From The Washington Post:
Sandy Berger: A Case for Accountability
by Colbert I. King
Set aside Republican speculation that former Clinton national security adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger was trying to hide classified information from the Sept. 11 commission or that he had provided the material to the Kerry campaign. Do likewise with Democratic suspicions that the FBI's investigation of Berger was leaked to distract attention from the commission's report. Those concerns, all unproven, are partisan and secondary. Keep the focus where it belongs. Did Sandy Berger violate the rules regarding the protection of classified information entrusted to him, and if he did, will he be held accountable for his actions?
That's the key test for Washington.
Sandy Berger is a prominent figure among the nation's foreign policy elite. He has friends everywhere, especially where it counts: on Capitol Hill and in the Democratic administration-in-exile holed up in D.C. think tanks and on K Street. He occupies a place of honor in high political circles and among opinion-makers in the press. And he's got clout. Immediately following disclosure about him and the missing National Archives documents, Bill Clinton and John Kerry put in a good word for their friend. And it wasn't for nothing that Berger received this sympathetic characterization in a Post story on Wednesday: "At the same time," wrote our reporter, "[Berger] was known as someone who would constantly lose track of papers or appointments without subordinates to keep him organized and on schedule. 'For all those who know and love him, it's easy to see how this could happen,' one former Clinton colleague said."
A regular Mr. Magoo, that Sandy Berger.
Well, I don't know Berger or even love him except as my neighbor, in accordance with the Scriptures. But I do know that there are men and women in service to our nation who have paid a dear price for their mishandling of classified materials. They, too, were presumably known and loved by others. Nonetheless, their failure to properly safeguard sensitive information landed them in trouble with their government. Should Sandy Berger, because he is connected, be given a pass for taking classified materials out of the National Archives without permission? Should distraction by the cares of the world serve as an adequate defense for the violation of security procedures?
In 2000, during the Clinton administration, Ambassador Martin S. Indyk's security clearance was suspended for suspected violations of State Department security standards. In that same year, according to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, the clearances of five other State employees were suspended for violations of security policies. And in the previous two years, 27 other State Department workers had their security clearances suspended for other reasons.
At U.S. embassies and diplomatic missions around the world, offices are daily inspected to ensure that classified information is safeguarded. And violations for leaving safes unlocked, burn bags unattended and classified materials unprotected are written up and, if repeated and serious enough, referred to Washington.
Terrorism remains problem number one. But there are also hostile forces out there that make it their business to get their hands on U.S. government secrets. And they do it by any means necessary, including spying, electronic eavesdropping or recruiting someone on the inside to bring them out.
All the alarms, closed-circuit TV cameras and mechanical devices designed to prevent surreptitious intrusions aren't worth much if someone possessing classified material is careless or flouts security procedures. Some people do that, and with serious consequences to themselves and the nation's security. How well I know.
Several years ago, when the Cold War was still quite frigid and I was dozens of pounds lighter and with a full head of hair, I was a State Department special agent assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn as a regional security officer. From West Berlin to Hamburg and Munich, I saw America's best and worst sides on display where compliance with security procedures was concerned.
Which gets us back to Mr. Berger.
In adjudicating his case, questions that apply to others should also apply to him.
Given that Berger walked out of the National Archives with classified material and 40 to 50 pages of notes he had taken, and that he failed to show these papers to archives officials for review before leaving, as he should have, can he be still trusted with classified material?
Archives officials say that Berger turned over the notes when contacted by archives workers about missing files, but other documents are still missing. A search of his home and office failed to locate the missing documents. Does this raise a question regarding Berger's willingness and ability to safeguard classified information in his possession?
Berger's attorney says his client's actions were "inadvertent." Inadvertence happens to be one of the conditions that can mitigate security concerns under the federal government's adjudicative guidelines when considering violations of security regulations. Well, what caused archives officials to begin watching Berger as he worked with classified materials in their special room for reviewing documents? Officials familiar with the case told The Post that some documents were missing after Berger's previous visit, so archives staffers coded the papers he was interested in reading to help them detect when other papers disappeared. After one of Berger's visits, one source reported to The Post, those materials had disappeared from the files.
"Inadvertent" means not focusing the mind on the matter. Sources who tell The Post that archives officials witnessed Berger stuffing papers in his clothing may be of the view that the former national security adviser's mind was focused wonderfully on what he was doing. Sandy Berger denies walking off with classified stuff in his pants. But getting to the truth is, in fact, what this is all about.
At issue is not Berger's sense of injustice or embarrassment, or the gotcha game that is being played out by Republicans, or the Democratic establishment's willingness to give Berger the benefit of the doubt because he's one of their own.
The question is, was Sandy Berger's violation due to negligence -- at best -- or was it deliberate -- at worst? And should he be held accountable for his actions? Or is he too important and well-connected to be treated like everyone else? What's the answer, Washington?
kingc@washpost.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Saturday, July 24, 2004
The column is from The New Republic, dated June 28.
Moore Distortions
by Richard Just
A mainstream liberal consensus on Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" has emerged quickly. It goes something like this: Moore's a nutty conspiracy theorist, and parts of the movie -- in which he suggests, among other things, that we invaded Afghanistan not because of 9/11 but because we wanted to build a natural gas pipeline -- showcase Moore at his least responsible.
But he's also a talented polemicist and filmmaker; and as a result, the second half of the movie -- in which he uses the story of Lila Lipscomb, a grieving military mother, to examine why it is only the poor and working class who sacrifice in times of war -- is both profound and smart. In "The New York Times", A.O. Scott called the interviews with Lipscomb the "most moving sections" of the film. If the folks with whom I saw the movie provide any indication, audiences across the country will leave the theater so moved by Lipscomb's story that they will forgive "Fahrenheit 9/11" its often-incoherent points and poorly supported accusations. That, I suspect, is exactly what Moore wanted: to wrap assertions that can only be described as odd -- such as his insistence that the military is failing to adequately patrol miles of deserted Oregonian coast -- in the heart-breaking story of a mother's loss and the legitimate observation that America's system of military service asks too much of the poor and too little of elites.
There's a central -- and dishonest -- trick to what Moore is doing here: He's conflating two questions that have very little to do with each other. The question of whether a war is just (Moore's thesis is that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not) has no logical connection to the question of whether it is fought by a justly selected military. Vietnam was not an unjust war because elites received draft deferments; it was an unjust war in which the burdens of military service happened to be spread unfairly. Every war the United States has fought since Vietnam has been fought by an unjustly distributed military. But not every war has been unjust. The distribution of sacrifice in a democracy is a moral problem all its own.
Moore's argumentative strategy, however, rests on tricking audiences into believing otherwise. Having laid out his mostly unconvincing cases against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and having presented compelling scenes of Lipscomb grieving, military recruiters preying on the ignorance of teenagers, and congressmen fleeing questions about their children's military service, he pulls an intellectual sleight of hand that goes by so quickly -- and indeed, that sounds so logical -- that many viewers won't realize they've been tricked. In a voiceover, he says (and I'm paraphrasing pretty roughly here): "I've always been amazed that in America the poor and working class do most of the fighting. That is their gift to us. And all they ask in return is that we don't send them to war unless we absolutely have to."
The logical connection between the two thoughts here is patently absurd. (Is Moore implying that it's okay for the poor and working class to do most of the fighting as long as they are only sent to fight in necessary wars? Would it be okay to fight unnecessary wars if the military burden were properly balanced?) But it's also central to Moore's argument. He needs to be able to place his movie's best point -- the brazen immorality of Lipscomb having to grieve her son while elites make no similar sacrifice -- in the service of his larger argument, which is that Bush's wars have been unjust. So he eloquently conflates them, pumps up his soundtrack, and hopes viewers don't bother to think about what he's actually done.
How do we know Moore only wants to use his point about who sacrifices in war as a distraction from his real agenda of indulging conspiracy theories about Bush's foreign policy? Because a serious examination of that issue would have required something very different from what Moore delivers. He could have taken his camera and knocked on the doors of Ivy League presidents who ban ROTC from their campuses, helping to perpetuate the notion that military service is not for our country's young elites. He could have seriously considered the arguments for a draft. The problem of the military's socioeconomic imbalance, when considered thoughtfully, isn't really a partisan issue. But that's exactly how Moore treats it, because embarrassing (presumably liberal) academics or considering proposals with non-ideological appeal just isn't how Moore does business. His approach to the issue makes clear that he is using it rather than examining it. Surely Moore will concede that whether America's wars are just or unjust -- indeed whether we fight wars at all -- we do need people to serve in our military, and we do need to find them somewhere. The logical extension of elite schools shutting their doors to military recruiters is that those same recruiters end up scouring the malls of Flint, Michigan. If Moore really cares about the socioeconomic imbalance of the U.S. military, you wouldn't know it from this movie.
