind of PR offensive by Gadaffi's
minions? Or is this a hoax?
Update:
My reader writes:
Another
thing that points to it being my main man Muammar is that the Africa
thing is front and center. He has this obsession with uniting Africa
politically (under guess who's rule?) He seems to have swapped
pan-Arabism for pan-Africanism. It's been really pissing off his
subjects. He's opened up immigration and his principal cities are being
more and more subjected to black immigration. They aren't happy about
it.
If
you read his silly essay
on Africa it goes in for some anti-colonialism red meat and then
presents the problem that elections have led to the problem of
"power rotation" where perpetual changes in leadership bring
"instability" and so no dynamic progress can be made. I see
where he's going with this.
Oh
dear, with all the power rotation leading to instability who can save us
Africans? If only there was a man who could unite us and provide us with
stability WITHOUT pesky "power rotations". But WHO?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#Scott
Why
Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan Earns the Big Bucks:
It's not every man who can get up day after day and know he's going to
have to say, stone sober, stuff like McClellan's response to the revelation
that the latest CIA National Intelligence Estimate on the future of Iraq
is pessimistic:
"You
know, every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and
hand-wringers who said it can't be done," Mr. McClellan said at a
news briefing. "And every step of the way, the Iraqi leadership and
the Iraqi people have proven them wrong because they are determined to
have a free and peaceful future."
***
Time
Magazine's Cover Story on Illegal Immigration is surprisingly good.
(Here's the full text.)
Very VDAREy.
I've been saying for a long time that somebody could sell a lot of
magazines with honest reporting on this huge scandal, but, no, that
would be divisive. Finally, Time has broken the taboo, and
in a big, big way.
UPDATE:
Don't forget to send a Letter
to the Editor to Time magazine complimenting them on running
"Who Left the Door Open?"
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#quan
The
Funniest Reader Comments in Amazon's History have been elicited by
Adam Quan's self-help book How
to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men. Check
out the volunteer reviews.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#Decrim
Marijuana
decriminalization: I seldom have anything to say about the more
hackneyed topics such as drugs or abortion, not because they aren't
important, but because just about everything that is possible to have
been said on the topic has already been said over the decades. My
personal vice is the urge to say new things. I don't always succeed, and
when I do, it's usually not good for my career because new ideas are
hard to digest and they distract from building a brand name.
I
accepted an invitation from The American Spectator a few weeks ago to
write a short
essay against drug decriminalization, however, because I had
something to say that has been rarely said before. I have to say,
though, judging from much of the response
I've gotten, that my prior prejudice against writing on the topic seems
validated. A lot of people got angry and sputteringly abusive because
I'm Not Playing By The Rules of the drug debate: I introduced a new
argument. This debate has been going on and on and on for decades with
the exact same half-dozen arguments, and the participants are not in the
mood for having to think about anything novel.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#Asianvoters
Kerry
leads Bush 43-36 among Asian-Americans: The GOP used to win this
demographic, but the Democrats won easily in 2000 and 2002, so this poll
from August is a little narrower of a Democratic margin.
Out
of a total of 1004 respondents, Kerry has a 50 point lead among Hmongs,
a 39 point lead among Asian Indians (who will no doubt be the most
politically influential of the Asian immigrants groups), 35 points among
Chinese, and 4 among Japanese (usually, a consistently Democratic
group).
In
contrast, Bush is up 60 points among Vietnamese, 26 among Filipinos, and
3 among Koreans and Pacific Islanders. (Warning - very small sample
sizes and difficult polling conditions -- 59% of interviews conducted in
a foreign language.)
***
He's
Baaaaaaack! Ex-mayor Marion Barry, age 68, is re-elected to the
city council in Washington D.C.. Crack whores rejoice that business
should be lookin' up.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#guns2nd
Original
Intent of the Second Amendment: I haven't really been into guns
since I desperately wanted a BB gun for my 9th birthday (see
"Christmas Story" for details), but my son and I did some
research recently into what the authors and ratifiers of the Bill of
Rights intended to do by passing the Second Amendment: "A well
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
This
wording is rather unusual -- besides the superfluity of commas -- in the
context of the Bill of Rights in that it contains what appears to be a
"whereas" clause, which most of the other first 10 amendments
don't. The First for example, doesn't say, "A war of religion,
being a bad thing, Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion."
This
anomaly has led many contemporary commentators to assume that the 2nd
Amendment was meant only to apply to state militias and not to
individual gun ownership. Here,
for example, is Dahlia Lithwick in Slate confidently explaining that
"Eminent legal scholars, including Sanford
Levinson and historians such as Emory's Michael
Bellesiles, have done some staggering scholarly work on the subject
of the original intent of the Framers and the prevalence of guns at the
time of the founding of the country."
Staggering,
indeed. As the eminent Professor Bellesiles showed in his prizewinning
book Arming America: My Fantasy of How Frontier Life Should Have Been,
when an American in 1789 felt a hankering for deer meat, rather than
resort to using a gun, he normally ran a deer down on foot and gnawed
the beast to death with his teeth.
What
my son and I found out about the original intent was the exact opposite.
The research was a little frustrating to do because there was almost no
debate among state legislators at the time about an individual right to
gun ownership -- because that simply wasn't controversial. Of course
Americans had the right to own guns: the woods were full of bars,
Injuns, and bad 'uns. Nobody argued about it then because there was
nobody at the time to argue with.
What
was controversial back then were state militias -- trained bodies of
fighters who could potentially resist the federal government. Legalizing
militias -- i.e., alternative armies to the U.S. Army -- was obviously a
much more radical step than legalizing individual ownership of firearms.
That was a concession that Federalists like Madison made to win the
approval of those skeptical of the centralizing force of the
Constitution.
When
the Union Army won the Civil War, the idea of alternative armies started
to look outdated, thus leading to the current misinterpretations of what
the authors and ratifiers of the Second Amendment meant. Gun control
advocates should feel free to argue than in an era of
rocket-propelled-grenades and radio-dispatched police cars, the whole
Second Amendment is obsolete and dangerous, but please don't make up
stories about what it was supposed to mean.
UPDATE:
The other big change is that the Bill of Rights didn't apply to the
states until the 14th Amendment of 1868. For example, Connecticut had an
establishment of religion until 1818. So, the ratifiers weren't
establishing an absolute right of gun ownership, they were just
preventing the federal government from infringing it.
***
The
Derb pens Bush's 11/8/04 Iraq
Withdrawal speech:
People
of Iraq! I am George W. Bush, president and president elect of the
United States of America. In last week's elections, the citizens of my
country asked me to continue as chief executive of our federal
government...
I
am appearing before you tonight to tell you that the U.S. component of
that expeditionary force will soon be withdrawn from your country...
No
nation is happy to have its territory occupied by foreign armies.
Certainly the U.S. never intended the current occupation to be of long
duration. We are not an imperialist nation. Our own nation's origins
were in a revolt against imperialism. Our entire history testifies to
our deep belief in national independence and self-determination for all
peoples. We occupied Iraq in our own interests, because we believed that
the Saddam dictatorship was a threat to us, and to the international
order. Many other nations agreed with us. We shall now prepare to leave,
as we always intended to, because those threats no longer exist...
There
is, however, a limit to what we can do, and a limit to the patience of
our own people. If Iraqis cherish their nation, they must themselves be
willing to sacrifice for it. If Iraqis wish to be citizens of a peaceful
and prosperous country, they must themselves work hard to those ends.
Many Iraqis, of course, are so willing, and indeed many have sacrificed
their lives to those ends in this past year and a half. However, Iraq
will only be a single nation, and at peace, if the overwhelming majority
of Iraqis sink their differences and join together in a spirit of
patriotic solidarity to preserve this nation. If Iraqis are not willing
to do that, then there is no hope for Iraq, either under occupation or
free from it. [More]
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#apollo
Apollo
-- This 1989 book about the engineers who made the moon landing possible
is back in print. It was written by Charles Murray and his wife
Catherine Bly Cox and they've got a new website
with lots of interesting material.
The
accomplishments of the American engineers of the Cold War are a
tremendous subject that's been barely tapped yet. Another excellent book
is Skunk
Works by the second head of Lockheed's secret design shop Ben R.
Rich.
***
A
new number #1 player in tennis -- If you're not a tennis fan, check
out this picture
of the handsome fellow who just moved up to #1. Then, read the caption
below it.
And
people give Anna Kournikova a hard time for not winning...
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#chechnya3
Another
Neocon and Beslan: William Kristol writes in his Weekly Standard:
Now
we face a new challenge: jihadist terror. Leaders around the world claim
to be united in vowing to deny the terrorists victories. And yet. In the
immediate wake of the Beslan slaughter, one might have expected
editorials in top U.S. papers simply to express grief, anger, and
solidarity, and a commitment to winning the war on terror. Instead, they
tended briefly to denounce the terrorists and then focus on the
incompetence of the Russian security forces, and on rehashing the dismal
history of Russian-Chechen relations.
The
New York Times, for example, concluded its editorial by urging a
"bold Russian reach for compromise" with, needless to say,
"diplomatic nuance." It took Ralph Peters, a military analyst
writing in the New York Post, to state the simple and unfashionable
truth: "The attack in Beslan wasn't about Russia's brutal
incompetence in Chechnya--as counter-productive as Moscow's
heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so
profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the
trigger and term the act 'divine justice'."
But
this is too simple for American liberals, or for the government of
France.
Okay,
Bill, but that's also too simple for the pro-independence
American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, which officially denies that
Muslim extremism is an important element in the Chechen revolt, which it
sees as a justifiable nationalist insurgency. And you, Bill Kristol, are
one of ACPC's 96
members. So, do you want to think things over and try to get your
story straight? Or, will you just continue to bluster whatever suits
your convenience?
UPDATE:
Here's the Russian
Dilettante's comment.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#kool-aid
Andrew
Sullivan stops drinking Bush's Kool-Aid -- Lately, Sullivan,
long one of the most febrile of the war fever bloggers, has started to
sound progressively more sane about Iraq. He's almost beginning to say
what I was saying in 2002 and 2003. (Of course, I fear the only reason
Andrew stopped drinking Bush's Kool-Aid is because Bush came out against
the one thing Andrew really cares about: gay marriage.) For
example, when Gregg Easterbrook revived Sullivan's notorious Flypaper
Strategy in TNR, Sullivan responded:
Gregg
thinks we're killing hundreds of mujahideen on Iraq, which can only be a
good thing. Yes it is - as long as the conflict doesn't create many
replacements. And the poor people of Iraq surely deserve more than being
in the middle of an open-ended exercise in urban warfare in which their
country is slowly destroyed. My early hope was that, having stabilized
the country, U.S. forces could indeed have attracted professional
terrorists to Iraq and killed them. But the Bush administration never
sent enough troops to pacify the country, and so provoked the terrorism
without being able to suppress it effectively. That's the worst of all
possible worlds. Look, we have to tough it out. But how much confidence
can anyone still have in the president who engineered this in the first
place, and who still refuses to recognize that anything is fundamentally
awry?
Over
a year ago, I wrote:
"Jumbo
shrimp," "military intelligence," and now ... "blog
wisdom!" -- Since midsummer,
the big blog boys, including Tin Pencil-Sharpener nominees Instapundit,
Andrew
Sullivan, and James Taranto
of the WSJ, have been promoting the "flypaper" or
"draining the swamp" theory to explain why our getting into a
guerilla war in Iraq is really a good thing. See, now we've got
all the bad guys right where we want them -- all the anti-American
Muslims in the world are flocking to Iraq where we will kill them all
and then there will be no more of them anywhere ever again. As Greg
Cochran points out, the Soviets tried out the flypaper theory in
Afghanistan from 1979-1988, killing a million or more Muslims, which is
why there hasn't been a single Islamist extremist in Afghanistan ever
since.
With
an article crowing over the President's endorsement of his Flypaper
strategy / desperate rationalization, Andrew Sullivan puts in his bid in
the Tin
Pencil Sharpener's uncoveted Hormone Derange category. (In Jay
McInerney's Ransom, "Home on the Range" was the name of
an American-owned shop in Kyoto that sold cowboy hats to Japanese young
men. The owner changed the name to "Hormone Derange" because
that's how his customers pronounced it, and, well, it just seemed more
fitting.) The idea is that getting into a guerilla war in Iraq is a good
thing because it lets us kill more people who need killing.
One
obvious problem with the Flypaper theory is that there's no glue on the
flypaper. President Bush has been inviting guerillas into Iraq with his
"Bring 'em on" bluster. If these foreign anti-Americans
fighters in Iraq start losing, they'll come to realize that Andrew
Sullivan is a more masterful asymetrical war strategist than they are,
and they'll just leave Iraq. So, the upside is small.
The
downsides are numerous. How exactly are we going to turn Iraq into a
shining city on a hill of prosperity and democracy while also using it
as our designated killing floor? How are we going to keep the oil
and water pipelines running if we keep inviting in more trained
terrorists? How can we win the hearts and minds of civilian Iraqis who
might not appreciate the President deciding to treat their neighborhoods
as a global battle zone? How can we get more cooperation from Iraqi
civilians if they are in danger of being murdered for cooperating by all
the guerillas we've attracted?
In
reality, it turned out that foreign terrorists, while probably
significant due to suicide bombings, were vastly outnumbered in the
insurgency by local Iraqis who just didn't like foreigners occupying
their country.
(By
the way, you always hear from the war-fever-crowd-with-second-thoughts
about how their invasion would have worked out fine if Bush had only
sent more troops. Where exactly are these additional troops?)