Which is too bad, because the question of who serves in the American military is an important one, and we ought to be having a national debate about it. But far from provoking such a debate, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will stymie it. That's because Moore essentially argues that the way to redress our military's socioeconomic imbalance -- the way to stop the Lila Lipscombs of America from bearing an unfair percentage of the burden of our country's defense -- is not to fight unjust wars. This makes no sense, but it is also a deeply attractive message to Moore's target audience of true believers, because it neatly waves away the guilt of elites who do not want their children to serve in the military. It tells them that the difficult moral question of how we determine who serves in the military -- a question that should make any parent or young person who really thinks about it deeply uncomfortable -- need not be grappled with, as long as we only wage just wars. Just as young viewers of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (like me) may be beginning to wonder why it is that the life of Lipscomb's son was worth less than their own, Moore invites us to short-circuit this troubling, important line of reasoning with a glib piece of illogic: No unnecessary wars; no need to spread the sacrifice of military service. It's as if he forgets that people also die, and mothers also grieve, in necessary wars.
There seems to be a growing sentiment among liberals that Moore is a bad guy, but dammit, he's our bad guy. I disagree. Liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. Besides, Lila Lipscomb and the young men being funneled directly from Flint malls to Iraq deserve better. That is, they deserve to be more than distractions from the intellectual mess that precedes them in this movie. Moore ends "Fahrenheit 9/11" by predicting that American voters will not be fooled into voting again for George W. Bush. I hope he's right. But I also hope they won't be fooled by the bad logic at the center of his film.
Richard Just is editor of The New Republic Online.
Moore Distortions
by Richard Just
A mainstream liberal consensus on Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" has emerged quickly. It goes something like this: Moore's a nutty conspiracy theorist, and parts of the movie -- in which he suggests, among other things, that we invaded Afghanistan not because of 9/11 but because we wanted to build a natural gas pipeline -- showcase Moore at his least responsible.
But he's also a talented polemicist and filmmaker; and as a result, the second half of the movie -- in which he uses the story of Lila Lipscomb, a grieving military mother, to examine why it is only the poor and working class who sacrifice in times of war -- is both profound and smart. In "The New York Times", A.O. Scott called the interviews with Lipscomb the "most moving sections" of the film. If the folks with whom I saw the movie provide any indication, audiences across the country will leave the theater so moved by Lipscomb's story that they will forgive "Fahrenheit 9/11" its often-incoherent points and poorly supported accusations. That, I suspect, is exactly what Moore wanted: to wrap assertions that can only be described as odd -- such as his insistence that the military is failing to adequately patrol miles of deserted Oregonian coast -- in the heart-breaking story of a mother's loss and the legitimate observation that America's system of military service asks too much of the poor and too little of elites.
There's a central -- and dishonest -- trick to what Moore is doing here: He's conflating two questions that have very little to do with each other. The question of whether a war is just (Moore's thesis is that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not) has no logical connection to the question of whether it is fought by a justly selected military. Vietnam was not an unjust war because elites received draft deferments; it was an unjust war in which the burdens of military service happened to be spread unfairly. Every war the United States has fought since Vietnam has been fought by an unjustly distributed military. But not every war has been unjust. The distribution of sacrifice in a democracy is a moral problem all its own.
Moore's argumentative strategy, however, rests on tricking audiences into believing otherwise. Having laid out his mostly unconvincing cases against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and having presented compelling scenes of Lipscomb grieving, military recruiters preying on the ignorance of teenagers, and congressmen fleeing questions about their children's military service, he pulls an intellectual sleight of hand that goes by so quickly -- and indeed, that sounds so logical -- that many viewers won't realize they've been tricked. In a voiceover, he says (and I'm paraphrasing pretty roughly here): "I've always been amazed that in America the poor and working class do most of the fighting. That is their gift to us. And all they ask in return is that we don't send them to war unless we absolutely have to."
The logical connection between the two thoughts here is patently absurd. (Is Moore implying that it's okay for the poor and working class to do most of the fighting as long as they are only sent to fight in necessary wars? Would it be okay to fight unnecessary wars if the military burden were properly balanced?) But it's also central to Moore's argument. He needs to be able to place his movie's best point -- the brazen immorality of Lipscomb having to grieve her son while elites make no similar sacrifice -- in the service of his larger argument, which is that Bush's wars have been unjust. So he eloquently conflates them, pumps up his soundtrack, and hopes viewers don't bother to think about what he's actually done.
How do we know Moore only wants to use his point about who sacrifices in war as a distraction from his real agenda of indulging conspiracy theories about Bush's foreign policy? Because a serious examination of that issue would have required something very different from what Moore delivers. He could have taken his camera and knocked on the doors of Ivy League presidents who ban ROTC from their campuses, helping to perpetuate the notion that military service is not for our country's young elites. He could have seriously considered the arguments for a draft. The problem of the military's socioeconomic imbalance, when considered thoughtfully, isn't really a partisan issue. But that's exactly how Moore treats it, because embarrassing (presumably liberal) academics or considering proposals with non-ideological appeal just isn't how Moore does business. His approach to the issue makes clear that he is using it rather than examining it. Surely Moore will concede that whether America's wars are just or unjust -- indeed whether we fight wars at all -- we do need people to serve in our military, and we do need to find them somewhere. The logical extension of elite schools shutting their doors to military recruiters is that those same recruiters end up scouring the malls of Flint, Michigan. If Moore really cares about the socioeconomic imbalance of the U.S. military, you wouldn't know it from this movie.
Which is too bad, because the question of who serves in the American military is an important one, and we ought to be having a national debate about it. But far from provoking such a debate, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will stymie it. That's because Moore essentially argues that the way to redress our military's socioeconomic imbalance -- the way to stop the Lila Lipscombs of America from bearing an unfair percentage of the burden of our country's defense -- is not to fight unjust wars. This makes no sense, but it is also a deeply attractive message to Moore's target audience of true believers, because it neatly waves away the guilt of elites who do not want their children to serve in the military. It tells them that the difficult moral question of how we determine who serves in the military -- a question that should make any parent or young person who really thinks about it deeply uncomfortable -- need not be grappled with, as long as we only wage just wars. Just as young viewers of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (like me) may be beginning to wonder why it is that the life of Lipscomb's son was worth less than their own, Moore invites us to short-circuit this troubling, important line of reasoning with a glib piece of illogic: No unnecessary wars; no need to spread the sacrifice of military service. It's as if he forgets that people also die, and mothers also grieve, in necessary wars.
There seems to be a growing sentiment among liberals that Moore is a bad guy, but dammit, he's our bad guy. I disagree. Liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. Besides, Lila Lipscomb and the young men being funneled directly from Flint malls to Iraq deserve better. That is, they deserve to be more than distractions from the intellectual mess that precedes them in this movie. Moore ends "Fahrenheit 9/11" by predicting that American voters will not be fooled into voting again for George W. Bush. I hope he's right. But I also hope they won't be fooled by the bad logic at the center of his film.
Richard Just is editor of The New Republic Online.
Book Review from The Observer:
On monsters and myths
by Neal Ascherson
Do we need another book about Hitler and Stalin? It takes only a few pages of The Dictators for Richard Overy to convince Neal Ascherson that we do.
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia
by Richard Overy
Penguin £25, pp849
The huge books about war and the dictators keep coming, as if the historians were queuing up to dump their slabs of learning on a grave. We should be grateful. The sheer weight of these volumes, to say nothing of their weighty research, keeps the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb.
None the less, a reader facing yet another tome is bound to ask whether there is much left to be said about those two monsters. But a few pages of Richard Overy's new book are enough to remove doubt. This is a superb work, comprehensive and written with rare fire and intelligence.
Like many good historians, Overy was compelled to write by a sense of having been misled. He was taught, not so long ago, that the reason why so many millions obeyed and worshipped Hitler and Stalin was a simple one - fear of state terror. Overy sets out to show that this explanation is hopelessly crude.
Fear of the penalties for protest was important, of course, but both regimes drew wide consent from the majority who were neither active dissenters (a tiny fraction) nor party enthusiasts. More broadly, the chaos of the Twenties left both populations feeling that it was better to be 'pro' whatever the leadership did than 'anti', and that social unity mattered more than the right to criticise.
Hitler and Stalin took over societies already riddled with fear of the future, with paranoia about conspiracies and with hatred of 'others' expressed in murderous language. Both dictatorships were able to replace the notion of moral and legal absolutes with 'historical absolutes': the idea that law must be subordinated to the 'iron laws' of development, whether Marxist-Leninist or racism. Dictatorship flourished in a climate of perpetual emergency. 'The moral universe... made the state's crimes explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent a greater injustice.' At the end of this road stood Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, who was outraged to be accused of theft at his postwar trial but showed no remorse for murdering hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Overy asks what made the two regimes similar and what made them different. He wastes no time on the old 'equivalence' argument that Hitler and Stalin were both totalitarian psychopaths who killed millions and were therefore as bad as each other. Their differences were very real. Constantly, Overy contrasts the universalism of Stalin's utopia, aimed at 'an equal and happy future', with Hitler's vision reserved for the Germanic race alone. But he uses this contrast as an analytic tool, not as mitigation for Stalin's crimes.
In the same way, he is not saying that it was better to be arrested by the NKVD than by the Gestapo when he notes: 'It is the utterly lawless character of state repression in Germany by the end of the dictatorship that makes the chief difference between the Soviet and German security systems'.
His point is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, which kept up at least the pretence of courts with judges, was in many ways a more controllable and versatile apparatus than the Nazi machine.