UPDATE:
I'd known that Sullivan et al got the "flypaper" idea from
some Canadian named David Warren, but I had never read Warren's original
Flypaper essay (July 5, 2003) until just now. Not surprisingly,
Warren's prose style is gratingly smug and pompous, but what I hadn't
expected was the emphasis he put in his influential little theory on how
much he approved of Americans dying in place of Israelis (I added the
bolding below):
The
U.S. occupation of Iraq has done more to destabilize Iran than the
ayatollahs could hope to do in Iraq; and then something. This
"something" has befuddled the various "experts" on
regional security, trapped within their Pavlovian assumptions. They
notice that the U.S. forces in Iraq have become a new magnet for
regional terrorist activity. They assume this demonstrates the
foolishness of President Bush's decision to invade.
It
more likely demonstrates the opposite. While engaged in the very
difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq -- the first
democracy, should it succeed, in the entire history of the Arabs --
President Bush has also, quite consciously to my information, created a
new playground for the enemy, away from Israel, and even farther
away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this
lower ground, he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.
This
is the meaning of Mr. Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt from the
Roosevelt Room on Wednesday, when he was quizzed about the "growing
threat to U.S. forces" on the ground in Iraq. It should have been
obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers
take casualties. What the media, and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp,
is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be
provided by defenceless civilians, both in Iraq and at large. The sore
thumb of the U.S. occupation -- and it is a sore thumb equally to
Baathists and Islamists, compelling their response -- is not a mistake.
It is carefully hung flypaper.
And
I think the naïve "roadmap" exercise in diplomacy between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority may make some sense in this
context. I.e., Israel takes down its flypaper, while the U.S. puts up
its own in Iraq.
At
the moment it appears that most of the infiltration of Iraq is coming
from the west, through Syria, and consists of Lebanese-based Hizbullah
elbowing their way into Saddam's old territory. Their intention is to do
to the U.S. Army in Iraq what they did to the Marines in Beirut in 1983.
The chief source of both men and materiel is what Gal Luft has called
"Hizbullahland" -- the 1,000 square kilometre patch, that
Hizbullah now rules under Syrian protection, which was formerly Israel's
security enclave in southern Lebanon (until they withdrew in a peace
initiative in the year 2000).
Hizbullah
itself (the "Army of Allah" -- Shia, and ultimately financed
and armed by Iran's ayatollahs) are directing their attention less
and less towards the "Little Satan" of Israel, and more and
more towards the "Great Satan" of the U.S., as events
unfold.
This
is exactly what President Bush wants. To engage them, away from
Israel, in mortal combat. To have an excuse for wiping them out -- a
good, solid, American excuse, from which Israel has been extracted.
The good news is, Hizbullah's taking the bait.
Now,
Warren is a Canadian, so his preference for Americans dying in place of
Israelis does not reflect on his patriotism. But it sure as hell does
reflect badly on all those American bloggers who read Warren's
concoction and found it wonderful.
UPDATE:
Sullivan wrote
in "Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds" in the Sunday Times of
London, 9/6/03: "The
extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist
terrorists that is not Israel."
Beauty,
it appears, is in the eye of the beholder. Is Sullivan an American
citizen?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#juancole1
The
Emerging (or Submerging) Muslim Superpower: Juan Cole writes in an essay
on Osama bin Laden's strategy of destroying national boundaries within
in the Arab Muslim world:
If
the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated
intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of
the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Well
... maybe. Here are all the national average IQ studies for Arab
countries found in Lynn and
Vanhanen's database:
Egypt:
83
Iraq:
87, 87
Lebanon:
86
Morocco:
84, 85
Qatar:
78
Sudan
(marginally Arab): 72
Not
a lot there to work with, Juan.
The
Ottoman Empire, the closest historical analogy, wasn't exactly 5th
Century BC Athens for the last few centuries of its existence.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#dementia
This
could explain a lot ... The Washington Post reports:
"Many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in
elections -- including through absentee ballot. Although there are no
national statistics, two studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island found
that patients at dementia clinics turned out in higher numbers than the
general population. About 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's
disease, the most common cause of dementia. Florida alone has 455,000
patients, advocates estimate."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#goppoll
Republicans
Who Know What They're Talking About -- It would be fascinating to do
an opinion poll on the Iraq War just among people who voted for Bush in
2000 and who have jobs that require them to actually know what they are
talking about. I exclude myself from that category. (I like to think I'm
well informed, but, obviously, the job of pundit doesn't require any
such thing.) Instead, I'd include:
-
Generals in the U.S. Armed Services
- Executives with Middle Eastern experience in oil and engineering firms
-
Weapons scientists at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore
-
Spies and intelligence analysts
Any
bets on what they'd say?
UPDATE:
Thrasymachus places his bets here.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#bongbong
Ethnic
preferences for Latinos: Here are some readers' additions to the
list in my new VDARE column
of curious categories potentially eligible for affirmative action as
Hispanics:
-
The non-Hispanic wives of Latinos who take their husbands' Spanish
surnames.
-
The non-Hispanic ex-wives who keep their ex-husbands Spanish surnames.
-
Blondes from Paraguay with the first name Dieter or Klaus who are vague
about what their grandfathers did from 1933-45.
-
Teresa Heinz Kerry -- a twofer: not only Portuguese and thus sort of
Hispanic, but African-American!
-
Exiled Filipina co-dictatress Imelda Marcos and her crooked, but
Spanish-surnamed, son Bong-Bong Marcos
-
Madonna: she played Argentinean co-dictatress Evita Peron; and she's
often been said on various occasions to have had a little Latino in her
(and have had a lot of big Latinos in her, too, for that matter).
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#foucault
The
Heroic Age of Epistemology -- Between CBS's dogged defense of their
apparently forged documents and the Republican Convention's repeated
conflation of the War on Terror with the actual War in Error in Iraq,
American elites appear to have entered into a collaboration to prove
Foucault right: that power and the will to impose one's interpretation
are all-important and that "truth" is obsolete in our
post-modern era.
I
suspect, however, that reality gets the last laugh.
***
A
new VDARE.com column
is out recounting one of the classic affirmative action head-scratchers.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#madness
Another
day of chaos, madness, and horror in Iraq: For some reason, nobody
over there seems to care about 1972 IBM Selectric typefaces. The
Washington Post reports
we whacked an Arab cable network TV correspondent as he was reporting
live (or, depending upon upon when you tuned in, dead), insuring hours
of viewing excitement for hotheads from Rabat to Brunei:
Car bombings,
mortar attacks and clashes between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi
security forces killed at least 80 civilians across the country Sunday,
Iraqi officials said...
A U.S. military
helicopter fired into a crowd of civilians in the capital who had
surrounded a burning Army armored vehicle, killing 13 people, said Saad
Amili, spokesman for the Health Ministry. Among those killed was a
Palestinian journalist reporting from the scene for the Arab satellite
network al-Arabiya.
The U.S. military
said it was trying to scatter looters who were attempting to make off
with ammunition and pieces of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which had
been hit by a car bomb early in the morning on Haifa Street, a
troublesome north-south artery west of the Tigris River.
But witnesses,
including a Reuters cameraman who was filming the al-Arabiya journalist
when he was shot, disputed that account and said the crowd was peaceful,
Reuters reported.
In the video,
which was shown on al-Arabiya throughout the day, the journalist, Mazin
Tumaisi, 26, can be seen reporting near the burning armored vehicle. It
is not clear what the people around it were doing. As the camera moved
to the sky to capture the image of two low-flying military helicopters
swooping onto the scene, bullets rained down, hitting Tumaisi and the
cameraman, Seif Fouad, who was seriously wounded. The camera lens was
sprayed with blood, and Tumaisi could be heard saying, "Please help
me. I am dying."
In Ramadi, a city
west of Baghdad, 10 people were killed and 40 were wounded, including
women and children, when U.S. tanks and helicopters opened fire in a
residential district, Abdel Salam Mohamed, a doctor at Ramadi Hospital,
told Reuters. The U.S. military had no immediate comment.
Ten people were
also killed in Babil and two in Basra, the Health Ministry said, without
specifying the circumstances. Independent confirmation could not be
made.
Near Hilla, 60
miles south of Baghdad, three Polish soldiers were killed in an ambush
and three Iraqi National Guardsmen died in a bombing, according to the
Associated Press.
In
other news, Reuters reports
we killed 51 in Tal
Afar, which won't make our Turkish allies happy because that city is
largely populated by Turkmen. Turkmens? Turkpersons? Whatever, their
co-ethnics, whom they look protectively upon, especially when U.S.
forces seem to be working with the Turkmen's hated rivals, the Kurds.
***
Secretary
of State John Quincy Adams, Fourth of July 1821:
Wherever
the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled,
there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But
she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the
well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion
and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by
the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own,
were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve
herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and
intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the
colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her
policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....She
might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the
ruler of her own spirit....
[America’s]
glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march
of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield
is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration:
this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of
mankind would permit, her practice.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#floridavote
John
Kerry Says GOP Out to Suppress Black Votes:
John
Kerry suggested Saturday night that Republicans may try to keep black
voters from casting their ballots to help President Bush win in
November. "We are not going to stand by and allow another million
African American votes to go uncounted in this election," the
Democratic presidential nominee told the Congressional Black Caucus -- AP
Now,
it is definitely true that if every registered voter who showed up at
the polls in Florida in 2000 had had their intention accurately
recorded, then Al Gore would be President. But, it is not true that this
was the result of a nefarious GOP conspiracy. Instead, the various
voting machines employed by different counties required different levels
of competence to successfully operate.
Of
course, under our laws, it's not enough to to just want to vote for Al
Gore -- you have to actually unambiguously mark your ballot for Gore,
something that Gore supporters had a harder time doing than Bush
backers.
Was
this caused by differences in voting machines or differences in the
competence between Gore and Bush supporters?
There
was little evidence that between-county differences in voting machines
benefited the Republicans in Florida. But within each county (and
thus using the exact same machines), voters in Democratic-leaning
precincts were more likely on average to screw up their ballots than
voters in Republican-leaning precincts, according to a study
by the Miami Herald, which estimated Gore would have won by 23,000
votes if the messed up ballots in each precinct had followed the
breakdowns of the rest of precinct.
Why?
Because more really dumb people wanted to vote for Al Gore than for
George W. Bush. (For example, nationally, Gore won the high school
dropout vote by a commanding 59-39 average, according to the VNS exit
poll.) So, the Miami Herald's estimate of a 23,000 vote margin for Gore
is probably underestimated, because within each precinct, Gore
supporters were more likely to get confuse and botch their ballots.
However,
you'll never hear this simple explanation of what happened in Florida
because the group that screwed up their ballots the most was of course
the 90+% Democratic voting group that also averages a standard deviation
lower on IQ tests. ("Life is like a long mental-battery test,"
a wise
woman has said.) And you can't mention that fact, which is
the single biggest reason so much of what is written about public
affairs in this country is largely meaningless.
La
Griffe du Lion estimated
that Gore would have won by over 1% in Florida if everybody's intention
had been counted accurately. He recently told me that the new
idiot-proofed voting systems in Florida reduced the misvote to
negligible levels in the 2002 election, so the Democrats are likely to
benefit.
***
"Illiteracy
shockingly high in L.A.: Half of
workers unable to read"
reports the L.A. Daily News:
Continued
immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts
to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the
working-age population can't read a simple form, a report released
Wednesday found.
Alarmingly, only
one in every 10 workers deemed functionally illiterate is enrolled in
literacy classes and half of them drop out within three weeks, said the
study by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
"It's an
emergency situation," said Mayor James Hahn, adding that poor
literacy rates could jeopardize the region's economy by driving out
high-tech businesses and other industries that pay well.
In the Los
Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed
functionally illiterate, the study said.
That percentage
dropped to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley -- which
includes Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita -- but soared to 85 percent in
some pockets of the Valley.
The study
measured levels of literacy across the region using data from the 2000
Census, the U.S. Department of Education and a survey of literacy
programs taken from last September to January.
It classified 3.8
million Los Angeles County residents as "low-literate,"
meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a
bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.
And despite
hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past
decade to boost literacy rates, functional illiteracy levels have
remained flat because of a steady influx of non-English-speaking
immigrants and a 30 percent high school dropout rate, authors of the
report said.
***
Time
Mag Cover Story: "Who
Left the Door Open?"
Despite
all the talk of homeland security, sneaking into the U.S. is
scandalously easy—and on the rise. Millions of illegal aliens will
pour across the U.S.-Mexican border this year, many from countries
hostile to America. TIME looks at the damage, the dangers and the
reasons the U.S. fails to protect itself.
It
seems almost shocking that a major newsmagazine is doing a story on a
problem happening right now rather than on what Berry or Kush were doing
in 1968.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#fredonmexico
Fred
Reed on the View from Mexico: Fred moved to Mexico awhile ago, and
offers an insightful
column on illegal immigrants and assimilation:
Mexicans and
gringos have distinctly different views of the United States. An
American explaining the attractiveness of his country will usually say,
“I have a big house in the suburbs, three cars, a home theater, and
300 channels on the cable. I can drink the water, and in the mall I can
buy anything, absolutely anything.” He may talk of freedom and
democracy, often having only the vaguest idea of whether he actually has
them or what conditions might be in other countries.
A Mexican is more
likely to say, “They are such a cold people. They don’t know their
neighbors. They don’t know their children. They have no fiestas. Rules
and being on time are more important to them than other people. They
have no religion.” (To a robust Catholic, bland agnostic Protestantism
isn’t detectibly a religion.) Democracy means little to an illegal
with a second-grade education; in any event, Mexico is probably as
democratic as the United States. He knows the government left him alone
in Mexico, which is his definition of freedom. And mine.
But money counts
when you don't have any. It counts a lot. And so they come whether they
like the country or not. Very often they do not. This is going to
matter.
... Who then are
the emigrants?
For starters,
they are not doctors, chemists, and airline pilots. Successful Mexicans
do not want to go to the United States. Mexicans who are merely
comfortable do not want to go to the United States. They like Mexico.
This is very difficult to explain to most Americans, who know beyond
doubt that Mexico has lesser malls. But it is a fact.
I
always greatly enjoyed visiting Mexico the nine or ten times I've been
there, precisely because it is so different from the U.S.. But the last
time I took my family to Rosarito Beach (between Tijuana and Ensenada)
there were just too many guys with fifth grade educations and two hours
of training standing around holding submachine guns.
I'll
go back when I'm an empty-nester.
***
Bush
approval ratings actually on the rise - As I've mentioned before,
the Pollkatz
site graphically tracks all the opinion polls over time and plots the
approval minus disapproval ratings. As I've mentioned before, the normal
tendency has been for Bush's approval rating to decline, except the
three times it has shot up: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the capture
of Saddam. Yet, Bush's approval rating has been on the rise for the last
few weeks and has finally climbed back in the black after months when
disapprovers outnumber approvers, although there has been little
objective news to warrant this.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#portrait
Portrait
of an Iraqi Insurgent -- Although Administration has constantly
tried to portray the rebels in Iraq as "dead-end Ba'athists"
or "al-Qaeda," the U.S. military has been reluctant to lie to
support this line. Instead, while the U.S. has captured and interrogated
thousands of insurgents in Iraq -- and, as the Abu Ghraib scandal
revealed, ve haf vays of making them talk -- the standard line for
military spokesmen has been, "We don't know who the insurgents
are."
An
interview n the Observer
with one guerilla, a small-timer whose group of seven claims to have
killed five or six American soldiers, shows the randomness of the
origins of the rebels:
Abu Mujahed,
worryingly for the analysts, fits into none of these easy categories.
For a start, he was pro-American before the invasion. 'The only way to
breathe under the old regime was to watch American films and listen to
their music,' he said. He had been a Bon Jovi fan.
'It gave me a
glimpse of a better life. When I heard that the Americans were coming to
liberate Iraq I was very happy. I felt that I would be able to live
well, travel and have freedom. I wanted to do more sport, get new
appliances and a new car and develop my life. I thought the US would
come here and our lives would be changed through 180 degrees.'
He spoke of how
his faith in the US was shaken when, via a friend's illicitly imported
satellite TV system, he saw 'barbaric, savage' pictures of civilian
casualties of the fighting and bombing. The next blow came in the
conflict's immediate aftermath, as looters ran unchecked through
Baghdad.
'When I saw the
American soldiers watching and doing nothing as people took everything,
I began to suspect the US was not here to help us but to destroy us,' he
said.
Abu Mujahed,
whose real name is not known by The Observer, said: 'I thought it might
be just the chaos of war but it got worse, not better.'
He was not alone
and swiftly found that many in the Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad
shared his anger and disappointment. The time had come. 'We realised. We
had to act.'
Nothing had been
planned in advance. There has been speculation, and especially among
American officials, that Saddam's henchmen had planned a 'guerrilla war'
if defeated. But Abu Mujahed, who described himself as 'a Muslim but not
religious', and the others in his group were not working to any plan.
Everything they did was improvised. And each of his seven-man group had
a different motive: 'One man was fighting for his nation, another for a
principle, another for his faith.'
Significantly,
his group contains several former soldiers, angry at the controversial
demobilisation of the Iraqi military by the coalition last year. Others,
like Abu Mujahed, have salaried government jobs. The cell is not part of
any broader organisation and does not have a name, he said. 'We are just
local people ... There is a sheikh who co-ordinates some of the various
groups but I do not know who he is.'
... Black
soldiers are a particular target. 'To have Negroes occupying us is a
particular humiliation,' Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism
prevalent in much of the Middle East. 'Sometimes we aborted a mission
because there were no Negroes.'
His justification
for the struggle was an inconsistent mix of political and economic
grievances and wounded pride: 'We are under occupation. They bomb the
mosques, they kill a huge number of people. There is no greater shame
than to see your country being occupied.'
A
reader writes:
I'm
afraid you've just alerted the Neoconservatives/ NR types (who I am sure
all read your blog) to another post-hoc reason for the invasion;
the vile racism of the Iraq youth. We need to get some human relations
commissions set up, pronto! And hand a Haliburton-sized contract to
Diversity.com for reeducation.
***
Q.
Dave Barry is to "booger"
as Steve Sailer is to ... A reader writes:
Here's
a fun search to do on your site: "shocked,
SHOCKED." Is it your trademark phrase? I don't know, but it's
the one I remember most!
Yes,
I made it up and trademarked it, so you should send me a nickel whenever
you use it.
***
On
this 3rd anniversary, Peter Brimelow's essay in VDARE.com "Three
Years After 9/11: Is The Tragedy Just Beginning?" is a must
read.
***
21
Ways the Neocons Were Wrong: Martin Sieff of UPI, who used to be a
speechwriter for Netanyahu, writes in Salon:
These must be
strange days to be a neoconservative: caught between exultant hope and
wild terror; utterly discredited, yet still securely in power; proven
totally wrong on Iraq, yet still determined to believe against all odds
that one more wild throw of the dice will recoup all.
To the casual
observer, the neocons in the Bush administration and their impeccably
drilled and regulated cheering section across the commanding heights of
the U.S. broadcast and print media have been routed. Since the hand-over
of power to the interim Iraqi government, the media have for the most
part turned their sensitive faces away from Iraq, giving the public the
false sense that it is becoming quiet there. The 138,000 U.S. troops
still bogged down in Iraq know better, even if Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz can't recall before a congressional committee
just how many Americans have died: Fifty-four were killed in July, a
significant rise from the 42 who died in June, the month before the
hand-over; and the total in August already looks as if it will exceed
that in July.
But the
perception that the neocons -- including Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith -- have been routed, or are in retreat, could not be
further from the truth. They are as firmly in control of the levers of
real power in the government as they were in the yearlong, synchronized
buildup to their war in Iraq. Not a single National Security Council or
Pentagon official who eagerly rode the bandwagon for the war has been
fired. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
and aide John Hannah continue to enjoy the full confidence of the vice
president.
In the media, it
is the same story. Rupert Murdoch has not suffered a sudden fit of shame
and forced William Kristol to relinquish control of the Weekly Standard.
Time magazine and the Washington Post have not shown one iota of
embarrassment that they continue to provide a platform for columnist
Charles Krauthammer, whose histrionics have now ascended into a call for
our next "preemptive" war -- this time with Iran. If that
happens, of course, hundreds, probably many thousands, of young
Americans will pay with their lives for a new wave of appalling bungles.
And if the past is prologue, no neocon in government should ever expect
to lose a job.
Marty
goes on to list 21 separate neocon predictions about Iraq that have all
proven false.
See
also the 19
(and counting) reasons why Iraq was never likely to become a
democracy.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#vijay2
Vijay
Singh, Nowhere Man -- The greatest golfer in the world today, the
man who pushed Tiger Woods off his pedestal last weekend after five
years as the official #1 player on Earth, is Vijay Singh from Fiji. I argued
that nobody in America cares because Americans only think in terms of
three races: White, Black, and Miscellaneous. A reader begs to differ:
Little attention
is being paid to Vijay Singh because he is being "punished" by
the news media and by the public at large for being perceived as having
been mean to a girl.
I'm talking, of
course, about his objections from last year to Annika
Sorenstam's participation in the Bank of America Colonial
Invitational. He was raked
for that by the most vocal members of the press and the public, and they
will probably never forgive him for it.
Western women
have reached a very enviable position in which they can assert
themselves as independent to men and equal to men and able to compete
with men on equal terms -- but in situations where they really aren't
equipped to do so, as Sorenstam wasn't, they are declared to be
"winners" simply for showing up.
And you're STILL
not allowed to "pick on the girl", as Singh is perceived to
have done. Think of New York female voters waxing shocked and aghast at
the temerity of Rick Lazio for striding across a platform and thrusting
a petition in the face of Hillary Clinton - who is supposed to be the #1
symbol of female assertiveness. Singh is in a similar position.
Worse yet, from
the standpoint of the social arbiters, Singh shrugged off the hostility
and has since gone on to do very well for himself.
By contrast,
think of the volcanic and emotionally vulnerable John
Rocker, who allowed the hostile treatment that he received from the
press, the MLB establishment, and some fans to destroy his career. It
was very clear that the treatment he was receiving was very much
adversely affecting his performance. So like vultures, they followed
Rocker voraciously, celebrating every subsequent failure that he
underwent between the foul lines.
Trust me, if
Singh were playing poorly, we'd be hearing his name mentioned more
often: i.e., "Vijay Singh, who stirred up a lot of controversy by
objecting to the presence of a female golfer in the Colonial
Invitational, failed to make the cut again today...
***
The
Trouble with Bush winning from the perspective of Pentagon neocons
is that there's a tradition of Presidents only handing out pardons as
they leave office -- witness Clinton pardoning Marc Rich or Bush Sr.
pardoning Elliot Abrams for lying to Congress about Iran-contra. In
contrast, Nixon refused to use the pardon weapon to shut down the
Watergate investigations.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#elliotabrams
Speaking
of Elliot Abrams, I'd like to say that back in the 1990s I was
impressed by his courage during his post-pardon exile from government.
In the last decade, he devoted most of his energies to trying, as in his
book Faith
or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, to
persuade Jews not to marry shiksas. For example, he wrote
in Slate in 1997:
But
the accommodationists are wrong. Intermarriage is both inevitable in our
open society, and immensely threatening to Jewish continuity here. The
Jewish community must avoid excuses and circumlocutions, and recognize
that only a powerful Jewish identity built on the faith and practice of
Judaism can enable young American Jews to resist the temptation of
intermarriage. Only that faith can explain to them why they should
resist the melting pot and build a family that takes its place in the
covenant of Abraham.
It
seemed to me then that Abrams was taking a politically incorrect stand
on something he deeply believed in, even though he was obviously
permanently sacrificing any chance for a future government job involving
the Middle East. After all, nobody is going to nominate the Rev. Bob
Jones III, the president of the university that was notorious for
banning interracial dating, to be American ambassador to South Africa,
and Abrams' position on interethnic dating is fairly similar.
Boy,
was I naive. Abrams is now not only back in government, but he has his
dream job: he's the White House's Director
of Middle Eastern Affairs.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#democracyiniraq
Democracy
in Iraq -- I have no idea if anything resembling free, fair,
comprehensive elections will take place in Iraq on schedule, but if they
do, has anybody stopped to think what the number one campaign issue will
be? My bet, judging from what little polling has been done in Iraq, is
that most of the candidates will run on one of the two platforms:
"I
hate America the most!" versus, "No, I hate America even
more!"
A
reader writes: "At least they won't be arguing about the font,
superscript and proportional spacing capabilities of an early seventies
IBM typewriter. Jeez, what a way to elect the most powerful man in the
world!"
See
also: "Hundreds
of Republicans Injured in Rush to Discredit Kerry" and "Bush
Campaign More Thought Out than Iraq War:"
"Judging
from the initial misrepresentation of intelligence data and the ongoing
crisis in Najaf, I assumed the president didn't know his ass from his
elbow," said Col. Dale Henderson, a military advisor during the
Reagan Administration. "But on the campaign trail, he's proven
himself a master of long-term planning and unflinching determination.
How else can you explain his strength in the polls given this
economy?" Henderson said he regrets having characterized Bush's
handling of the war as "incompetent," now that he knows the
president's mind was simply otherwise occupied."
The
Onion
Another
reader writes:
So,
what are the obstacles the US faced in turning Iraq into the
Jeffersonian democracy of the Middle East?
(1)
Dislike of all foreigners;
(2) Dislike of all infidels (or "Kafirs");
(3) If you're an American you stand out like a sore thumb - either
you're black or white and that makes spotting you pretty easy;
(4) Fully armed populace;
(5) Martyr mentality as outlined by the War Nerd;
(6) No history of Liberalism ever;
(7) Clannishness and in-breeding rampant (as outlined by you);
(8) Low IQ;
(9) United States' complete lack of experience in empire-building;
(10) Female soldiers standing guard with guns against Arab Men;
(11) Vicious hatred for the US in the middle east and association with
"evil" Israel;
(12) Country teeming with hotheads likely to blow their fuse at the
first available opportunity; and
(13) Warring ethnic groups - Shia, Sunni and Kurd. No real sense of
nationhood worth its name.
Have
I left anything out? :D
I'd
add a couple of points Greg Cochran has been making:
(14)
Illiteracy rate well over 50%.
(15) Even though you always heard from neocons about how educated the
Iraqis were, even the college graduates weren't educated in John Locke
and the Baron de Montesquieu. They'd mostly been taught from technical
manuals and Baathist propaganda. The most intellectually adventurous
might have read some Sartre and the other counter-productive thinkers
who helped inspire the Khmer Rouge.
Another
reader adds:
(16)
Entire export economy based on resource-extraction product, easily
controlled/monopolized without needing any consent from the people
(17) Country borders Iran, who hate us (officially) and will
supply/foment Shi'a rebels
(18) Country borders Saudi Arabia, who hate us (unofficially) and will
supply/foment Sunni rebels
(19) Country borders Turkey, who don't hate us, but won't tolerate any
sensible policy on the Kurds.
As
Sam Spade said to Brigid O'Shaughnessy at the climax of The
Maltese Falcon, after he gave her a long list of reasons he can't
play the sap for her anymore:
"Maybe
some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at
the number of them."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#derbslaw
Derb's
Law vs. Lovejoy's Law -- John
Derbyshire has often contended that Americans deep down feel there
are only two races: black and nonblack. Having a Chinese immigrant wife
and two Eurasian kids certainly gives him plenty of experience to judge
from.