This difference was decisive for the outcome of the gigantic war which began in 1941 (and cost the lives of more than 11 million soldiers in less than four years). Here, Overy challenges received ideas. The notion of the Soviet Union's 'infinite resources' is misleading. After the conquest of the western USSR in 1941, Germany controlled far greater supplies of manpower, production and raw materials.
Stalin won for three main reasons. First, because the Red Army simply outfought the Wehrmacht with better strategy and tactics. Second, because Soviet central control of the economy was more effective; the Soviet Union overtook Germany in artillery and tank production in the critical year of 1942-3. Third, Stalin became more aware of his own limitations as the war went on and relied increasingly on the judgment of trusted generals. Hitler, in contrast, grew more convinced of his own genius and by 1945 was interfering in almost every military decision.
This version makes the ultimate Soviet victory even more impressive. It also undermines the 'weak dictatorship' school of thought, which has tried to deconstruct the notion of two all-powerful dictators. Stalin and Hitler delegated authority, but both, Overy insists, retained almost absolute power to intervene at any level. The difference was that Soviet central control was more flexible. The German system was too rigid to mobilise resources quickly (but the belief that the Nazis refused to conscript women for war work is a myth).
But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned industries.
In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism.
As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies.' Both dictators relied on a cult of science, social or biological. Both, above all, created a stupefying gap between what anyone could see was happening and what was proclaimed to be happening. But most people preferred to believe rather than to see.
It is the memory of that deception which still, generations later, darkens our hopes of constructing a future through politics.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
On monsters and myths
by Neal Ascherson
Do we need another book about Hitler and Stalin? It takes only a few pages of The Dictators for Richard Overy to convince Neal Ascherson that we do.
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia
by Richard Overy
Penguin £25, pp849
The huge books about war and the dictators keep coming, as if the historians were queuing up to dump their slabs of learning on a grave. We should be grateful. The sheer weight of these volumes, to say nothing of their weighty research, keeps the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb.
None the less, a reader facing yet another tome is bound to ask whether there is much left to be said about those two monsters. But a few pages of Richard Overy's new book are enough to remove doubt. This is a superb work, comprehensive and written with rare fire and intelligence.
Like many good historians, Overy was compelled to write by a sense of having been misled. He was taught, not so long ago, that the reason why so many millions obeyed and worshipped Hitler and Stalin was a simple one - fear of state terror. Overy sets out to show that this explanation is hopelessly crude.
Fear of the penalties for protest was important, of course, but both regimes drew wide consent from the majority who were neither active dissenters (a tiny fraction) nor party enthusiasts. More broadly, the chaos of the Twenties left both populations feeling that it was better to be 'pro' whatever the leadership did than 'anti', and that social unity mattered more than the right to criticise.
Hitler and Stalin took over societies already riddled with fear of the future, with paranoia about conspiracies and with hatred of 'others' expressed in murderous language. Both dictatorships were able to replace the notion of moral and legal absolutes with 'historical absolutes': the idea that law must be subordinated to the 'iron laws' of development, whether Marxist-Leninist or racism. Dictatorship flourished in a climate of perpetual emergency. 'The moral universe... made the state's crimes explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent a greater injustice.' At the end of this road stood Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, who was outraged to be accused of theft at his postwar trial but showed no remorse for murdering hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Overy asks what made the two regimes similar and what made them different. He wastes no time on the old 'equivalence' argument that Hitler and Stalin were both totalitarian psychopaths who killed millions and were therefore as bad as each other. Their differences were very real. Constantly, Overy contrasts the universalism of Stalin's utopia, aimed at 'an equal and happy future', with Hitler's vision reserved for the Germanic race alone. But he uses this contrast as an analytic tool, not as mitigation for Stalin's crimes.
In the same way, he is not saying that it was better to be arrested by the NKVD than by the Gestapo when he notes: 'It is the utterly lawless character of state repression in Germany by the end of the dictatorship that makes the chief difference between the Soviet and German security systems'.
His point is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, which kept up at least the pretence of courts with judges, was in many ways a more controllable and versatile apparatus than the Nazi machine.
This difference was decisive for the outcome of the gigantic war which began in 1941 (and cost the lives of more than 11 million soldiers in less than four years). Here, Overy challenges received ideas. The notion of the Soviet Union's 'infinite resources' is misleading. After the conquest of the western USSR in 1941, Germany controlled far greater supplies of manpower, production and raw materials.
Stalin won for three main reasons. First, because the Red Army simply outfought the Wehrmacht with better strategy and tactics. Second, because Soviet central control of the economy was more effective; the Soviet Union overtook Germany in artillery and tank production in the critical year of 1942-3. Third, Stalin became more aware of his own limitations as the war went on and relied increasingly on the judgment of trusted generals. Hitler, in contrast, grew more convinced of his own genius and by 1945 was interfering in almost every military decision.
This version makes the ultimate Soviet victory even more impressive. It also undermines the 'weak dictatorship' school of thought, which has tried to deconstruct the notion of two all-powerful dictators. Stalin and Hitler delegated authority, but both, Overy insists, retained almost absolute power to intervene at any level. The difference was that Soviet central control was more flexible. The German system was too rigid to mobilise resources quickly (but the belief that the Nazis refused to conscript women for war work is a myth).
But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned industries.
In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism.
As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies.' Both dictators relied on a cult of science, social or biological. Both, above all, created a stupefying gap between what anyone could see was happening and what was proclaimed to be happening. But most people preferred to believe rather than to see.
It is the memory of that deception which still, generations later, darkens our hopes of constructing a future through politics.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Friday, July 23, 2004
Great article from The Boston Globe:
Introducing Ricky Fante: young man, old soul
By Renee Graham
Real soul music, as vital as your next heartbeat, has a mess of livin' in it.
It cannot be taught, it must be lived. That's what separates great from good, passionate tribulation from proficient technique. It's less a sound than a marrow-deep feeling, a salve for the wounds of faded love or an exhilarating shout when you've got the world on a string. Whether it's Otis Redding's stutter at the end of "Try a Little Tenderness" or the steam of Wilson Pickett's scream in "Mustang Sally," it's an indescribable thrill, both foreign and familiar, that arches the back and makes you move in a way you didn't know possible.
Ricky Fante -- a former Marine and a soldier of love -- is proud to call himself a soul singer, a distinction, he believes, that should not be lightly bestowed.
"I've been through some things," Fante says during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "I've been through a lot of relationships, I've been through a lot. What you hear in my music is everything I've experienced and lived."
Raw and moving, Fante's debut album, "Rewind," hits stores Tuesday (July 11). His remarkably seasoned voice will instantly remind listeners -- especially those over 35 -- of such soul greats as Redding, Sam Cooke, and Al Green. It's a retro sound from the '60s and '70s, which is again refreshing, especially when compared to the formulaic and textureless modern R&B of, say, Usher. It also stands apart from the neo-soul of D'Angelo, which has always had a hip-hop sensibility present in its attitude, if not its execution.
Through its 12 tracks, "Rewind" plays as if hip-hop never happened -- and that's just fine with Fante. "That's not what I'm trying to do," says the 26-year-old singer-songwriter. "I want to take people on a roller coaster ride of emotions with classic soul as the backdrop."
And it is an amazing ride. From the piano and horn-driven opening track, "I Let You Go," with a sound so evocative of years past it could have been plucked from your parents' dusty stack of 45s, to the heartbreaking and lush "Why," Fante delivers his music with a palpable ache designed to gnaw at you long after the song is over. Fante recorded his debut as a tribute to the honey-dipped heyday of the Memphis-based Stax sound, "a time I consider the mecca of soul music," he said.
Though his song "It Ain't Easy" features a portion of Pickett's "It Ain't Easy," Fante co-wrote every song on the album. Whereas Joss Stone, the 16-year-old British wunderkind with the old soul sound, recorded all cover songs for her 2003 debut, "The Soul Sessions," Fante and his cocreators believed original songs would best reflect his vintage soul vision.
"Ricky's a songwriter, and he has things to say," says Josh Deutsch, senior vice president for A&R at Virgin Records, Fante's label. "For me, the issue was configuring the right group of people around him to help him express that. To me, personally, cover albums aren't as meaningful as when you can find someone who can actually write songs, or with the help of a group of people. come up with his own material."
Deutsch, who also produced "Rewind," discovered Fante when he received a demo of the Soul Surfers, an acoustic soul duo Fante formed several years ago. He contacted the young singer, flew him to New York, and introduced him to Jesse Harris, the musician and songwriter first recognized for his Grammy-winning work on Norah Jones's multimillion-selling 2002 debut, "Come Away With Me." Harris and Deutsch are longtime friends.
"We instantly got along with each other -- he laughed at my jokes," Fante quips. "I find the guy extremely talented, and once we were introduced, we got along with each other in a working environment."
With Deutsch, Harris, and keyboardist Guyora Kats, Fante wrote, recorded, and completed the album in six months before he even had a record deal.
"We weren't trying to make a throwback record," Deutsch says. "That's just what Ricky's voice wants to do. We also wanted to take a step back from all the traffic in the neo-soul world, and we wanted to make a record that was a little more emotional and innocent."