Perhaps,
though, a slightly more accurate model would be to adapt Lovejoy's Law
of the Three American Religions to the Three American Races. On The
Simpsons, the Rev. Lovejoy offered this stirring tribute to
ecumenical cooperation:
Ned:
Homer, God didn't set your house on fire.
Rev. Lovejoy: No, but He was working in the hearts of your
friends and neighbors when they came to your aid, be they [points to Ned
Flanders] Christian, [points to Krusty the Klown] Jew, or [points to Apu
Nahasapeemapetilon] ... miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu! There are 700 million of us.
Rev. Lovejoy: Aw, that's super.
So,
Lovejoy's Law would suggest that in the minds of most Americans, white
and black, there are three races: White, Black, and Miscellaneous.
***
I'm
in the new book The
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 -- My American
Conservative article "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" on the
impact of the high rates of inbreeding on the culture of Iraq and other
Muslim countries was chosen by guest editor Steven Pinker for inclusion
in this prestigious anthology, which will go on sale October 14.
***
An
Indian in England doesn't get Barack Obama. A reader writes to
wonder why Americans are so excited over the exotic half-Kenyan,
half-white Barack Obama. Certainly there are numerous, say, South Asians
of identical skin tone who were also on the Harvard Law Review, but
nobody in America cares about them.
The
basic fact behind this is that white Americans (and for that matter,
black Americans) really aren't interested in any races other than whites
and African-Americans. (John Derbyshire has written about this enough to
call it Derb's Law.) For example, the funny thing about Obama is that
Americans are not at all interested in the truly interesting things
about him. For example, he was raised largely in Indonesia by his
Indonesian stepfather and white mother. That's certainly ... different.
Does that give him any insights into, say, Southeast Asia or the Muslim
(or Hindu?) world that might be useful in the U.S. Senate?
But,
nah, nobody in America cares about weird foreign stuff like that. What
everybody is fascinated by is the brute fact that he's (half) black.
They hope that makes him an expert on -- and spokesman for, or spokesman
to -- the 'hood (which is the one place he didn't grow up), which, love
it or hate it, is infinitely more interesting to Americans than the rest
of the world and all its people.
It
took me a long time to figure this out, since I was always interested in
everybody: e.g., the pygmy
negritos of the Andaman Islands have long been fascinating to me
because they are so different. For example, I started following Tiger
Woods' career when he was 15 in 1991. I always thought Tiger's family
heritage was interesting because he is so multiracial (Thai, Chinese,
white, black, American Indian), but it eventually dawned on me in 1997
when everybody else learned about him that to most Americans his
heritage is interesting for one reason: because he's black (well, only
1/4th, but that's enough in Americans' eyes to overwhelm whatever else
he might be).
Look
at the guy who just took Tiger's place as the #1 golfer in the world,
Vijay Singh. He's blacker in skin color than Tiger, he's this amazing
story of coming from Fiji of all places to be the top golfer in the
world, he was a club pro in Borneo, and last Sunday he went head
to head with Tiger to be #1 and beat him ... but nobody is very
interested in Vijay at all. And not just not interested in his
personality, but nobody in America is interested in any racial angle
about Vijay (e.g., Is he the greatest Indian athlete of all time?),
whereas when Tiger won the Masters in 1997 the race angle (Descendant of
Slaves Wins The Masters in the Deep South!) was a huge topic.
***
Span
of Revenge: Does anybody have much of an idea what the rules are in
Iraqi culture(s) for whom an honorable man is supposed to revenge?
Anthropologist Carleton Coon pointed out that one advantage to Arabs of
marrying their first cousins is that by making blood relatives and
in-laws into the same people, it reduces the number of individuals whose
deaths an honorable man is expected to avenge. So, how far does it go?
Are you expected to avenge a sibling? A first cousin? A second cousin? A
third cousin? What about in-laws when they aren't blood relatives too?
What are the rules for the killer buying the avenging family off with
cash?
Randall
Parker at ParaPundit.com pointed
out a long time ago that the insurgency in Iraq is like a self-replicating
virus by quoting this Newsweek report:
But
now, in the aftermath of Saddam's capture on Dec. 13, a new kind of
threat is emerging that comes from deep within Arab culture and has
little to do with the bedraggled Iraqi tyrant. These are the
"bloodline" attacks, as Tomlinson's superior, Capt. Todd
Brown, calls them. Samarra is only about 15 miles from where Saddam was
captured at Ad Dawr, but "what we're seeing now is much more
tribal," he says. "It's the Arabic rule of five. If you do
something to someone, then five of his bloodlines will try to attack
you."
The
insurgency is self-replicating, like a virus, through the vengeance of
brothers, sons, cousins and nephews.
The
neocons were hopeless about anticipating this sort of thing because in
their conscious world-view, people are only motivated by ideology, and
since we have the best ideology, then Iraqis will have to love us. Of
course, the subconscious emotions of the neocons are driven by exactly
the same feelings about kin and loyalty and vengeance as everybody else
in the world feels. The neocons, unfortunately, don't have any
vocabulary for discussing these basic aspects of humanity at the public
policy level, which is a big reason their policies have been so
disastrous in Iraq.
The
span of revenge issue becomes important in estimating what proportion of
the Iraqi population now has a blood feud with the U.S. Estimates seem
to put the number of civilian deaths in Iraq in the low 5 digit range.
If only their brothers are expected to revenge them, that's not so bad.
But if everybody up to their third cousins is supposed to come after us,
that's not so good. That is a large supply of potential terrorists, and
as the Russians are finding with the Chechens, it's not fun for a
country to have a large number of individuals who feel it is their duty
in life (and death) to avenge their relatives' deaths in a guerilla war.
Hey,
I've got a crazy idea. I realize that our official Invade-the-World /
Invite-the-World policy of going to Iraq and killing people until they
learn to love the American Way while also letting the kin of the people
we kill into America sounds perfectly sane and common-sensical, but what
if we did something really wacky? What if we stopped going to Iraq to
kill people, and also stopped letting Iraqis come to the U.S. so they
can't kill us in revenge? It's so bizarre sounding it just might work!
***
Good
Questions:
If
you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go
to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it.
It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one
that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni
regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or
one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility
is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States
military when it's there? How long does the United States military have
to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what
happens to it once we leave?
Secretary
of Defense Dick Cheney, April 13, 1991
The
truly strange thing is that a decade later, Dick Cheney agitated
ceaselessly to topple Saddam Hussein ... yet he never bothered to answer
any of those questions he posed in 1991.
In
1996, Cheney, then chairman of Halliburton, again defended, on PBS' Frontline,
the first Bush Administration's decision to leave a severely
weakened Saddam in power:
...
the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the
regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real
danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict,
that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world; if you recall we
were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the
Iranians restarting the conflict that they'd had in the eight-year
bloody war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had
concerns about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every
time we start to talk about an independent Kurdistan...Now you can say,
well, you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam. I don't think
so. I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for
a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have
succeeded.
[I]f
Saddam wasn't there, his successor probably wouldn't be notably
friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of
the world as of vital interest to the United States; for the next
hundred years it's going to be the world's supply of oil. We've got a
lot of friends in the region. We're always going to have to be involved
there. Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to
have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it.
You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it
doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely
to in my lifetime.
This
was the sensible Dick Cheney the nation thought it was electing in 2000.
Something went severely wrong with the man somewhere along the line.
***.
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#chechnya2
"Give
the Chechens a Land of Their Own" says historian Richard
Pipes, father of Daniel Pipes, in response to the Chechen terrorist
massacre of hundreds of Russian schoolchildren. Pipes the Elder is one
of the many neocon members
of the pro-Chechen American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, which I
discussed below. The funny thing about Pipes'
op-ed is that you could go through it and substitute either
"Palestine" or "Iraq" for "Chechnya" and
"Israel" or "America" for "Russia," and it
would make just about as much sense. For example:
The
Israelis / Americans ought to learn from the French. France, too, was
once involved in a bloody colonial war in which thousands fell victim of
terrorist violence. The Algerian war began in 1954 and dragged on
without an end in sight, until Charles de Gaulle courageously solved the
conflict by granting Algeria independence in 1962.
Good
point, but that pretty much describes the war in the West Bank and the
war in Iraq, too. Funny, though, how none of the neocons ever bring up
the Franco-Algerian War as a useful analogy for guiding either Israel or
America. (Remember how I could find but a single paragraph in the
pro-war neocon press about the re-release of "The Battle of
Algiers," even though the Special Forces brass gave a screening of
it in the Pentagon because it was so relevant to the current situation
in Iraq?)
I'm
still wondering why the neocons insist on having a dog in this
particular fight. As a conservative, my Burkean prejudice is:
"First, do no harm." I look at the Chechen tragedy and say,
"Sheesh, I have no idea what should be done over there. If I got
involved, I'd probably just make it worse." So, instead, I think
more about how I can help my country avoid getting involved in that kind
of mess.
In
contrast, neocons seem to wake up every morning thinking, "What
far-off, complex, interminable conflict should I turn my penetrating
brilliance upon today?" It must be nice to feel that
self-confident, but it sure isn't conservative.
But,
what else is going on here? Why are the neocons so pro-Chechen? Is it
leftover anti-Sovietism? Extremely leftover anti-Czarism? Is it because
Putin threw one of the AEI's big donors
in the clink? Is it so the neocons can say they aren't against Muslim
nationalists in general, just against Palestinians? Do they just like
trouble?
***
"Hero"
vs. "Lord of the Rings" -- A reader writes:
I
saw "Hero" over the weekend, and I thought it was a great
piece of cinema, but I became more and more alarmed as its theme
emerged. It's a very useful film to point up the difference
between Chinese and western values. It's the anti-"Lord of
the Rings". Instead of destroying the Ring of Power, Hero's
Frodo tells Sauron, "Yes, I now understand what you and Saruman
were getting at. Here's your ring back."
***
"A
Vast All-Wing Conspiracy" Against the Neocons: Eli Lake reports
in the New York Sun:
Last
week, the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused for two days
to share classified papers with officials working for Mr. Feith, sources
say. Cooperation between the two offices only resumed after individuals
at the highest levels of the Pentagon ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff
to cooperate.
Meanwhile,
neocon Frank Gaffney complains
in an essay entitled "Witch Hunt?" that the notorious
anti-American cabal known as the FBI is out to get his pals:
For
weeks now, the FBI has carried out in the press a prosecution of
individuals and organizations it has so far been unable or unwilling to
pursue in court.
What
other America-hating extremists are conspiring together with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the FBI to persecute the poor neocons? The
Boy Scouts? The American Legion? The 4H Club? The Elks?
***
The
Most Important Man You've Barely Heard Of *. In a review
of "Hero" in The
American Spectator, Colby
Cosh provides a quick, insightful analysis of Qin Shih Huang-ti, the
first emperor of China, and his fraught relationship with modern China.
*
Qin Shih Huang-ti, not Colby Cosh.
Colby is the 7th most important man you've barely heard of.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#ledeen-plagiarism
Ethics?
We don't need no steeeenking ethics -- Michael A. Ledeen, NRO's
very own international man of mystery who is once again in the news for
his connections with NeoconGate, was profiled in in the Washington
Post on Feb. 2, 1987 (only on Nexis):
At
different times [Ledeen] has been a world-class bridge player who toured
with actor Omar Sharif, a teacher of Italian history who was denied
tenure at Washington University of St. Louis after charges of
plagiarism, a journalist who has written several biting attacks on the
press, and a self-described terrorism expert who has done consulting
work for the Italian military intelligence service and the Reagan
administration. ...
Several of
Ledeen's former colleagues at Washington University said they were
surprised to learn he had played such a sensitive role in a momentous
foreign policy gamble [Iran-Contra], because Reagan administration
officials knew about the plagiarism allegations that cost Ledeen a
tenured position 15 years ago.
Ledeen said,
"Any suggestion that my scholarship was less than professional is
nonsense." He said Rowland Berthoff, head of the history department
at the time, told him the allegations didn't play a role in the vote.
But Berthoff
disagreed. "He seemed to have used the work of somebody else
without proper credit. There was no other reason to vote against
him."
Richard Walter,
the current head of the department, said, "Serious questions were
raised about the quality of his scholarship and the research that went
into it." He said government background investigators were told
about the tenure issue before Ledeen was hired as a special adviser to
Haig in 1981. "I think the people who appointed him showed bad
judgment," Walter said.
Robert C.
Williams, now dean of the faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina,
said the charges "involved deceptive use of prime sources . . . .
Some would call it plagiarism, some wouldn't."
Solon Beinfeld, a
professor who said he is a friend of Ledeen who voted in his favor in
the tenure dispute, said, "It seems unfair that people raise this
now as some sort of proof he's been a shady guy all along." He said
Ledeen was popular with students at the university and the
"quasi-irregularity" at issue didn't warrant the negative vote
on tenure for Ledeen. "I would just tell him not to do it
again."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/index.htm#chechnya
Some
Terrorists Are More Equal than Other Terrorists, Part 2 -- On NRO,
Tom
Nichols writes about the Chechen massacre in Beslan, Russia:
Calls
for the Russian government to throw in the towel and negotiate Chechen
independence are well-meaning but foolish, especially now that Arab
terrorists have joined the fight.
Also
on NRO, Barbara
Lerner exhorts:
Already,
Putin is getting the message. In an unprecedented burst of candor, he
told the Russian people, "We were weak, and weak people are
beaten." Already, he is reaching out a tentative hand, looking for
help from us and from the Israelis. Israel will respond, generously, as
long as the much-maligned Israeli Right retains its shaky hold on power,
and we will too, as long as George W. Bush continues to lead us. ... and
with Russia on our side, we will win what Norman Podhoretz rightly calls
World War IV much more quickly than we would without her.