And authentic. In this album's liner notes, the great Isaac Hayes, who first made his name playing keyboards for Redding and who co-wrote such songs as "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin," calls Fante "the shot of adrenaline the music industry needs today." Deepening his old-soul credentials, Fante also appeared earlier this year as Pickett singing the classic "Land of a Thousand Dances" on an episode of NBC's set-in-the-1960s drama "American Dreams."
Born and raised in a middle-class Washington, D.C., family, Fante was always immersed in music. His grandmother sang in the church choir, so singing was "just natural," he says.
"I listened to a lot of music growing up, and I just absorbed what I heard like a sponge. My parents played all types of music," Fante recalls. "There was always gospel on Sunday. My mom likes everything from Barry Manilow to Parliament, and all the things in between. And my father listens to a lot of jazz and soul."
Still, the big-bang moment of Fante's young life was hearing Stevie Wonder. In the early 1980s, his mother and aunt took the 5-year-old to a rally in support of making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday. Wonder sang, among other songs, his King-inspired anthem "Happy Birthday," and from that moment, he had Fante in his thrall.
"I'd never heard anyone like that," Fante says. "He moved me to tears, and after that I just wanted to hear everything Stevie Wonder did. He's the artist I admire the most." (Fante takes a moment to clear up early reports that had him citing Elvis Presley as a major musical influence: "I liked Elvis's style. I liked his persona of coolness, but that's basically it when it comes to Elvis.")
Later, Fante got into go-go music, the bass-heavy, beat-crazy music best recognized outside its D.C. birthplace through the 1987 hit "Da' Butt" by E.U., and he started his first group, Junior Division. Any musical ambitions were put on the sidelines when Fante enlisted in the US Marine Corps after high school. When he completed his four-year hitch, he moved to Los Angeles and began performing in local clubs while attending college and working various jobs.
Those years are thankfully over, and Fante credits his father for teaching him the discipline to stick with his dreams, even during the lean years. Now he's making music full time and is already plotting his next album, which, he says, will feature a go-go beat -- "I want to do something we haven't heard before, while still keeping it soulful."
While others sprout cliches about "keepin' it real," with Fante it always comes back to keeping it soulful.
"There's a lot of young kids out there who don't know what soul music is all about," Fante says. "I want people to hear that R&B can be done in a tasteful manner without lyrics about smacking a girl on her booty, or having one cup filled with Hennessy and another filled with diamonds and pearls."
Renee Graham can be reached at graham@globe.com.
Introducing Ricky Fante: young man, old soul
By Renee Graham
Real soul music, as vital as your next heartbeat, has a mess of livin' in it.
It cannot be taught, it must be lived. That's what separates great from good, passionate tribulation from proficient technique. It's less a sound than a marrow-deep feeling, a salve for the wounds of faded love or an exhilarating shout when you've got the world on a string. Whether it's Otis Redding's stutter at the end of "Try a Little Tenderness" or the steam of Wilson Pickett's scream in "Mustang Sally," it's an indescribable thrill, both foreign and familiar, that arches the back and makes you move in a way you didn't know possible.
Ricky Fante -- a former Marine and a soldier of love -- is proud to call himself a soul singer, a distinction, he believes, that should not be lightly bestowed.
"I've been through some things," Fante says during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "I've been through a lot of relationships, I've been through a lot. What you hear in my music is everything I've experienced and lived."
Raw and moving, Fante's debut album, "Rewind," hits stores Tuesday (July 11). His remarkably seasoned voice will instantly remind listeners -- especially those over 35 -- of such soul greats as Redding, Sam Cooke, and Al Green. It's a retro sound from the '60s and '70s, which is again refreshing, especially when compared to the formulaic and textureless modern R&B of, say, Usher. It also stands apart from the neo-soul of D'Angelo, which has always had a hip-hop sensibility present in its attitude, if not its execution.
Through its 12 tracks, "Rewind" plays as if hip-hop never happened -- and that's just fine with Fante. "That's not what I'm trying to do," says the 26-year-old singer-songwriter. "I want to take people on a roller coaster ride of emotions with classic soul as the backdrop."
And it is an amazing ride. From the piano and horn-driven opening track, "I Let You Go," with a sound so evocative of years past it could have been plucked from your parents' dusty stack of 45s, to the heartbreaking and lush "Why," Fante delivers his music with a palpable ache designed to gnaw at you long after the song is over. Fante recorded his debut as a tribute to the honey-dipped heyday of the Memphis-based Stax sound, "a time I consider the mecca of soul music," he said.
Though his song "It Ain't Easy" features a portion of Pickett's "It Ain't Easy," Fante co-wrote every song on the album. Whereas Joss Stone, the 16-year-old British wunderkind with the old soul sound, recorded all cover songs for her 2003 debut, "The Soul Sessions," Fante and his cocreators believed original songs would best reflect his vintage soul vision.
"Ricky's a songwriter, and he has things to say," says Josh Deutsch, senior vice president for A&R at Virgin Records, Fante's label. "For me, the issue was configuring the right group of people around him to help him express that. To me, personally, cover albums aren't as meaningful as when you can find someone who can actually write songs, or with the help of a group of people. come up with his own material."
Deutsch, who also produced "Rewind," discovered Fante when he received a demo of the Soul Surfers, an acoustic soul duo Fante formed several years ago. He contacted the young singer, flew him to New York, and introduced him to Jesse Harris, the musician and songwriter first recognized for his Grammy-winning work on Norah Jones's multimillion-selling 2002 debut, "Come Away With Me." Harris and Deutsch are longtime friends.
"We instantly got along with each other -- he laughed at my jokes," Fante quips. "I find the guy extremely talented, and once we were introduced, we got along with each other in a working environment."
With Deutsch, Harris, and keyboardist Guyora Kats, Fante wrote, recorded, and completed the album in six months before he even had a record deal.
"We weren't trying to make a throwback record," Deutsch says. "That's just what Ricky's voice wants to do. We also wanted to take a step back from all the traffic in the neo-soul world, and we wanted to make a record that was a little more emotional and innocent."
And authentic. In this album's liner notes, the great Isaac Hayes, who first made his name playing keyboards for Redding and who co-wrote such songs as "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin," calls Fante "the shot of adrenaline the music industry needs today." Deepening his old-soul credentials, Fante also appeared earlier this year as Pickett singing the classic "Land of a Thousand Dances" on an episode of NBC's set-in-the-1960s drama "American Dreams."
Born and raised in a middle-class Washington, D.C., family, Fante was always immersed in music. His grandmother sang in the church choir, so singing was "just natural," he says.
"I listened to a lot of music growing up, and I just absorbed what I heard like a sponge. My parents played all types of music," Fante recalls. "There was always gospel on Sunday. My mom likes everything from Barry Manilow to Parliament, and all the things in between. And my father listens to a lot of jazz and soul."
Still, the big-bang moment of Fante's young life was hearing Stevie Wonder. In the early 1980s, his mother and aunt took the 5-year-old to a rally in support of making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday. Wonder sang, among other songs, his King-inspired anthem "Happy Birthday," and from that moment, he had Fante in his thrall.
"I'd never heard anyone like that," Fante says. "He moved me to tears, and after that I just wanted to hear everything Stevie Wonder did. He's the artist I admire the most." (Fante takes a moment to clear up early reports that had him citing Elvis Presley as a major musical influence: "I liked Elvis's style. I liked his persona of coolness, but that's basically it when it comes to Elvis.")
Later, Fante got into go-go music, the bass-heavy, beat-crazy music best recognized outside its D.C. birthplace through the 1987 hit "Da' Butt" by E.U., and he started his first group, Junior Division. Any musical ambitions were put on the sidelines when Fante enlisted in the US Marine Corps after high school. When he completed his four-year hitch, he moved to Los Angeles and began performing in local clubs while attending college and working various jobs.
Those years are thankfully over, and Fante credits his father for teaching him the discipline to stick with his dreams, even during the lean years. Now he's making music full time and is already plotting his next album, which, he says, will feature a go-go beat -- "I want to do something we haven't heard before, while still keeping it soulful."
While others sprout cliches about "keepin' it real," with Fante it always comes back to keeping it soulful.
"There's a lot of young kids out there who don't know what soul music is all about," Fante says. "I want people to hear that R&B can be done in a tasteful manner without lyrics about smacking a girl on her booty, or having one cup filled with Hennessy and another filled with diamonds and pearls."
Renee Graham can be reached at graham@globe.com.
From Billboard:
Springsteen, Dylan, Pixies Salute Zevon
Live recordings by Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, as well as newly recorded cuts by Jackson Browne, the Pixies and Ry Cooder will be featured on an upcoming tribute to the late Warren Zevon. Planned for a fall release by Artemis, the collection is being produced by Jorge Calderone, who worked closely with Zevon on his final album, "The Wind."
The title, release date and track list for the album is still being finalized, according to a label spokesperson.
Springsteen, who was among the guests on "The Wind," has contributed a version of Zevon's "My Ride's Here" recorded in Toronto last year. Dylan, who took to performing several Zevon songs on the road in 2003, has offered his take on "Mutineer" to the collection.
In a move that the notoriously sardonic Zevon would probably have appreciated, comedian Adam Sandler has recorded the artist's best-known song, "Werewolves of London," for the compilation.
Jackson Browne donates version of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," a 1978 top 40 hit for Linda Ronstadt, while the Pixies take on "Ain't That Pretty At All" and Cooder teams with David Lindley for "Monkey Wash/Donkey Rinse."
Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule adds a previously released cover of "Don't Let Us Get Sick," while her Artemis labelmate Steve Earle's "Reconsider Me" and Don Henley's "Searching for a Heart" are both tabbed for inclusion. Among several other tracks that will round out the set will be a cut from actor-turned-recording artist Billy Bob Thornton, who also appeared on "The Wind."
Calderone is planning to add his own touch to the tribute with his rendition of the heartbreaking "Keep Me In Your Heart," one of the songs he co-wrote with Zevon for "The Wind."
Talking to Billboard.com in the wake of a pair of Grammy wins for "The Wind" -- best contemporary folk album and best rock performance by a duo or group for the duet with Springsteen, "Disorder in the House" -- Zevon's son Jordan said there were a few unrecorded songs by late artist and Calderone that he believed would come to light at some point.
"There are songs that he and Jorge collaborated on and we're all gonna get behind Jorge and keep nudging him to record those," he said in February. "I know that Dad gave Jorge his blessing to take those songs and work with them and record them, so hopefully he will."
Jordan Zevon has taken one of those songs, "Studabaker," and recorded it for inclusion on the tribute, and tapped longtime friend/Wallflowers lead singer Jacob Dylan to add backing vocals.
-- Barry A. Jeckell, N.Y.
Springsteen, Dylan, Pixies Salute Zevon
Live recordings by Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, as well as newly recorded cuts by Jackson Browne, the Pixies and Ry Cooder will be featured on an upcoming tribute to the late Warren Zevon. Planned for a fall release by Artemis, the collection is being produced by Jorge Calderone, who worked closely with Zevon on his final album, "The Wind."
The title, release date and track list for the album is still being finalized, according to a label spokesperson.
Springsteen, who was among the guests on "The Wind," has contributed a version of Zevon's "My Ride's Here" recorded in Toronto last year. Dylan, who took to performing several Zevon songs on the road in 2003, has offered his take on "Mutineer" to the collection.
In a move that the notoriously sardonic Zevon would probably have appreciated, comedian Adam Sandler has recorded the artist's best-known song, "Werewolves of London," for the compilation.
Jackson Browne donates version of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," a 1978 top 40 hit for Linda Ronstadt, while the Pixies take on "Ain't That Pretty At All" and Cooder teams with David Lindley for "Monkey Wash/Donkey Rinse."
Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule adds a previously released cover of "Don't Let Us Get Sick," while her Artemis labelmate Steve Earle's "Reconsider Me" and Don Henley's "Searching for a Heart" are both tabbed for inclusion. Among several other tracks that will round out the set will be a cut from actor-turned-recording artist Billy Bob Thornton, who also appeared on "The Wind."
Calderone is planning to add his own touch to the tribute with his rendition of the heartbreaking "Keep Me In Your Heart," one of the songs he co-wrote with Zevon for "The Wind."
Talking to Billboard.com in the wake of a pair of Grammy wins for "The Wind" -- best contemporary folk album and best rock performance by a duo or group for the duet with Springsteen, "Disorder in the House" -- Zevon's son Jordan said there were a few unrecorded songs by late artist and Calderone that he believed would come to light at some point.
"There are songs that he and Jorge collaborated on and we're all gonna get behind Jorge and keep nudging him to record those," he said in February. "I know that Dad gave Jorge his blessing to take those songs and work with them and record them, so hopefully he will."
Jordan Zevon has taken one of those songs, "Studabaker," and recorded it for inclusion on the tribute, and tapped longtime friend/Wallflowers lead singer Jacob Dylan to add backing vocals.
-- Barry A. Jeckell, N.Y.
BERGER UPDATE:
Excellent Glenn Reynolds post on Instapundit:
DRUDGE is flashing a New York Sun item on Sandy Berger. The bottom line:
“In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.
In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”
On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”
In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden.This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”
In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times — Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.
It really doesn’t matter now what was in the documents from the National Archives that Mr. Berger says he inadvertently misplaced. The evidence in the commission’s report yesterday is more than enough to embarrass him thoroughly.
(Emphasis added.) Ouch. The Sun is right to stress that this doesn't make Berger responsible for the 9/11 attacks, of course. But it does suggest that he was the wrong man to hold the job he held under Clinton, and that he was a poor choice as senior foreign policy adviser for the Kerry campaign. As Martin Peretz said, "He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it."
I hope John Kerry doesn't share those instincts, which proved tragically wrong in this case.
Excellent Glenn Reynolds post on Instapundit:
DRUDGE is flashing a New York Sun item on Sandy Berger. The bottom line:
“In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.
In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”
On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”
In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden.This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”
In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times — Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.
It really doesn’t matter now what was in the documents from the National Archives that Mr. Berger says he inadvertently misplaced. The evidence in the commission’s report yesterday is more than enough to embarrass him thoroughly.
(Emphasis added.) Ouch. The Sun is right to stress that this doesn't make Berger responsible for the 9/11 attacks, of course. But it does suggest that he was the wrong man to hold the job he held under Clinton, and that he was a poor choice as senior foreign policy adviser for the Kerry campaign. As Martin Peretz said, "He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it."
I hope John Kerry doesn't share those instincts, which proved tragically wrong in this case.
The 9/11 Commission Report
Key passage below:
"In this sense, 9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests “over there” should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America “over here.” In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet. But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism —especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.
As we mentioned in chapter 2, Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamist terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. It is further fed by grievances stressed by Bin Ladin and widely felt throughout the Muslim world—against the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, policies perceived as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and support of Israel. Bin Ladin and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the “head of the snake,” and it must be converted or destroyed.
It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground—not even respect for life—on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated."
Key passage below:
"In this sense, 9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests “over there” should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America “over here.” In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet. But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism —especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.
As we mentioned in chapter 2, Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamist terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. It is further fed by grievances stressed by Bin Ladin and widely felt throughout the Muslim world—against the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, policies perceived as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and support of Israel. Bin Ladin and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the “head of the snake,” and it must be converted or destroyed.
It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground—not even respect for life—on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated."
Thursday, July 22, 2004
From The Australian:
Arroyo does a Munich
by Joshua Muravchik
THE Government of the Philippines has yielded to the blackmail of Islamist terrorists. In exchange for the life of one hostage, it has agreed to hasten the withdrawal of the small contingent of peacekeepers it had sent to Iraq.
No doubt Philippines President Gloria Arroyo believes that not only has she literally saved the head of her countryman, Angelo de la Cruz, but that she also saved her nation from a passel of further woes in the Middle Eastern briar patch. "With over 1million OFWs [overseas Filipino workers] in the Middle East," she explained, "my Government has a deep national interest in their wellbeing."
This calculation brings to mind Winston Churchill's comment on the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938. British Prime minister Neville Chamberlain's government, he said, had faced a choice between war and shame: "They chose shame; they'll get war too." By his willingness to purchase peace at any price, Chamberlain had only made more certain the very war he wished to forestall and on terms more disadvantageous to his country.
The Philippines may in time learn that it has done much the same, especially if other nations follow the ignoble example that it and its former imperial master, Spain, have set in Iraq.
To be sure, the US itself bears some of the blame for the shaky resolve of some of its coalition partners. The manifest eagerness of the Bush administration to diminish the US "footprint" in Iraq as rapidly as possible (and the implicit promise of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to do the same still faster) is scarcely likely to stiffen the spines of Washington's smaller partners.
But whatever America's failings of leadership, they do not justify the cowardly opportunism of Arroyo's decision, for it is sure to backfire. The million Filipinos employed in the Middle East are anything but safer now that their Government has shown the terrorists how easily it is cowed. Philippines soldiers may be gone from Iraq, but are there no other demands that Islamists or other extremists may want to exact from the Philippines?
Commercial or diplomatic concessions? Votes in the UN? The release of radical Islamists held in Philippines jails? Plain old cash extortion? Might terrorists not even seize Philippines nationals in the effort to pressure other governments, judging it likely that the Philippines Government will lobby for concessions on behalf its nationals?
The proof that, like Hitler, Islamist terrorists are emboldened by appeasement can be found in the very genesis of today's war with terrorism. Osama bin Laden and his gang believed that they had defeated the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan and that they could do much the same to the US. They took encouragement from Washington's long record of backing down from confrontation with terrorists. The US had walked away from the murderous attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and of the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, and numerous other terrorist outrages. The payoff for America's softness was delivered to the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Perhaps the leaders of some smaller countries might reason that it is the US that is the real target of the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere and that they themselves will be spared if they keep their distance from "the great Satan". But for the Philippines such logic is madness, for it has been hemorrhaging for decades from its own indigenous Islamist rebellion in Mindinao and other southern islands. These Muslim separatists have received funding from bin Laden and training from al-Qa'ida. Nothing is more certain to inspirit the Philippines Islamist fighters than Arroyo's proof that the Government in Manila yields easily to threats and violence. "Every life is important," she declared, justifying her Iraq decision. But just as surely as she has rescued de la Cruz, so has she sealed the deaths of untold other Filipinos whose names we do not yet know.