Leaving
aside Lerner's bizarre assumption that Putin has previously been wimpy
toward the Chechens, what exactly has been the position of Norman
Podhoretz and the rest of the American supporters of the Israeli Right
toward negotiations with Chechen separatists?
It's
interesting to examine the website of the leading pro-Chechen
organization, the American
Committee for Peace in Chechnya, in the light of the recent mass
slaughter of hundreds of children in Russia by Chechen terrorists. Some excerpts
from the ACPC website:
Myth:
Chechens are terrorists.
Fact:
While some criminal and extremist factions have targeted civilians,
Western governments, including the United States, have argued that
Russia paints Chechens as terrorists in order to whitewash its own human
rights violations. Chechen officials have issued public statements
condemning terrorism 121 times since 1999.
Myth:
Chechens are Islamic Fundamentalists.
Fact:
Chechens practice a moderate form of Sufi mysticism based on indigenous
pre-Islamic traditions. While radical Islam has gained some adherents
since the fall of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of Chechens reject
fundamentalist ideologies.
Myth:
Chechens won't accept a peaceful solution.
Fact:
Since 1999, Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and his envoys have
repeatedly called for a cease-fire, the return of international monitors
and unconditional peace talks with the Russian Federation.
Other
documents from ACPC compare the suffering of the Chechens to that of the
Muslim Albanians in Kosovo,
and applaud
the granting of political asylum in America
to the Chechen separatist foreign-minister-in-exile, a man Putin
describes as a terrorist.
(Colby Cosh has more on this story.)
So,
who are the bleeding heart terrorist-excusing liberals behind the ACPC?
Michael Moore? Janeane Garofalo? Noam Chomsky?
No.
The 96
members of the ACPC include -- well, whattaya know! -- Barbara
Lerner's favorite, Old "Mr. WW4" himself, Norman Podhoretz,
his wife Midge Decter, his son-in-law Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, R.
James Woolsey, William Kristol, Frank Gaffney, Joshua Muravchik, and NRO's
own Michael A. Ledeen.
ACPC
is by no means all neocon: Zbigniew Brzezinski has a leadership role,
anti-Iraq Attaq realist Gen. William Odom is a member, and even a few
liberal Democrats like Geraldine Ferraro are signed up. Richard Gere is
the designated celebrity.
Now,
I'm not going to pretend I know the ideal solution to Chechnya. But I am
going to point out that all these people sure don't know either, but
that hasn't stopped them from telling Russia what to do. These guys
think they are the master strategists who deserve to run the world, but
they are in way over their heads.
UPDATE:
A reader writes:
Sheesh.
These neocons really do have a dog in every fight, don't they? Trots
without the Marxism, just like it says in the handbook...
***
Chechnya
summed up: Here, in a nutshell, are the arguments, pro and con, on
independence for Chechnya:
Pro:
The Muslim Chechens are motivated by nationalism, and, as we saw
watching over 200 countries compete at the Olympics, nationalism is hard
to beat.
Con:
Russia is still an empire, and if it lets Chechnya go, lots of other
parts could try to break off, at vast human cost.
The
moral of the story: Don't become an empire in the first place because
you'll end up having to put down nationalist insurgencies, especially
Muslim ones. So, how come the neocons on the ACPC were so hot for the
U.S. to play Russia to Iraq's Chechnya? Don't they ever get it? What's
wrong with these guys?
***
From
CNN's article
on Putin (via Colby Cosh):
But Putin said
each time Russia complained to the Bush administration about meetings
held between U.S. officials and Chechen separatist representatives, the
U.S. response has been "we'll get back to you" or "we
reserve the right to talk with anyone we want."
Putin blamed what
he called a "Cold War mentality" on the part of some U.S.
officials, but likened their demands that Russia negotiate with the
Chechen separatists to the U.S. talking to al Qaeda.
These are not
"freedom fighters," Putin said. "Would you talk with
Osama Bin Laden?" he asked.
Putin said the
Chechen separatists are trying to ignite ethnic tensions in the former
Soviet Union and it could have severe repercussions.
"Osama Bin
Laden attacked the United States saying he was doing it because of
policies in the Middle East," Putin said. "Do you call him a
freedom fighter?"
Putin's comments
came a few weeks after the U.S. granted asylum to Ilias Akhmadov, the
"foreign minister" of the Chechen separatist movement.
***
Mark
Steyn's Iraq trip: A reader writes:
You
are, I think, a little bit over the line with your (possibly
inadvertent) juxtaposition of Mark Steyn and the "pundit class back
home in comfy America". Remember, he went to Iraq immediately after
the invasion and spent nearly a month stomping around there when most
opinion journalists still considered it an inaccessible war zone and
cargo planes were still being shot at with SAMs. It was a rather
extraordinary gesture for an opinion writer of his stature; there was a
barely audible but quite distinct "Huh?" in Canadian circles
when he went.
Yes,
he was certainly much braver than me. But, did Steyn allow himself to
learn anything on his trip? He went over there heavily invested in the
idea that the Iraq Attaq was a great idea and came back telling us how
swimmingly it was working out. The War
Nerd never leaves Fresno (supposedly), but his predictions about
what will happen next in Iraq have come true much more often than
Steyn's predictions have since his return from over there. I am
certainly hoping Steyn's not planning to go back, since it's much, much
less safe over there now than when he went -- which is not what he
thought would happen.
H.G.
Wells and George Bernard Shaw went to Stalin's Soviet Union to see for
themselves, too. But, as Orwell noted, "To see what is in front of one's
nose needs a constant
struggle."
***
Here's
what I wrote about Steyn's ideas about Iraq way back in the spring
of 2002, a year before the invasion:
Mark
Steyn might be the best all-around pundit in the English
language, since he understands the interactions among politics, popular
culture, and what Camille Paglia calls sexual personae. But even
Steyn has fallen for a direly silly new fad among conservatives with bad
cases of war fever: lionizing the Iraqis. He
writes, "The Iraqi people are secular, tolerant, literate, the
antithesis of those wacky fundamentalists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. ...
Once you've got rid of the ruling gang, it's the West's best shot at
incubating a reasonably non-insane polity."
I
see this assertion more and more frequently, as the febrile logic takes
ever greater hold of the once impressive intellects of the conservative
press. With a straight face, we are assured that, while the rest of the
Arabs are a bunch of savages, Iraq is the Germany of the Middle
East. It just needs a U.S. imposed democratic government to resume its
high rank among civilized nations. Iraq then will become a light unto
the gentiles and lead the Arab world out of barbarism. You don't
believe anybody could say that without giggling? The WSJ
editorialized, "This is why we believe the best chance for
peace in Palestine, and for stability throughout the entire Middle East,
goes through Baghdad. Iraq is a serious country with a proud history ..."
Iraq?
A proud history? What is the WSJ talking about - Sumer? Babylon?
Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad back in Charlemagne's time? Guatemala,
with its Mayan ruins, had a prouder history in the last millennium than
Iraq. Iraq has a proud history of backstabbing and cowardice.
Is
there any evidence that the Iraqis are the most likely candidates
in the Arab world for restrained self-rule or is this just a delusion to
justify a war? I mean, if you are going to consider the
"sophistication" level of the Arab populations, wouldn't Lebanon
be at the top of the list? Wouldn't the Palestinians be up there
too? At least before they launched their on-going "war of the
cradle" that is swamping the sophisticated elites with hordes
lower-class youngsters? Wasn't Egypt a beacon of culture and tolerance,
with a Nobel Prize-winning writer, before the peasants outbred the
sophisticates? Isn't Syria also secular? Doesn't Jordan at least have a
sane monarchy? Isn't Morocco the favorite destination of French
fashion designers looking for boys? Isn't the Sultan of Oman a
huge Gilbert & Sullivan fan?
Maybe,
I'm wrong about Iraq because I've been reading Bedouinphiles like T.E.
Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger who despised the Iraqis, but I don't have
a good feeling about Iraq's future prospects. But are there
any Iraqophiles? (At least among people who have been there?) If
not, what does that say about Iraq? Am I missing something?
One
measure of a country's capacity for self-rule is its warmaking
capability. Paradoxically, nation-states that are good at killing their
foreign enemies tend to be be cohesive and harmonious at home. So, how
good is Iraq at fighting its enemies? According to Greg Cochran,
war-gamers assign a man-for-man power rating to the armies of the world.
Iraq has the lowest rating. In one war, a whole bunch of Iraqi
soldiers surrendered to an Italian journalist.
This
delusion could have disastrous consequences after an American invasion. Which
Iraq are we talking about? We could easily shatter Iraq into three
or more pieces, but if we invade with the notion of making Iraq into a
model nation-state, we're going need more than all the king's horses and
all the king's men to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Do we
want to fight the Kurds and the Shi'ites to keep Iraq whole, so it can
be a good example to the rest of the Middle East?
I
suppose the Kurds of northern Iraq could rule themselves (although they
fought a civil war in 1995), except that an oil-rich Kurdish state would
inevitably get into a war with Turkey by supporting Kurds inside Turkey.
The Turkish army would invade and crush independent Kurdistan in order
to preserve Turkish national unity. The slaughter, though, would
undo much of Turkey's vaunted (and exaggerated) progress toward being an
Islamic "normal country," and send Turkey reeling away from
its European aspirations and into the Middle Eastern morass.
Maybe
the Shi'ites of the south could rule themselves, but how clear-cut are
the demographic borders between Shi'ites and Sunnis? If the two groups
overlap, you are headed for trouble. A Shi'ite state on the Iranian
border would tempt Iran - a country with much greater potential
for becoming a "normal country" than Iraq - into foreign
adventurism, which could be fatal to the chances for internal reform.
And
how many tribes are there among the Sunnis?
***
We
haven't heard much about Gov. Jim "Gay American" McGreevey
lately, but Nicholas Stix has the full
story on the remarkably corrupt governor on Enter
Stage Right. You'll want to take a bath in Lysol after reading
about him. I guess you could say the press was bending over backwards to
cover up for him. Or, then again, maybe it was bending over forward for
him.
***
The
Bush Pardon Pool -- If Bush loses, whom will he pardon on January
19, 2005? Nominations, please!
***
Economist
Eric Rasmussen discusses my American Spectator essay on
"The Perils
of Decriminalization" here.
It's interesting that the distinction between "thinking like an
economist" and "thinking like a parent" is so sharp.
***
To
track casualties in Iraq: iCasualities.org
***
The
Derb misses the point of NeoconGate: In National Review's The
Corner, John Derbyshire writes:
The
paleocon websites -- yep, you bet I read them -- have been going nuts
over this story of an Israeli spy in the DoD. This strikes me as
disingenuous. I have always assumed that every country -- including
friendly ones -- spies on the US govt to whatever degree it can get away
with. The value-added of having some advance, unauthorized insight into
US govt policy discussions is tremendous. Foreign governments, friendly
or otherwise, would be fools not to do all they can to get insights into
US policy... To throw up your hands in horror on learning that some
friendly country is spying on the US is preposterous.
No,
the point of NeoconGate is ... the Neocons. From what we know at
present, Israel didn't hatch some
elaborate operation to snatch a secret document from Larry Franklin. No,
Franklin thrust the document at two Israeli agents of influence
from AIPAC. (In fact, the most likely reason he did it, Laura Rozen
argues plausibly, was because he felt Israel would have more influence
arguing for his plan within the higher reaches of the Administration
than he, the Iran desk officer, would!)
Further,
the FBI doesn't believe Franklin is the only neocon traitor within the
administration. They flipped him and were using him to troll for the
source of the leaked secrets within the Administration that went to
Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, which Chalabi apparently passed on to Iran's
Vevak secret police. Then, there's the whole issue of the Italian
forgery of the Niger yellowcake documents... and on and on.
So,
let's see, we've got neocons in the administration involved with
nefarious goings on with Israelis, Iraqis, Iranians, and Italians. All
the neocons have to do is give American secrets to the Irish, the
Icelandics, and the Ivory Coastians and they can start betraying America
to the Japanese, Jordanians, Kazakhstanis, Kyrgyzstanis, etc.. .
Seriously,
folks, we've got a problem in this administration similar to the one
Truman inherited in 1945. Bush, probably under Rove's influence, has
started to pay less heed to the neocon mischief-makers within the
civilian ranks of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President, but
he hasn't fired anybody yet. When will he?
***
Great
Minds Think Alike Dept.: In the Washington Post, Philip
Longman wrote
on Sept. 2, 2004:
Conservative,
religiously minded Americans are putting far more of their genes into
the future than their liberal, secular counterparts. In Utah, for
example, where 69 percent of all residents are registered members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fertility rates are the
highest in the nation. Utah annually produces 90 children for every
1,000 women of child-bearing age. By comparison, Vermont -- the only
state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to embrace gay
unions -- produces only 49.
Back
in the spring of 2000, I wrote
in VDARE:
Our
most liberal state, Vermont (which is represented in Congress by
Socialist Bernie Sanders), has the lowest birthrate at only 1.57 babies
per woman. In contrast, our most socially conservative state,
Mormon-dominated Utah, has the highest fertility at 2.71. That's 73%
more babies per woman.
Longman
also wrote over the weekend:
High
fertility also correlates strongly with support for George W. Bush. Of
the top 10 most fertile states, all but one voted for Bush in 2000.
Among the 17 states that still produce enough children to replace their
populations, all but two -- Iowa and Minnesota -- voted for Bush in the
last election. Conversely, the least fertile states -- a list that
includes Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Connecticut -- went
overwhelmingly for Al Gore. Women living in Gore states on average have
12 percent fewer babies than women living in Bush states.
I
wrote
in 2002, echoing an article (not on Google) that I wrote in late 2000
(using earlier data than Longman uses and only looking at white
fertility):
On
the other hand, Republicans seem to be doing better than Democrats at
growing the next generation of white voters. After the 2000 election,
UPI calculated that Bush won the 19 states with the highest white birth
rate. The states where Bush won a majority in 2000 had a 16 percent
higher birth rate overall than the states where Gore and Nader combined
won the majority. Presumably, differences within those states made the
overall disparity in white fertility by party even greater.