Even if there were no Islamic insurgency in the Philippines, Arroyo's craven action would still be unforgivably short-sighted.
Islamist terrorists have inflicted their grisly work on dozens of countries on six continents. The only hope for defeating this scourge lies in the determined and united efforts of the civilised world. This need not mean that the other nations must fall in obediently behind America's lead. Washington's judgment is not infallible, and its allies are entitled to their own voice. But for individual nations to try to save their own skins by deflecting the terrorists elsewhere is not only contemptible. It will prove self-defeating.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
© The Australian
Arroyo does a Munich
by Joshua Muravchik
THE Government of the Philippines has yielded to the blackmail of Islamist terrorists. In exchange for the life of one hostage, it has agreed to hasten the withdrawal of the small contingent of peacekeepers it had sent to Iraq.
No doubt Philippines President Gloria Arroyo believes that not only has she literally saved the head of her countryman, Angelo de la Cruz, but that she also saved her nation from a passel of further woes in the Middle Eastern briar patch. "With over 1million OFWs [overseas Filipino workers] in the Middle East," she explained, "my Government has a deep national interest in their wellbeing."
This calculation brings to mind Winston Churchill's comment on the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938. British Prime minister Neville Chamberlain's government, he said, had faced a choice between war and shame: "They chose shame; they'll get war too." By his willingness to purchase peace at any price, Chamberlain had only made more certain the very war he wished to forestall and on terms more disadvantageous to his country.
The Philippines may in time learn that it has done much the same, especially if other nations follow the ignoble example that it and its former imperial master, Spain, have set in Iraq.
To be sure, the US itself bears some of the blame for the shaky resolve of some of its coalition partners. The manifest eagerness of the Bush administration to diminish the US "footprint" in Iraq as rapidly as possible (and the implicit promise of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to do the same still faster) is scarcely likely to stiffen the spines of Washington's smaller partners.
But whatever America's failings of leadership, they do not justify the cowardly opportunism of Arroyo's decision, for it is sure to backfire. The million Filipinos employed in the Middle East are anything but safer now that their Government has shown the terrorists how easily it is cowed. Philippines soldiers may be gone from Iraq, but are there no other demands that Islamists or other extremists may want to exact from the Philippines?
Commercial or diplomatic concessions? Votes in the UN? The release of radical Islamists held in Philippines jails? Plain old cash extortion? Might terrorists not even seize Philippines nationals in the effort to pressure other governments, judging it likely that the Philippines Government will lobby for concessions on behalf its nationals?
The proof that, like Hitler, Islamist terrorists are emboldened by appeasement can be found in the very genesis of today's war with terrorism. Osama bin Laden and his gang believed that they had defeated the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan and that they could do much the same to the US. They took encouragement from Washington's long record of backing down from confrontation with terrorists. The US had walked away from the murderous attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and of the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, and numerous other terrorist outrages. The payoff for America's softness was delivered to the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Perhaps the leaders of some smaller countries might reason that it is the US that is the real target of the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere and that they themselves will be spared if they keep their distance from "the great Satan". But for the Philippines such logic is madness, for it has been hemorrhaging for decades from its own indigenous Islamist rebellion in Mindinao and other southern islands. These Muslim separatists have received funding from bin Laden and training from al-Qa'ida. Nothing is more certain to inspirit the Philippines Islamist fighters than Arroyo's proof that the Government in Manila yields easily to threats and violence. "Every life is important," she declared, justifying her Iraq decision. But just as surely as she has rescued de la Cruz, so has she sealed the deaths of untold other Filipinos whose names we do not yet know.
Even if there were no Islamic insurgency in the Philippines, Arroyo's craven action would still be unforgivably short-sighted.
Islamist terrorists have inflicted their grisly work on dozens of countries on six continents. The only hope for defeating this scourge lies in the determined and united efforts of the civilised world. This need not mean that the other nations must fall in obediently behind America's lead. Washington's judgment is not infallible, and its allies are entitled to their own voice. But for individual nations to try to save their own skins by deflecting the terrorists elsewhere is not only contemptible. It will prove self-defeating.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
© The Australian
From The New Republic Online:
Turning Tale
by Martin Peretz
The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done. The flying apart began with two stories in the Financial Times (London), one on June 28, the other on July 4. Relying on information ultimately sourced to three European intelligence services--none of them British and one of them that had monitored clandestine uranium smuggling to Iraq over three years--Mark Huband reported that the network also serviced or was to service Libya, Iran, China, and North Korea. A tell-tale element of the story is that the mines in Niger from which several thousand tons of uranium had been extracted and sold were owned by French companies. Apparently, after a time, they had abandoned the mines as economically unviable. But, as a counter-proliferation expert told Huband, this does not mean that extraction stopped. In any case, Lord Butler's altogether independent panel in the United Kingdom concluded that Tony Blair's claim about Hussein being in the market for uranium was "well-founded." These are the same claims made by George W. Moreover, the U.S. Senate report undercuts Wilson's very believability. I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a "real spook" had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.
I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it. No matter. Still, here's his story about the filched classified materials dealing with the foiled Al Qaeda millennium terrorist bombing plot from the National Archives: He inadvertently took home documents and notes about documents that he was not permitted to take from the archives; secondly, he inadvertently didn't notice the papers in his possession when he got home and actually looked at them; and, thirdly, he inadvertently discarded some of these same files so that they are now missing. Gone, in fact. One of his lawyers attributes this behavior to "sloppiness," which may better explain his career as Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser and certainly describes his presentation of self in everyday life. But it is not an explanation of his conduct in the archives or, for that matter, at home. Personnel at the archives actually noticed him stuffing his pockets with papers as he left, which is how the FBI found out about this bizarre tale in the first place. Inadvertence, then, doesn't do it either. Maybe Sandy wanted souvenirs from his career in the White House that was punctuated by so many catastrophes for the United States. Nonetheless, he has had ambitions tied to John Kerry's, ambitions that clash with those of Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden, who decisively do not have McGovernite politics. But Berger did run the Kerry foreign policy team at the writing of the Democratic Party platform a few weeks ago (when the only opposition, easily pacified, came from a handful of Dennis Kucinich loyalists) and has been deeply involved in crafting how the candidate presents himself on these issues. So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really. A more important question, of course, is: What was contained in the papers that Berger snatched? The answer to that question might answer another. Maybe Clinton's top national security aide didn't want others to see what they documented.
Turning Tale
by Martin Peretz
The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done. The flying apart began with two stories in the Financial Times (London), one on June 28, the other on July 4. Relying on information ultimately sourced to three European intelligence services--none of them British and one of them that had monitored clandestine uranium smuggling to Iraq over three years--Mark Huband reported that the network also serviced or was to service Libya, Iran, China, and North Korea. A tell-tale element of the story is that the mines in Niger from which several thousand tons of uranium had been extracted and sold were owned by French companies. Apparently, after a time, they had abandoned the mines as economically unviable. But, as a counter-proliferation expert told Huband, this does not mean that extraction stopped. In any case, Lord Butler's altogether independent panel in the United Kingdom concluded that Tony Blair's claim about Hussein being in the market for uranium was "well-founded." These are the same claims made by George W. Moreover, the U.S. Senate report undercuts Wilson's very believability. I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a "real spook" had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.
I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it. No matter. Still, here's his story about the filched classified materials dealing with the foiled Al Qaeda millennium terrorist bombing plot from the National Archives: He inadvertently took home documents and notes about documents that he was not permitted to take from the archives; secondly, he inadvertently didn't notice the papers in his possession when he got home and actually looked at them; and, thirdly, he inadvertently discarded some of these same files so that they are now missing. Gone, in fact. One of his lawyers attributes this behavior to "sloppiness," which may better explain his career as Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser and certainly describes his presentation of self in everyday life. But it is not an explanation of his conduct in the archives or, for that matter, at home. Personnel at the archives actually noticed him stuffing his pockets with papers as he left, which is how the FBI found out about this bizarre tale in the first place. Inadvertence, then, doesn't do it either. Maybe Sandy wanted souvenirs from his career in the White House that was punctuated by so many catastrophes for the United States. Nonetheless, he has had ambitions tied to John Kerry's, ambitions that clash with those of Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden, who decisively do not have McGovernite politics. But Berger did run the Kerry foreign policy team at the writing of the Democratic Party platform a few weeks ago (when the only opposition, easily pacified, came from a handful of Dennis Kucinich loyalists) and has been deeply involved in crafting how the candidate presents himself on these issues. So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really. A more important question, of course, is: What was contained in the papers that Berger snatched? The answer to that question might answer another. Maybe Clinton's top national security aide didn't want others to see what they documented.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Ah, misquoted in another article, keeping my 20+ year string alive...
Lucky town: Carrboro snags Boss magazine
BY ERIC FERRERI, The Herald-Sun
CARRBORO -- Sure, Bruce Springsteen has a lot of big, popular, blow-the-roof-off-the-arena rockers. But there's one line in "Cadillac Ranch" that seems to get a particular rise out of the natives when the Boss performs here in North Carolina.