Anyway,
it's nice to see that my articles are having such a direct (if
uncredited) influence on another writer.
***
Iraq
Statistics -- I realize that ever since June 28th, when the U.S.
declared Iraq to be "transcendent," excuse me,
"sovereign," the media have been much more fascinated by
certain events during the 35 year old war in Vietnam than the ongoing
one in Iraq. As Mark Steyn crowed
in a piece on why Bush was going to win, "As for Iraq, ever since
the transfer of sovereignty that's all but off the radar."
But
here are some statistics about the average day our soldiers in Iraq
enjoyed in August while Steyn and everybody else in the pundit class
back home in comfy America had their radars fixated on the Swift Boats
of yore:
Attacks
on Americans (and allies) per day: 87
Total
American casualties per day: 38
Americans
killed per day: 2.1.
Both
the figures for attacks and for casualties were the worst yet in the 17
month old rebellion. Worse, we're losing the war ... at least in terms
of the most fundamental measure: control
of territory. The places where an unarmed American can go has
steadily shrunk to very little. Moreover, the U.S. military has written
off even armed patrols of important sectors of the country.
(In
the good news from Iraq, a cooling trend should reduce the Baghdad high
temperatures from 116 on Wednesday to 104 by next Monday.)
What
do the candidates say about this? Sen. Kerry announced on Labor Day that
he'd like to get America's troops home within four
years. (Let's see, 38 casualties per day times 365 days per year
times 4 years equals ... 55,000 additional casualties under President
Kerry, on top of the nearly 8,000 already. Time to build some more VA
hospitals.) In response, Pres. Bush denounced Kerry for
"flip-flopping" and refused to set any kind of deadline.
(Let's see, 38 casualties per day times 365 days per year times infinity
years equals ... )
We're
all agreed now that in Vietnam the only two sensible choices were Win
or Get Out. Right now in Iraq, we're headed toward the Defeat of a
Thousand Cuts. Don't believe me? Then tell me what those nearly 1200
casualties during August accomplished strategically. Every month, we
lose control of a larger portion of Iraqi territory because whenever
push comes to shove in Iraq, Bush backs down.
Yet,
neither candidate advocates either of the two practical strategies: Win
or Get Out. Instead, they argue over whether we should continue the
current bleeding for four years or for some indeterminate amount of
time.
***
"Perils
of Decriminalization" -- My new article in The
American Spectator is here.
The
problem with marijuana is not that it's some wild and crazy thing, but
that it's middle-age-in-a-bong. Smoking dope saps the energy from youth,
turning them into sedentary couch potatoes.
The
parents of America already have a hard enough time getting their
teenagers -- and, increasingly, their adult children who have come back
home to live -- off the TV room floor when they are perfectly straight.
Parents understand that changing laws to make marijuana more readily
available -- and, let's not kid ourselves, that's what these
"reforms" would do -- would create an even more inert and
obese generation of young people.
Smoking
dope may not do all that many of the horrible things often attributed to
it, but it definitely makes people want to sit down. And that's
something even the most clean and sober young people of the 21st Century
do way too much of already.
***
From
"Tracking the Field" in the 9/27/04 issue of The
American Conservative:
That the first
modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896 turned out to be an inspired
choice. Not only did ancient Greece invent the games in 776 B.C., but
modern Greece's struggle for freedom from the Turks in the 1820s -- the
rebellion in which Lord Byron gave his life -- fired the 19th Century
romantic nationalist imagination, of which the Olympic revival was a
felicitous outgrowth.
A particularly
creative tribute to patriotism was the organizers' invention of a
footrace over the 26 miles that Pheidippides is said to have run from
Marathon to Athens with the joyous news of the defeat of the Persian
invaders in 490 B.C.. The inspiring victory of a Greek shepherd named
Spiridon Louis in the inaugural marathon did more than anything else to
help the Olympic spirit survive the organizational ineptitude of the
next two Olympics.
In that distant
era, national pride drove European artists to create masterpieces
redounding to the glory of their homelands. Such atavistic attitudes are
as rare in the cultural realm today as the artistic greatness they
spawned.
In the
globalist's fantasy of post-nationalist sports, the Olympics likewise
wouldn't be organized around anything so passé as patriotism. Instead,
athletes sponsored by Coke could battle Nike's hired guns for world
marketing supremacy. The only problem with this vision is that nobody
would watch. (Well, I'd tune in, but I'm a sports statistics geek.) In
these hypothetical Globalist Games, how would you know for whom to root?
Watching eight strangers splash around face down in a swimming pool is
dull unless you can use nationality to choose a favorite.
In reality, the
only sport where fan loyalties are more corporate than regional is
NASCAR, and that's because stockcar racing as a whole is already a
festival of ethnic pride for white Protestants from the red states.
At the Athens
Games, the stratagems of the sponsors receded to the level of inevitable
background noise while overt patriotic gestures took center stage. Back
in 1984, it was an unusual and controversial gesture when Carl Lewis
waved a large American flag while jogging his victory lap after winning
the 100 meter dash. By 2004, however, almost every medallist literally
wrapped himself in his country's flag, draping his national banner
across his shoulders while celebrating for the television cameras.
Rivalries among
nations stoke competitive excellence, both on and off the field. Killjoy
economists warn that Greece's vast investment in staging the 2004
Olympics may never pay off, but the Greeks will remember that, in the
face of universal skepticism about their ability to pull it off, they
threw the world one helluva party.
***
There
won't be a new VDARE column this Monday morning -- we're not laboring on
Labor Day.
***
More
on Kerry's IQ: A reader writes:
First,
if you look among his military records you can find that he graduated
from his Officer Candidate School class with fairly good marks, 80th
in a class of 543.
Well,
that's not nothing, better than he did at Yale, where it's pretty clear
he was no scholar. Kerry's Yale grades appear to be kept under tighter
security than Pentagon secrets, probably because they must have been
pretty bad. The Boston Globe reported:
"During his senior year [at Yale] he 'majored in flying,' as Kerry
put it, learning aerobatics and performing loop-de-loops instead of
focusing on his studies." As you would expect for someone so
preternaturally ambitious, he majored in poly sci, but that doesn't
exactly rank up there with chemical engineering as a tough major.
His
attending Boston College law school in 1973 instead of an Ivy League
school struck one of his professors at BC as bizarre, since Kerry was
already nationally famous, and had just lost election to Congress in the
most expensive House race of 1972. The Boston Globe reported:
A
nationally known figure, Kerry was not your typical law student. "I
remember looking up at my first-year class, and sitting there, big as
life, was this guy I had seen on television, testifying before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and running for Congress,"
recalls Thomas J. Carey Jr., one of Kerry's professors. "He stood
out from the beginning."
My
reader continues:
Also,
his bio stuff indicates that while at Yale he was on the debate team,
and was a star. I don't know that much about this "sport,"
but clearly it is one in which high-IQ (or, more likely, some
correlate), wins.
Now,
why would Kerry be hiding his intelligence (if that is so)? I
think the answer is pretty obvious: people already knock him for being
an out-of-touch blueblood. Among his supporters, IQ is important
but they already think he has it (both absolutely and more importantly,
over Bush). Among undecideds, though, is the palpable advantage of
"being like them", which is part of the reason that the only
thing Kerry can campaign on is his military service.
Could
be. Then again, maybe Kerry is both out of touch and not all that
bright. If he was smarter, he could fake in-touchness better.
Keep
in mind, he's now 60, and everybody loses a step mentally as they age.
If he was 50, he'd probably be smart enough, but as he heads toward old
age, this could become a problem, especially if he were to get a second
term.
***
Best
wishes to President Clinton on his recovery -- The scary thing about
a heart bypass operation is that it can mess with your mind. For
example, you can see the exact point, about 100 pages from the end, in
Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full where he broke off to have his heart
operation. He suffered terrible depression after the operation and his
writing style didn't recover. Wolfe has a new novel coming out, so let's
hope he's feeling better.
***
FBI
had flipped Franklin before leak - Time reports that in
August, Larry Franklin had been calling people who might have some
knowledge of who leaked the American secrets to Ahmed Chalabi that wound
up in Iranian hands, presumably with the FBI listening in on the
extension. The assumption is that Franklin was cooperating with the FBI
to mitigate his crime of handing a secret document to AIPAC, which then
went to Israel. Of course, once somebody leaked the story to CBS nine
days ago, Franklin's usefulness to the FBI was kaput. Sure would be
interesting to know the story behind the original leak.
***
1945
all over again: The Bush Administration today resembles the federal
government at the time an unprepared Harry Truman took over. Truman
slowly learned to his horror that the Administration he inherited was
riddled with a wartime ally's agents of influence. Truman slowly
discarded the Soviet sympathizers who infested the U.S. government
during the later years of the Roosevelt Administration.
So
far, there is only the most marginal evidence that Bush is attempting to
excise the Israeli and Saudi agents of influence within his government.
Fortunately, some institutions, such as the FBI, appear to be still
mostly devoted to the national, rather than the Israeli or Saudi,
interest.
Over
on WarandPiece.com, Laura
Rozen asks: "In general, why are the neocons soft on al Qaeda? They
want us to go after every other Islamist terror group but the one that
struck the US on 9/11." The answer is that al Qaeda is less of a
threat than other groups are to Israel. It is much more of a threat to
the United States of America than Hamas or Hezbollah, but the neocons
have their loyalties and act accordingly.
It's
striking how there has been a community of interest between the Israeli
and Saudi agents of influence within the government. The Iraq Attaq
distracted attention away from Al-Qaeda, which is heavily manned and
funded by Saudis. Now, the Israeli-oriented members of the
Administration want to go after non-Arab Iran, further distracting
attention from the Saudis and their propensity for funding extremist
preachers.
***
Bush
as LBJ: After a week of red meat rhetoric at the Republican National
Convention, it's striking to return one's focus to the real world
of Iraq, where the Bush Administration's war plan resembles something
crafted by the combined talents of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Jimmy Carter,
and Bill Clinton. The NYT reports:
In Iraq, the list
of places from which American soldiers have either withdrawn or decided
to visit only rarely is growing: Falluja, where a Taliban-like regime
has imposed a rigid theocracy; Ramadi, where the Sunni insurgents appear
to have the run of the city; and the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and
Najaf to the south, where the Americans agreed last month to keep their
distance from the sacred shrines of Ali and Hussein.
The calls are
rising for the Americans to pull out of even more areas, notably Sadr
City, the sprawling neighborhood in eastern Baghdad that is the main
base for the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. There, leaders of his Mahdi
Army are demanding that American soldiers, except those sent in to do
reconstruction work, get out.
Negotiations with
rebel leaders foundered last week on precisely the issue of the freedom
of American soldiers to enter the area; the Iraqi government, possibly
with American backing, refused to accept the militia's demand. Even so,
the point seemed clear enough: where Iraqis once tolerated American
soldiers as a source of stability in their neighborhoods, they
increasingly see them as a cause of the violence. Take out the
Americans, the Iraqis say, and you take out the problem. Leave us alone,
and we will sort our own problems.
"All we want
is for the Americans to stay out," said Yusef al-Nasiri, a top aide
to Mr. Sadr. "When the Americans come into the city, they insult
our people. That's when the people get nervous. It makes them
uncomfortable."
That certain
Iraqis believe their cities and neighborhoods would be better off
without American soldiers is neither new nor surprising; that is what
the guerrillas' insurgency, now in its 17th month, is all about. What is
new, however, is that the Americans, in certain cases, appear to agree
or have decided that the cost to prove otherwise would be too high.
Whatever
happened to "Win or Get Out"?
This
is military strategy as designed by Karl Rove with one goal in mind: to
get through November 2nd without American voters having to think much
about Iraq. Despite almost 1,200 American causalities in August,
so far that seems to be working.
***
War
Nerd: "Holy Shi'ite!"
That's what's
hardest for Americans to understand about the Shia: they don't think
winning is everything. It'd be closer to the truth to say that they
think losing is everything, that losing is a sign of being in the right.
The point is,
they don't think like us. A whole lot of what's gone wrong in Iraq comes
from thinking that everybody in the world wants to be like us. That's
just plain wrong. Hell, I'm not sure I even want to be like us. And I
know for certain the Shi'ites don't.
We believe in
winning. Remember the beginning of Patton, when George C. Scott stands
up in dress uniform and says, "No son-of-a-bitch ever won a war by
dying for his country -- he won it by making some other poor
son-of-a-bitch die for HIS country"? That sounds pretty obvious to
us, but it's not the only way you can think about war...
If the Shi'ites
wrote the script for Patton, George C. Scott would get up and say
something like, "Go ahead and kill us -- you'll be sorry!"
We're talking about a martyr culture here, where dying makes you
stronger. You know, that shouldn't be so hard for us to get, because
we've got Christ, who won by losing, by dying. But that was a long time
ago, and it's so prettified by now that Mel Gibson had to make a whole
movie to remind people that martyrdom actually hurts.
The Shi'ites'
martyrs are a lot more recent. Their favorite disaster happened in 680
AD, at the battle of Karbala. Yup, THAT Karbala -- the same city where
we've been fighting Shi'ites for the last few months. Karbala means
"anguish." That should tell you something about the way
Shi'ites see the world, that they named one of their holiest cities
after something we'd call "clinical depression." They're not
smiley-face optimists. If a Shi'ite coached your kid's soccer team, he'd
start every practice with a video of the team's biggest defeat:
"Yet again we see Jason missing the goal! Truly we AM/PM Minimart
Big Gulps are out of the playoffs forever and a day!"
***
How
smart is Kerry? I'm stumped at finding out anything at all about
Kerry's academic smarts. I can't find anything on Google about his
college or law school GPA, much less his SAT and LSAT scores.
We
know Bush scored 1206 on the SAT (stop giggling youngsters, that was a
much better score back before they made the scoring easier for your
generation around 1995). Charles Murray and I worked out that Bush
scored at about the 95th or 96th percentile among all Americans. Bush's
grades at Yale were mediocre, although they were somewhat better than Al
Gore's at Harvard. And Bush later graduated from Harvard Business School
while Gore's post-graduate attempts were dope-hazed disasters. (Gore,
however, scored 1330 on the SAT, and twice took IQ tests at St. Alban's,
which gave him scores of 134 and 133.) Historian Jim Chapin guesstimated
that Bush's IQ would fall between the 25th and 50th percentiles among
U.S. Presidents, and Gore's between the 50th and 75th percentiles.
(Here's one of my articles
on the subject.)
The
only other confirmed IQ score for a President is John F. Kennedy's 119.
Long ago, I heard somewhere that Nixon scored 143, which sounds about
right, but, unfortunately, when I recently tried to confirm it, most of
the references on Google to that score trace back to an article I wrote
five years ago, so, lacking my notes from 1999, I can't confirm it.
Gore's
academic career at Harvard was undistinguished, but his social career
was striking. His roommate was football player Tommie Lee Jones, the
future Oscar winner. Classics professor Erich Segal modeled the
character, hockey player Oliver Barrett IV, played by Ryan O'Neal in the
movie version of his novel "Love Story" on Tommie, but drew a
few of the character's less attractive qualities from Al, who mistakenly
claimed to be the main model (and wrongly suggested Tipper was the model
for Ali MacGraw's character). However, Al was not bereft of enjoying a
professor's creepy-sounding devotion to a hunky undergrad of his own:
Professor Martin Peretz, who went on to marry rich women and buy The
New Republic, was Al's valuable catch. (In the late 1990s, Peretz
fired TNR editor Michael Kelly for not sharing his infatuation
with Al.)
With
his SAT and grades, Bush didn't really expect to get into Yale, his
father's school -- he was telling his prep school friends that he was
looking forward to being a U. of Texas Longhorn -- so his admission came
as a pleasant surprise. That was the last year Yale gave big breaks to
members of the old WASP elites. My late friend Jim Chapin was a history
professor there at the time, and says that the intellectual improvement
between Bush's class and the next class was striking. (That accounts for
Bush's famous alienation from much of campus life after his freshman
year -- Yale filled up quickly with a lot of very smart Jews and
Catholics, many of them leftwing, with whom Bush had little in common.)
Kerry
is a couple of years older than Bush, so he too was admitted under
Yale's old admission system that gave lots of brownie points for good
blood, good bone.
I
have been able to find absolutely nuthin' on Kerry's grades. Googling on
terms like "honors" and "laude" comes up with
nothing either, so it's clear his grades weren't good enough to deserve
any recognition. The only other fact we know is that Kerry attended
Boston College Law School rather than an Ivy League school. Kerry offers
some convoluted scheduling excuse about why he couldn't go to Harvard or
Yale Law, but it doesn't make much sense. Boston College Law is a good
place for aspiring local politicians to go, but Kerry's ambitions were
more focused on the national stage.
So,
the evidence, and lack of evidence, suggests that Kerry is probably
about as smart as Bush overall, maybe somewhat dumber. (After
all, Bush got into Harvard for his professional degree while Kerry went
to Boston College.)
Based
on the last four years, this is not encouraging. Of course, it doesn't
take a huge amount of intellectual firepower to not invade the wrong
country -- most other Presidents before George W. Bush managed that
feat. For example, FDR was no Dick Feynman, but after Pearl Harbor, he
didn't invade, say, Paraguay.
Kerry
reminds me of another tall Democratic Senator, Bill Bradley, who, as the
star of the NCAA Final Four-making Princeton basketball team, was even
more celebrated as a youth than even Kerry. New Yorker journalist
John McPhee developed an infatuation with Bradley similar to Segal's
with Jones and Peretz's with Gore, and wrote an embarrassing book about
how the golden boy was a genius on and off the court. This reputation
stuck with Bradley for decades, so, when it came out, as he began his
run for the Democratic nomination for the President in 2000, that his
SAT verbal score was only 485
(Bush's was 566), much derision was cast on the SAT. But, then, during
his disastrous campaign, Bradley proved to be a deadly dull man, and the
validity of the SAT was once again upheld.
On
the other hand, Bradley really was a dedicated public servant who tried
hard within his intellectual limits. The 1986 tax simplification
legislation, for which Bradley was primarily responsible, was a far more
impressive accomplishment than anything Kerry has done in 20 years in
the Senate (although little is left of that bill these days, now that
loopholes are back in style).
On
the other other hand, Kerry has married two rich women, one incredibly
rich, so he must have something going for him.
One
thing you've got to say for Bush -- the only influential older men who
developed a deep and abiding interest in him were his relatives.
***
Fewer
troops in Iraq mean fewer deaths: The conventional "liberal
hawk" view is that we don't have enough troops in Iraq. But William
M. Arkin points out in the LA Times:
Because
we have been unable to break out of our old mind-set, it's actually a
blessing we don't have more troops in Iraq. The fact that the
coalition force is relatively small is one reason that, on average,
fewer than two soldiers are being killed each day [well, in August, 2.1
per day, along with 36 wounded per day] , compared to the 30
American soldiers who died each day during the peak of U.S. fighting in
Vietnam in 1968.
What is true militarily in Iraq is also true politically, there and in
the rest of the Arab world: We keep thinking that, deep down, our
adversaries are really just like us. In reality, for the present and for
the foreseeable future, most of the Islamic world is not — and does
not want to be — like us. It has profoundly different values and
priorities. Thus our entire strategy is predicated on a mirror-picture
that we will someday "defeat" the increasingly angry
anti-American mob of Iraqi nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists,
with democratic stability miraculously arising from the ashes.
Unfortunately, John F. Kerry doesn't really offer a different view. He
promises to execute his plans better, but that may not help much if the
underlying vision of the situation is off.
Both presidential candidates, and both parties, seem to have accepted
the idea that the war on terrorism is part of a larger clash, a titanic
struggle for national survival. There's a seductive ring to such a
battle cry. Part of the American character — and human nature
generally — likes a call to heroism. But there's another part of our
character that favors taking a deep breath, looking at things as they
are and figuring out a practical solution. To me, the final lesson of
the last three years is that this is the voice we need to hear.
***
Kerry
promises immediate illegal immigration cave-in:
FRESNO,
Calif. -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry capped a recent
farm workers convention by promising to propose "comprehensive
immigration reform" within his first 100 days in office if he
defeats President George W. Bush.
Kerry
made the promise in a seven-minute telephone call to delegates last
Saturday at the 17th Constitutional Convention of the United Farm
Workers in Fresno, California. He also vowed to immediately sign the
bipartisan AgJobs bill, which would allow undocumented farm workers to
gain legal residency status.
"Within
hours of being sworn in, there will be health care for all
Americans," said Kerry. [What is he talking about?!? -- SES]
"Every child in America will be covered by child care. In addition
to that, we will be introducing an opportunity for kids to graduate from
high school differently."
Back
in the days when the United Farm Workers leaders were more concerned
about raising the wages of their members than of increasing the number
of dues-paying members, Cesar Chavez was strongly anti-immigration.
***
1,100
American soldiers wounded in August - This is the highest monthly
total yet. It goes along with 66 Americans killed. The Washington Post reports:
"Since the start of the war in March 2003, 979 U.S. troops have
died in Iraq and almost 7,000 have been wounded."
***
Why
did W.F. Buckley wash his hands of NR so precipitously? Maybe
I'm all wrong about this, but didn't William F. Buckley's June 29th announcement
that he was leaving National Review after 49 years seem much more
rushed than you'd expect? I had always kind of assumed he would have a
bit of a well-deserved farewell tour (metaphorically speaking), like a
Hall of Fame athlete in his final season, timed to culminate with the
magazine's 50th anniversary next year. Instead, boom, just one day, he
relinquishes his shares with no public warning.
Normally,
one would expect him to choose a ceremonial date of transition a few
months in advance to allow his countless admirers to write and place
"What WFB Meant to Me" articles. But there's no market for
them because he walked off so quickly.
Is
there a story here? What's the story?
***
Michael
Ledeen, NRO's International Man of Mystery, Exposed: Speaking
of National Review, NRO Contributing Editor Michael Ledeen
was long suspected of treason by his Reagan Administration superiors.
Here's an excerpt from Stephen Green's "Serving
Two Flags" article, which the FBI has found most useful
in their wide-ranging and ongoing investigation into NeoconGate:
In 1983, on the
recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of
Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the
Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel
Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's
habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified
materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from
the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as
correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as
an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.
Some time after
their return from the trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request
for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which
he said were held by the FBI. He'd hand written on a piece of paper the
identifying "alpha numeric designators". These identifiers
were as highly classified as the reports themselves....which raised in
Koch's mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he hadn't
the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his
executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to
classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to
"work".
In early 1986,
however, Koch learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant...
Koch's belated
attempts to draw official attention to his former assistant were too
late, in any event, for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD
consultancy in late 1984, Ledeen had found gainful (classified)
employment at the National Security Council (NSC). In fact, according to
a now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House Iran- Contra
investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already suggesting to
Oliver North, his new boss at NSC...." that Israeli contacts might
be useful in obtaining release of the U.S. hostages in Lebanon."
Perhaps significantly, that is the first entry in the "Chronology
of Events: U.S.- Iran Dialogue", dated November 18,1986, prepared
for the Joint House-Senate Hearings in the Iran-Contra Investigations.
What is so
striking about the Ledeen-related documents which are part of the
Iran-Contra Collection of the National Security Archive, is how
thoroughly the judgements of Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and
validated, Noel Koch's internal security concerns about his consultant.
- on April 9,
1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security
Advisor Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's
role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli
Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on
the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted
to ask Peres for detailed operational information;
- on June 6,
1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that,
"Israel's record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah
and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel's agenda is not the
same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship
such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely
upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the
Iranian scene."
- on 20 August,
1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by
memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top
Secret-SCI to Secret.
- on 16 January,
1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter "for [the]
security of the Iran initiative" that Ledeen be asked to take
periodic polygraph examinations.
- later in
January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that
Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be
making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.
During the June
23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees'
investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became
suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated
for the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500
each.
Upon inquiring
with his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever
received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a
previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his
testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the
sale to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should renegotiate the
$2,500 price so that it could be defended by the "defense
management system." In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the
first class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over
a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in
New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile, nearly twice what
Ledeen had "negotiated" in Israel.
There are two
possibilities here--one would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC
colleagues, and the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively
negotiating for Israel, not the U.S.
Like his friend
Stephen Bryen (they've long served together on the JINSA Board of
Advisors) Ledeen has been out of government service since the
late1980s....until the present Bush Administration. He, like Bryen, is
presently a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support
of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, he has since 2001 been
employed as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans OSP). Both
involve the handling of classified materials and require high-level
security clearances.
Why does the U.S. government hire for
sensitive roles guys with long track records of suspicious behavior? Oh,
I get it. It's because they get hired by other guys with longer track
records of suspicious behavior.
***
The
GOP case for Bush's Re-election: The Three R's: Racial-Religious Revenge
-- Distilled from all the speeches at the Republican convention,
here it is: "Some Arab Muslims blew up the World Trade Center, so
we invaded Iraq and blew up some Arab Muslims. Mission
accomplished!"
***
Would
Kerry rather lose than cross AIPAC? We've spent the last six weeks
watching, first, John Kerry self-apotheosize himself as the Great
American Warrior who deserves to be elected President for doing the same
things large numbers of other men of his generation did, and, second,
George W. Bush's surrogates muddy the waters over Kerry's service while
Bush tries to act like he's above it all. Of course, all this is water
35 years under the bridge.
Now,
just as Bush is getting his convention bounce in the polls, Kerry has a
live Bush scandal handed to him: NeoconGate. But will Kerry even mention
that American secrets have ended up in Iranian hands, much less
Israeli hands? Or would he rather lose than cross the American Israel
Political Action Committee (which The Forward describes as "an
organization that to a large degree is successful because of its image
of virtual omnipotence")? We shall see.
One
harbinger is that even Michael Moore refused to touch the neocons in
"Fahrenheit 9/11" (here's my review),
where the only criticism they came in for was for Paul Wolfowitz's
un-hygienic grooming habits. Moore never mentioned Ahmed Chalabi!
***
"Hero"
From my review in The American
Conservative, now available electronically:
"Hero"
is vaguely based on a celebrated assassination attempt on the ruthless
King of Qin. He ruled the most aggressive of the seven Warring States in
the Third Century B.C. Subsequent Imperial historians have tended to
demonize this pre-unification era as anarchic, thus justifying the
Emperor's monopoly on power. In truth, competition between the Warring
States made this the most innovative era in Chinese history, just as
European culture flourished during the centuries of state competition
following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, while our arts are now losing
momentum under the orderly but uninspiring European Union. How many
years has it been, for instance, since a European movie could compare to
"Hero" in artistic ambition?
In
"Hero," the normally wary King of Qin suffers an unknown
swordsman (played by martial arts whiz Jet Li) to approach within an
unheard of ten paces of his throne to tell of how he killed the three
famous assassins sent by the enemy state of Zhao. The visitor explains
in a red-saturated flashback that he exploited the assassins' moral
flaws, but the king is suddenly dubious, saying his enemies were
warriors of the highest character. More untrustworthy Rashomon-style
color-coded flashbacks follow until we learn that the guest is a fourth
assassin. Will the hitman get his revenge on the aggressor, or will he
sheath his sword to spare the life of the only man brutal enough to
unify "Our Land" (or as, other translations more ominously put
it, "All Under Heaven")?