Each time Springsteen rasps out the words "James Dean in that Mercury '49. Junior Johnson runnin' thru the woods of Caroline" in this state, the local reference gets a huge cheer.
Chris Phillips, editor and publisher of a popular Springsteen fan magazine and Web site, is about to experience his own Cadillac Ranch moment. He's movin' to the woods of Caroline this month, and he's bringing his company with him.
Backstreets, the publication that has covered Springsteen since 1980, will soon relocate to Carrboro from Washington, D.C.
Phillips has rented office space in Carr Mill Mall.
Though not a retail operation, Backstreets will surely add something to an already vibrant local music scene. The quarterly magazine has been in publication for 23 years; the Web site is popular as well. On it, Phillips and his small staff track and review concerts, give news updates about Springsteen and his E Street Band, sell merchandise and host a lively message board where fans can chat and exchange tickets.
The decision to move south was strictly personal, Phillips said. He and his wife, Laura, are both Duke graduates, and have always considered relocating to the Triangle area. Backstreets is essentially a portable operation; it was born in Seattle in 1980, and several years after he took over as publisher, Phillips moved to Washington.
Now, he's heading south, closer to his native home in southern Georgia.
"I've seen quite a few Springsteen shows [in North Carolina] over the years, and we always thought it'd be a good place to settle down," he said. "We're essentially just an office."
Phillips does much of the company's work and his wife pitches in a bit. He has two full-time staff members, one of whom is expected to make the move south.
Phillips, 33, already has a firm grasp of this area's music scene. His Carr Mill Mall office, he points out, is just a quick walk away from Cat's Cradle, the local rock club.
"Chapel Hill was on top of my list for all sorts of reasons," he said. "The music scene was one of them."
For local Springsteen fans, Backstreets' relocation to the area won't actually carry too much weight. The magazine is not affiliated with the musician. Though a Springsteen devotee, Phillips doesn't have the Boss on autodial, and doesn't expect to have him over to Backstreets headquarters for cocktails anytime soon.
That's OK with Philip Melton, a marketing coordinator in Raleigh who has subscribed to Backstreets for so long that he owns "every issue but the first one."
For Springsteen fans in North Carolina, the magazine's relocation will still be a bit of a kick, Melton said.
"There are loads of Springsteen fanatics around town. There's still a group of people in the area who I run into at each Bruce concert," said Melton, who has attended 17 Springsteen shows. "Everybody I know who I'd say is a serious Springsteen fan either subscribes to or reads the magazine."
Links related to this article:
backstreets.com: www.backstreets.com/
Lucky town: Carrboro snags Boss magazine
BY ERIC FERRERI, The Herald-Sun
CARRBORO -- Sure, Bruce Springsteen has a lot of big, popular, blow-the-roof-off-the-arena rockers. But there's one line in "Cadillac Ranch" that seems to get a particular rise out of the natives when the Boss performs here in North Carolina.
Each time Springsteen rasps out the words "James Dean in that Mercury '49. Junior Johnson runnin' thru the woods of Caroline" in this state, the local reference gets a huge cheer.
Chris Phillips, editor and publisher of a popular Springsteen fan magazine and Web site, is about to experience his own Cadillac Ranch moment. He's movin' to the woods of Caroline this month, and he's bringing his company with him.
Backstreets, the publication that has covered Springsteen since 1980, will soon relocate to Carrboro from Washington, D.C.
Phillips has rented office space in Carr Mill Mall.
Though not a retail operation, Backstreets will surely add something to an already vibrant local music scene. The quarterly magazine has been in publication for 23 years; the Web site is popular as well. On it, Phillips and his small staff track and review concerts, give news updates about Springsteen and his E Street Band, sell merchandise and host a lively message board where fans can chat and exchange tickets.
The decision to move south was strictly personal, Phillips said. He and his wife, Laura, are both Duke graduates, and have always considered relocating to the Triangle area. Backstreets is essentially a portable operation; it was born in Seattle in 1980, and several years after he took over as publisher, Phillips moved to Washington.
Now, he's heading south, closer to his native home in southern Georgia.
"I've seen quite a few Springsteen shows [in North Carolina] over the years, and we always thought it'd be a good place to settle down," he said. "We're essentially just an office."
Phillips does much of the company's work and his wife pitches in a bit. He has two full-time staff members, one of whom is expected to make the move south.
Phillips, 33, already has a firm grasp of this area's music scene. His Carr Mill Mall office, he points out, is just a quick walk away from Cat's Cradle, the local rock club.
"Chapel Hill was on top of my list for all sorts of reasons," he said. "The music scene was one of them."
For local Springsteen fans, Backstreets' relocation to the area won't actually carry too much weight. The magazine is not affiliated with the musician. Though a Springsteen devotee, Phillips doesn't have the Boss on autodial, and doesn't expect to have him over to Backstreets headquarters for cocktails anytime soon.
That's OK with Philip Melton, a marketing coordinator in Raleigh who has subscribed to Backstreets for so long that he owns "every issue but the first one."
For Springsteen fans in North Carolina, the magazine's relocation will still be a bit of a kick, Melton said.
"There are loads of Springsteen fanatics around town. There's still a group of people in the area who I run into at each Bruce concert," said Melton, who has attended 17 Springsteen shows. "Everybody I know who I'd say is a serious Springsteen fan either subscribes to or reads the magazine."
Links related to this article:
backstreets.com: www.backstreets.com/
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
From The Jerusalem Post, earlier this month:
Fantasy and "Fahrenheit 9/11
by Mark Steyn
If I were the late Osama bin Laden, I'd come away from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 feeling a bit like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small.
Bin Laden and his colleagues in al-Qaida, their various subsidiaries and affiliates, the Wahhabi bankrollers in Saudi Arabia, and thousands of mullahs throughout the Muslim world believe they're engaged in a great crusade (whoops) against the Great Satan and the rest of the infidel world that will go on until they achieve final victory.
Michael Moore and his own fanatical worshipers, on the other hand, think it's all to do with Bush. Bush, Bush, Bush! Who's in the pay of the Saudis? Bush! Who's the top business partner of the Taliban? Bush! Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Bush – because he was paid to do so by a subsidiary of Halliburton run by a man who was at school with someone who has some stock in a company building a pipeline with someone who used to go bowling with the half-nephew-in-law of King Fahd.
Whatever the question, the answer is Bush. The message of Moore's film is: Get rid of Bush this November and all the bad stuff will go away. That's why its starting point is the 2000 election and the Florida recount. On the face of it, dimpled chads don't seem to have much to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. But, for Moore, this is where it all began, and this is where it will end: Topple Bush, and the world will once again be full of happy smiley people as it is in the slow-motion scenes of laughing children gaily flying their kites in idyllic Saddamite Iraq.
If I were the late Osama, I'd be insulted by Moore's picture. Al-Qaida's jihadi blew up plenty of stuff while Bill Clinton was president. He had the boys in America taking their flying lessons during the 2000 election, when Al Gore was ahead in the polls. The Islamists despise Bush, but they despise Clinton and Gore, and Carter and Kerry, too.
Americans, Moore told The Daily Mirror in London, are "the dumbest people on the planet. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." Yet he's the one who's come up with the hickiest, most parochial thesis imaginable: that the horrors of the age are just some screwy distraction got up by a chad-wangling moron fratboy's creepy neocon viziers.
This is the real difference – between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.
Which is a great pity. I look on 9/11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg. It's all been there under the surface for some time, but we never grasped the size of it. At one level, it's about the mainstreaming of the fringe. I don't mean in the sense that pre-9/11 Michael Moore was regarded as a kook by the Democratic Party establishment and now he's the toast of the town.
I mean that troublesome groups on the far horizons of the superpower can now strike at its heart.
What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Massaoui told his instructors, he didn't need to learn how to land), boxcutters cost a couple of bucks, add in a couple of rental cars and hotel accommodation, and that's it: For somewhere around $150,000, the 19 terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated. That makes it surely the biggest bang for the buck in world history.
MAYBE IT was just a freaky one-off; maybe now that they've done it they'll leave us alone – as the Spaniards have bet. But almost every technological advance works to the terrorists' advantage: an old-fashioned European army – Belgium's, say – is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through now humdrum innovations like e-mail, cell phones, and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. Then add nuclear technology, which has slipped the bunkers of the great powers to seep piecemeal through the murkier chancelleries.
Beyond that, consider the broader sea in which these currents course. Not all Muslims are al-Qaida supporters, but they don't have to be. If just one percent is generally sympathetic, that's enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, the Islamists, unlike Michael Moore, keep an eye on that big picture: Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26% of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%; the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
1970 isn't that long ago. If you're, say, 50, you wear narrower trousers and shorter hair than you used to, but the landscape of your life – your house, your car, your kitchen appliances – doesn't seem significantly different.
But the fact is the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less Western. Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially) – or the equivalents of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and
I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.
Now go back to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 and kid yourself that this will all go away if Bush, Cheney, and Rummy are thrown out this November.
Fantasy and "Fahrenheit 9/11
by Mark Steyn
If I were the late Osama bin Laden, I'd come away from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 feeling a bit like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small.
Bin Laden and his colleagues in al-Qaida, their various subsidiaries and affiliates, the Wahhabi bankrollers in Saudi Arabia, and thousands of mullahs throughout the Muslim world believe they're engaged in a great crusade (whoops) against the Great Satan and the rest of the infidel world that will go on until they achieve final victory.
Michael Moore and his own fanatical worshipers, on the other hand, think it's all to do with Bush. Bush, Bush, Bush! Who's in the pay of the Saudis? Bush! Who's the top business partner of the Taliban? Bush! Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Bush – because he was paid to do so by a subsidiary of Halliburton run by a man who was at school with someone who has some stock in a company building a pipeline with someone who used to go bowling with the half-nephew-in-law of King Fahd.
Whatever the question, the answer is Bush. The message of Moore's film is: Get rid of Bush this November and all the bad stuff will go away. That's why its starting point is the 2000 election and the Florida recount. On the face of it, dimpled chads don't seem to have much to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. But, for Moore, this is where it all began, and this is where it will end: Topple Bush, and the world will once again be full of happy smiley people as it is in the slow-motion scenes of laughing children gaily flying their kites in idyllic Saddamite Iraq.
If I were the late Osama, I'd be insulted by Moore's picture. Al-Qaida's jihadi blew up plenty of stuff while Bill Clinton was president. He had the boys in America taking their flying lessons during the 2000 election, when Al Gore was ahead in the polls. The Islamists despise Bush, but they despise Clinton and Gore, and Carter and Kerry, too.
Americans, Moore told The Daily Mirror in London, are "the dumbest people on the planet. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." Yet he's the one who's come up with the hickiest, most parochial thesis imaginable: that the horrors of the age are just some screwy distraction got up by a chad-wangling moron fratboy's creepy neocon viziers.
This is the real difference – between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.
Which is a great pity. I look on 9/11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg. It's all been there under the surface for some time, but we never grasped the size of it. At one level, it's about the mainstreaming of the fringe. I don't mean in the sense that pre-9/11 Michael Moore was regarded as a kook by the Democratic Party establishment and now he's the toast of the town.
I mean that troublesome groups on the far horizons of the superpower can now strike at its heart.
What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Massaoui told his instructors, he didn't need to learn how to land), boxcutters cost a couple of bucks, add in a couple of rental cars and hotel accommodation, and that's it: For somewhere around $150,000, the 19 terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated. That makes it surely the biggest bang for the buck in world history.
MAYBE IT was just a freaky one-off; maybe now that they've done it they'll leave us alone – as the Spaniards have bet. But almost every technological advance works to the terrorists' advantage: an old-fashioned European army – Belgium's, say – is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through now humdrum innovations like e-mail, cell phones, and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. Then add nuclear technology, which has slipped the bunkers of the great powers to seep piecemeal through the murkier chancelleries.
Beyond that, consider the broader sea in which these currents course. Not all Muslims are al-Qaida supporters, but they don't have to be. If just one percent is generally sympathetic, that's enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, the Islamists, unlike Michael Moore, keep an eye on that big picture: Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26% of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%; the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
1970 isn't that long ago. If you're, say, 50, you wear narrower trousers and shorter hair than you used to, but the landscape of your life – your house, your car, your kitchen appliances – doesn't seem significantly different.
But the fact is the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less Western. Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially) – or the equivalents of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and
I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.
Now go back to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 and kid yourself that this will all go away if Bush, Cheney, and Rummy are thrown out this November.
Monday, July 19, 2004
From TownHall.com
The 'Bush Lied' folks can't be taken seriously
by Michael Barone
Official reports issued the last two weeks have conclusively refuted those who have been arguing that "BUSH LIED" about the dangers from Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. The first report was that of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee has been rent by partisan divisions over the last year, but the report was unanimous.
One prime conclusion of the report is that American intelligence organizations, like those of every other major country, did indeed believe that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ongoing WMD programs. That intelligence seems to have been mistaken.
But given Saddam Hussein's documented development, possession and use of WMDs, and his refusal to account for their disposal, what intelligence evidence could have convinced a reasonable analyst that he no longer had them?
As the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon -- a frequent Bush critic -- puts it, "It would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological agents."
So Bush was justified in relying on the intelligence. And "the committee did not fund any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."
So much for the wild charges that Bush manipulated intelligence and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He simply said what was believed by every informed person -- including leading members of the Clinton administration before 2001 and Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards in their speeches in October 2002 supporting military action in Iraq.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report also refuted completely the charges by former diplomat Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration ignored his conclusion, based on several days in Niger, that Iraq had not sought to buy uranium in that country. Democrats and many in the press claimed that Wilson refuted the 16-word sentence Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, noting that British intelligence reported that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.
But British intelligence stands by that finding, and the committee noted that Wilson confirmed that Iraq had approached Niger, whose main exports are uranium and goats, and intelligence analysts concluded that his report added nothing else to their previous knowledge. And the report flatly denied Wilson's statements that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his mission to Niger -- it quotes Plame's memo taking credit for the appointment.
The report issued last week in Britain by former civil servant Lord Butler reaches similar conclusions. It finds that Prime Minister Tony Blair did not pressure intelligence organizations to change their findings and that there was no "deliberate distortion" of intelligence or "culpable negligence." It supported the conclusion of British intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa.
All this is significant because for the past year most leading Democrats and many in the determinedly anti-Bush media have been harping on the "BUSH LIED" theme. Their aim clearly has been to discredit and defeat Bush. The media continue to fight this battle: contrast the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times front-paged the Wilson charges last year with the way they're downplaying the proof that Wilson lied deep inside the paper this year.
Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George W. Bush has transformed American foreign policy, in response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, more than any president since Harry Truman transformed our foreign policy in response to the threat of aggressive communism.
But there is one big difference. In the late 1940s, Truman got bipartisan support from Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and Thomas Dewey, even at a time when there were bitter differences between the parties on domestic policy, and received generally sympathetic treatment in the press. This time, George W. Bush has encountered determined opposition from most Democrats and the old-line media. They have charged that "BUSH LIED" even when he relied on the same intelligence as they did; they have headlined wild and spurious charges by the likes of Joseph Wilson; they have embraced the wild-eyed propaganda of the likes of Michael Moore.
They have done these things with, at best, reckless disregard of the effect their arguments have had on American strength in the world. Are they entitled to be taken seriously?
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.
The 'Bush Lied' folks can't be taken seriously
by Michael Barone
Official reports issued the last two weeks have conclusively refuted those who have been arguing that "BUSH LIED" about the dangers from Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. The first report was that of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee has been rent by partisan divisions over the last year, but the report was unanimous.
One prime conclusion of the report is that American intelligence organizations, like those of every other major country, did indeed believe that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ongoing WMD programs. That intelligence seems to have been mistaken.
But given Saddam Hussein's documented development, possession and use of WMDs, and his refusal to account for their disposal, what intelligence evidence could have convinced a reasonable analyst that he no longer had them?
As the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon -- a frequent Bush critic -- puts it, "It would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological agents."
So Bush was justified in relying on the intelligence. And "the committee did not fund any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."
So much for the wild charges that Bush manipulated intelligence and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He simply said what was believed by every informed person -- including leading members of the Clinton administration before 2001 and Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards in their speeches in October 2002 supporting military action in Iraq.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report also refuted completely the charges by former diplomat Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration ignored his conclusion, based on several days in Niger, that Iraq had not sought to buy uranium in that country. Democrats and many in the press claimed that Wilson refuted the 16-word sentence Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, noting that British intelligence reported that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.
But British intelligence stands by that finding, and the committee noted that Wilson confirmed that Iraq had approached Niger, whose main exports are uranium and goats, and intelligence analysts concluded that his report added nothing else to their previous knowledge. And the report flatly denied Wilson's statements that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his mission to Niger -- it quotes Plame's memo taking credit for the appointment.
The report issued last week in Britain by former civil servant Lord Butler reaches similar conclusions. It finds that Prime Minister Tony Blair did not pressure intelligence organizations to change their findings and that there was no "deliberate distortion" of intelligence or "culpable negligence." It supported the conclusion of British intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa.
All this is significant because for the past year most leading Democrats and many in the determinedly anti-Bush media have been harping on the "BUSH LIED" theme. Their aim clearly has been to discredit and defeat Bush. The media continue to fight this battle: contrast the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times front-paged the Wilson charges last year with the way they're downplaying the proof that Wilson lied deep inside the paper this year.
Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George W. Bush has transformed American foreign policy, in response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, more than any president since Harry Truman transformed our foreign policy in response to the threat of aggressive communism.
But there is one big difference. In the late 1940s, Truman got bipartisan support from Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and Thomas Dewey, even at a time when there were bitter differences between the parties on domestic policy, and received generally sympathetic treatment in the press. This time, George W. Bush has encountered determined opposition from most Democrats and the old-line media. They have charged that "BUSH LIED" even when he relied on the same intelligence as they did; they have headlined wild and spurious charges by the likes of Joseph Wilson; they have embraced the wild-eyed propaganda of the likes of Michael Moore.
They have done these things with, at best, reckless disregard of the effect their arguments have had on American strength in the world. Are they entitled to be taken seriously?
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.
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