The suspense
might be tauter if you don't already know that the King of Qin survived
to become one of the most important figures in world history. In 221
B.C., he completed his conquest of the other Warring States and declared
himself Qin Shi Huangdi, the "First Emperor of China."
Somewhere between Napoleon and Stalin on the Evil Tyrant-Meter, he
imposed the relatively efficient but ultimately stultifying template of
centralism that has held China back ever since.
Fortunately, the
disunity of the Chinese during the 1970s allowed Deng glimpses from
Mao's mainland of madness of what Chinese people were accomplishing in
Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong under sane government.
"Hero's"
Chinese-unity-uber-alles philosophy should seem ominous to the
Taiwanese. Still, there's little question that director Zhang Yimou, the
one time often-censored bad boy, has tapped into an authentic current of
mounting Chinese national pride that has re-energized his art. In his
drive to reimagine the founding myth of this emerging industrial and
potential military superpower, Zhang's movie might even bear comparison
to the great nationalist operas of the 19th Century: "Hero" as
visual Wagner.
***
2004:
A 1972-Style Pyrrhic Victory Ahead? President Nixon won a smashing
victory in 1972, but the GOP was in ruins by the 1974 midterm elections.
A second term for Bush would likely be dominated by the news of his
first administration's more lawless foreign policy operatives being
arrested or fleeing abroad.
***
NeoconGate:
Some terrorists are more equal than other terrorists -- A standard
talking point of the neocons has been that being in a War on Terror
mandates that the United States battle all terrorist groups,
especially ones targeting only Israel and not the U.S. Yet, the neocons
have their own favorite terrorist group, the MEK, because it is trying
to overthrow Israel's number one enemy, Iran.
One
of the issues in NeoconGate is the battle within the Administration over
America's attitude toward the Islamic-Marxist group MEK or Mujahedin-e
Khalq, which murdered Americans back in the 1970s and has been on the
official U.S. terrorist list since 1997. The neocons like the MEK
and try to foster American support for it, since some of its terror has
been directed at the Iranian regime.
Warren
P. Strobel of Knight-Ridder, whose pre-Iraq Attaq reporting was some
of the least deluded, writes:
Officials
outside the Pentagon have questions about still-unexplained meetings
that [Larry] Franklin and Defense Department official Harold Rhode had
in December 2001 in Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms
dealer who played a role in the Iran-Contra affair.
The
first meeting was intended to put U.S. officials in contact with Iranian
dissidents who claimed to have information about threats to American
forces in Afghanistan, according to former Reagan administration
official Michael Ledeen, who helped broker it.
Officials
in Feith's office also argued for maintaining contacts with an Iranian
opposition group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, that's dedicated to overthrowing
the theocracy in Tehran.
The
administration official said Pentagon aides and contractors tried to
conceal some of their contacts with Ghorbanifar and the Mujahedeen Khalq
from the State Department and the CIA. He stressed that doing so isn't
new or necessarily wrong, and that the CIA itself does that to other
agencies routinely.
From
an official U.S.
Navy website, here's more information on the neocons' darlings, the
MEK, and their long ties to terrorism and to Saddam Hussein:
Description
The MEK philosophy mixes Marxism and Islam. Formed in the 1960s, the
organization was expelled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution in
1979, and its primary support came from the former Iraqi regime of
Saddam Hussein since the late 1980s. The MEK’s history is filled with
anti-Western attacks as well as terrorist attacks on the interests of
the clerical regime in Iran and abroad. The MEK now advocates the
overthrow of the Iranian regime and its replacement with the group’s
own leadership. First designated in October 1997.
Activities
The group’s worldwide campaign against the Iranian Government stresses
propaganda and occasionally uses terrorism. During the 1970s, the MEK
killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense
projects in Tehran and supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy
in Tehran. In 1981, the MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the
Islamic Republic Party and the Premier’s office, killing some 70
high-ranking Iranian officials, including chief Justice Ayatollah
Mohammad Beheshti, President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei, and Premier Mohammad-Javad
Bahonar.
Near
the end of the war with Iran during 1980-88, Baghdad armed the MEK with
military equipment and sent it into action against Iranian forces. In
1991, it assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and
Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the
north.
In
April 1992, the MEK conducted near-simultaneous attacks on Iranian
Embassies and installations in 13 countries, demonstrating the group’s
ability to mount large-scale operations overseas. In April 1999, the MEK
targeted key military officers and assassinated the deputy chief of the
Armed Forces General Staff. In April 2000, the MEK attempted to
assassinate the commander of the Nasr Headquarters—Tehran’s
interagency board responsible for coordinating policies on Iraq. The
normal pace of anti-Iranian operations increased during the “Operation
Great Bahman” in February 2000, when the group launched a dozen
attacks against Iran. In 2000 and 2001, the MEK was involved regularly
in mortar attacks and hit-and run raids on Iranian military and
law-enforcement units and government buildings near the Iran-Iraq
border, although MEK terrorism in Iran declined throughout the remainder
of 2001. In February 2000, for example, the MEK launched a mortar attack
against the leadership complex in Tehran that houses the offices of the
Supreme Leader and the President.
Coalition
aircraft bombed MEK bases during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the
Coalition forced the MEK forces to surrender in May 2003. The future of
the MEK forces remains undetermined with Coalition forces.
But
the neocons want the MEK to be the INC of Iran, the exile group that
provides lots of "intelligence" on the Iranian WMD programs to
justify attacking Iran.
The
MEK is actually quite an entertaining cult:
much of its supposed "fighting troops" consist of Amazon corps
of women warriors who take vows of eternal celibacy and loyalty to the
charismatic husband-wife team, the Rajavis, who head it. A New York
Times Magazine article on the MEK by Elizabeth Rubin concluded:
"This
past winter in Iran, when such a popular outburst among students and
others was still just a dream, if you mentioned the Mujahedeen, those
who knew and remembered the group laughed at the notion of it
spearheading a democracy movement. Instead, they said, the Rajavis,
given the chance, would have been the Pol Pot of Iran. The Pentagon has
seen the fatal flaw of hitching itself to volatile groups like the
Islamists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and, more recently, the
Iraqi exile groups who had no popular base at home. It seems dangerously
myopic that the U.S. is even considering resurrecting the Rajavis and
their army of Stepford wives."
***
NeoconGate:
"Wider
FBI Probe Of Pentagon Leaks Includes Chalabi" reports the
Washington Post:
The
FBI probe is actually much broader [than just Franklin-AIPAC], according
to senior U.S. officials, and has been underway for at least two years.
Several sources familiar with the case say the probe now extends to
other Pentagon personnel who have a particular interest in assisting
both Israel and Chalabi, the former Iraqi dissident who was long a
Pentagon favorite but who has fallen out of favor with the U.S.
government...
There
appears to be at least two common threads in the multi-faceted
investigation. First, the FBI is investigating whether the same people
passed highly classified information to two disparate allies -- Chalabi
and a pro-Israel lobbying group. Second, at least some of the
intelligence in both instances included sensitive information about
Iran.
The
broader investigation is also looking into the movement of classified
materials on U.S. intentions in Iraq and on the Arab-Israeli peace
process, sources added.
U.S.
officials said the alleged transfer of classified intelligence to
Chalabi has been part of the FBI investigation at least since a raid in
May by Iraqi officials on the Baghdad compound of Chalabi's party, the
Iraqi National Congress. Classified U.S. intelligence material was found
in that raid, a senior official said.
***
Conspiracies,
Italy, and Michael Ledeen:: Most of us Americans feel a deep
aversion toward conspiracy theories.
In
contrast to America, in Mediterranean countries, conspiracy theories are
most people's preferred explanation for how the world works. You saw a
little of that during the Olympics when Greek fans in the track and
field stadium held up the running of the 200m for some time by booing
and chanting the name of the Greek 2000 gold medalist in the 200m,
Kostas Kenteris, who had dropped out of the Olympics after a mysterious
motorcycle "accident" and a missed drug test the night before
the Opening Ceremony in which he was expected to light the Olympic
Torch. Booing was particularly loud when any of the three American finalists
were shown on the stadium screen. Reports indicate that many Greek fans
in the stadium believed the U.S. had somehow rigged the disgrace of
Kenteris to eliminate the only competition for their runners. The
simpler explanation -- that Kenteris only won in 2000 because he was
juiced to the eyeballs and that he staged his motorcycle crash with his
girlfriend, the silver medalist in the women's 100m in 2000, to avoid
being caught by an improved drug test -- did not appeal to Greeks, for
whom Occam's Razor is a poor guide to public affairs. (Of course, it
didn't help that the American favorite and eventual victor, Shawn
Crawford, had appeared barechested on television the night before
looking like an ad for BALCO, yet he passed his drug tests.)
Now,
there's a reason that Mediterraneans like conspiracy theories: there are
lots and lots of conspiracies in their countries. Extended family ties
are stronger, justice is less certain, and so much of publics affairs
resembles only somewhat more respectable organized crime
activities.
Only
in this year, for example, have I learned how much of Italy's history
from the American invasion of Sicily in 1943 onward happened below the
surface. For example, the U.S. Army helped revive the Mafia, which had
been beaten down by Mussolini for 20 years, to ease the way into Sicily
and to keep order afterwards so our troops didn't get bogged down in
occupation duty.
Likewise,
the overwhelming importance of defeating our subsequent ideological foe
during the Cold War caused the U.S. to tolerate, even subsidize, a lot
of conspiratorial criminality in Italy, where the chance of a Communist
takeover, by invasion, coup, or election was always fairly high. The
Mafia's get-out-the-vote abilities in southern Italy made it a bulwark
of the anti-Communist Christian Democrats, which we heavily subsidized.
Our main man in Cold War Italy, Giulio
Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, has spent most of
his retirement being tried for connections to the Mafia and murdering a
scandal-mongering journalist.
In
the north of Italy, the CIA established a network of potential sleeper
cells of armed, trained resistance fighters who would sabotage any
Soviet takeover (Operation Gladio). Very patriotic, but of course, being
Italians, some of the conspirators weren't content to wait around until
their country needed them and began to freelance on their own.
The
late 1970s and early 1980s were the fever years in Italy, when the
chance of a Communist takeover at the ballot box and leftwing
kidnappings were at their peak. Bizarre events were common, such as the
horrendous bombing of
the Genoa train station, apparently by rightwingers, the hanging death
of "the Pope's banker" Roberto
Calvi, and the discovery, most ridiculous sounding of all, of the
secret and sinister P2
Lodge of Free Masons to which much of the right of center Italian
establishment apparently belonged.
All
this seems very alien to most Americans. Yet a few Americans positively
love to conspire, most notoriously Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald almost
certainly shot JFK alone, but not for a lack of trying to attain
co-conspirators. The chief reason there have been so many JFK conspiracy
theories ever since is because Oswald had deeply wanted to be part of a
conspiracy. So, he had previously contacted potential partners: the KGB
most notably, but also the CIA, the Mafia, the Castroites, and the anti-Castroites.
Most realized, sooner or later, that Oswald was trouble with a capital T
and washed their hands of him, so he was forced to win his place in the
history books alone.
Another
inveterate plotter is NRO Contributing Editor and International
Man of Mystery Michael Ledeen. Separating truth from fiction about
Ledeen is hard, but a few things are agreed-upon, such as his role in
initiating the Iran-Contra scandal that almost destroyed the Reagan
Presidency and his central
role in setting up the recent meetings in Europe, including Rome,
between the Neocongate suspect Larry Franklin, fellow Feith operative
Harold Rhode, Italian Intelligence agents (SISMI), and Ledeen's old
collaborator from Iran-Contra, the notoriously unreliable Iranian arms
dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Ledeen
spent most of his formative years in the late 1970s and very early 1980s
in Italy, moving in CIA-related journalistic / intelligence circles. He
was apparently a consultant for SISMI, the Italian Intelligence service,
during those years. For an anti-Ledeen report on what he was supposedly
up to during those years, see this,
the accuracy of which I absolutely cannot vouch for.
We
now know that the the forged documents relating to the purported
purchase by Iraq of the Niger yellowcake emerged out of Italy, with a
tie to the Italian Intelligence service SISMI -- see Josh Marshall's report.
Is
there a connection to Ledeen? I know of no proof. But all I can say,
from what I see of Ledeen's history and personality, is that if he
wasn't involved in the yellowcake forgery, he must be kicking himself
for missing out on all the fun.
***
On
Bush: Readers respond:
1.
Bush & Rove are following a calculated strategy to get around the
Iraq problems by conflating Iraq with 9/11. All the speakers that I
heard -- all the big ones -- merged them together.This seems to be
working. Kerry can't do much about it because he also favors the war.
2.
The convention seemed to follow the Sailer strategy of going for white
guys and married white gals in the battleground states, giving them good
reasons to come out and vote on Nov. 2: protection from terror and tax
cuts. Then to make some moderates feel good and at least not voter for
Kerry, Bush threw in a bunch of proposals for new socialist programs,
most of which won't go anywhere.
It'll
probably work, unless it's really close and the immigrant vote does Bush
in.
*
Perceptive
analysis on Bush's ability to get-away saying things because people feel
he's just a puppet.
Give
him credit: he may not have applied himself at school, but he went to
school in politics and had an education there that rivals no one's. He
knows how to sell an idea that will draw the least amount of fire. He's
a master at creating a small target.
Also,
limited abilities might help Bush in a way. Being US President, the
number of things a remarkably smart person could get distracted on are
endless. Think of the streams of data that constantly bombard a US
President. Bush is probably overwhelmed by it, as most of us would be,
so he filters -- maybe too much.
***
Steve
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