Gerard Baker on Bush

Gerard Baker, the U.S. editor of the Times and a friend of America, has an absolute stunning essay in today's edition that I reprint here in full. I take issue with a point here and there, but, overall, this seems to me the most accurate description of where we find ourselves at this moment.

As follows:

"HOW'M I DOIN'?" was the question the quixotic Ed Koch used to ask New York's voters during Hizzoner's eleven turbulent years as the city's mayor. For a man who governed the globe's most neurotic metropolis in the style of a rolling public psychiatric consultation, it was a fitting question.

But as the world contemplates the nervous breakdown of American policy in the Middle East, it is something President George Bush should surely be asking himself, or at least his fellow Americans. How'm I doin'?

Let's see. You invaded Iraq because you argued you would be able to bring about a peaceful, democratic society in the heart of the Arab world, a step vital to the eradication of modern terrorism. Many of us supported the project because we believed the stakes were so high that you would not stint in committing the resources necessary to achieve it.

But you tried to do it on the cheap. If many of us miscalculated the scale of the threat Iraq posed, there was no excuse for the woeful lack of preparation by your Administration for the task of pacifying the country.

The outcome? A broken nation on the verge of civil war, prey to the avarice of tyrannical regional neighbours, violently immolating itself and nurturing new generations of terrorists.

How'm I doin'?

Well, you supported and perhaps even encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon last month, after repeated provocations by terrorists. The aim - a good one in principle - was to crush Hezbollah, weaken its Syrian and Iranian sponsors and put Lebanon on a path to long-term, terror-free stability. But when the largely aerial campaign predictably failed and equally predictably led to the world's media reaching their one-sided conclusion about Israel's "aggression" , you quickly backtracked. You encouraged Israel to accept a ceasefire that amounts to the country's most serious defeat in its 57-year history.

The result? A strengthened Hezbollah and a new Arab hero, Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah; a reprieve for the beleaguered Assad regime in Damascus and a further fillip to Iranian ambitions; a strategic setback for Israel and the condemnation of Lebanon tragically to replay the turmoil of the 1980s.

How'm I doin'? You rightly identified Iran as the gravest threat to the West's long-term security and you pledged to bend US policy to ensure that it did not gain the regional hegemony that would allow it to blackmail the world into acquiescence of its hateful ideology. Above all, Iran would be stopped from getting the bomb.
The result? The despised regime in Tehran has emerged as the true hegemonic power in the region, leeching on the battered bodies politic of Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, elevating its brand of Shia fundamentalism into position as the dominant force in the Islamic world and continuing on its path towards nuclear status.
If I were a conspiracy theorist I would be starting to conclude that you were some sort of Iranian Candidate, an agent of Tehran, brilliantly executing a covert strategy to enhance the prestige and power of the ayatollahs.

How'm I doin'? It took John Prescott, apparently, to come up with the grammatically flawed but analytically accurate answer this week. But I concur with the Deputy Prime Minister in monosyllabic conclusion only, not in thesis.

The common critique of US foreign policy these past few years has been that it was insufficiently multilateral. That if only the US would work a bit more with the French and the Russians, be a little bit warmer to the Palestinians, sign up to international treaties, say nice things about the United Nations, the world would be a much safer and calmer place.

I always found that a slightly old-fashioned critique. The events of September 11, taken together with the other, steadily escalating acts of terrorism committed against the West in the past 30 years, required a radical new departure for the international system. Preventing the lunatics from blowing us all to the hereafter was going to require that the US, the only country with the power to stop it, break a bit of crockery.

But the US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.

It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases - start by aggressively supporting Israel, then go all peacenik, holding hands with the UN in a touching chorus of Kumbaya.
Now we have the worst of all worlds. Not only is the US despised around the globe, it can't even make its supposed hegemony work.

It's one thing to be seen as the bully in the schoolyard; it's quite another when people realise the bully is actually incapable of getting anybody else to do what he wants. It's unpleasant when people stop respecting you, but it's positively terrifying when they stop fearing you.

What we have now is a situation in which the world's only superpower, with the largest economic and military advantage any country has ever enjoyed on Earth, is pinned down like Gulliver, tormented by an army of fundamentalist Lilliputians.
Some will say that the US's ineffectiveness is a direct result of the loss of its "soft" power. Alienating the rest of the world has weakened its ability to achieve its objectives. Idiocies such as Abu Ghraib and the brief flirtation with torture as a legitimate instrument undoubtedly hurt America's image. But I don't truly see how the failings in the Middle East could have been avoided by Washington's being nicer to foreigners. What's been missing is resolute leadership.

It is hard for me to recall a time when the world was such a scary place. No one should rejoice at America's weakness. The world is scarier still because of it.

Imagine My Surprise, Part II

Turn over a leftist these days and you find a racist and an anti-semite it seems. We get word this week that noted leftist novelist Gunter Grass was a member of the genocidal and criminal organization Waffen-SS. We see the folks over at Daily Kos use blackface caricature and post essays on the USS Liberty incident that read as if they've been written by a poster named TuetonicKnight_224 over at Stormfront.org. A run down of The Nation's recent editorials on the great topics of the day reveal a distressing similarity of position with the Holocaust-denying fascist theocrat who styles himself the "president" of the Islamic Republic.

Now the great Andrew Young, President Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, former mayor of Atlanta, "civil rights leader" and, as it turns out, adviser to Wal-Mart on how to sell the biggest of the big boxes to black neighborhoods has said something rather revealing. Something that caused him to have to resign from that Wal-Mart position that allowed him to continue the struggle for social justice in style. Turns out our hero said the following in a newspaper interview when asked if Wal-Mart drives mom-and-pop stores out of business:

"Well, I think they should; they ran the 'mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood. But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."

So, you see, running these little Jewish-Korean-Arab extortion and rip-off rackets out of black communities and bringing Wal-Mart in is a good thing because it no longer allows these three predatory races to feast on the flesh of innocent black folks.

Not much subtly or nuance there. Nothing but the old classic racist conspiracy thinking: a cabal of [insert target race here] is exploiting and degrading our people and they need to be run out of our areas.

It should be distressing to honest leftists these days to see so many of their magazines, websites and leading personalities saying things that could very well be copied word for word from the utterings of the worst sorts of Islamists and Fascists.

It should at the very least give one pause.

The Cultural Tide Is Turning, Part Two

Civilization will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

-- Winston Churchill, University of Bristol, July 2, 1938.

Below I wrote that I was starting to detect in the air a seachange in public opinion. For many years now, the standard lines about the Islamist threat have been uttered, the same tired refrain about a few tiny bands of extremists who have hijacked the great religion of peace. The first act of our leaders upon our people being killed is to utter soothing words of comfort directed at the mosques. We are all expected to pretend we don't notice the "broad strata of society" the murderers hail from. As President Bush has said, we must respect the "women of cover." No one in the halls of power will dare utter the truth.

But, the Islamic Fascists being who they are and the vast army of Muslim support they have, both here in the West and in the Islamic Civilization itself, being what it is, every day more and more average, ordinary, and thus vitally important people are waking up to the threat.

Despite the lectures of their political betters, despite the daily and shameful propaganda sent their way by the likes of CNN, the BBC and other horrifically biased relics of the old media, the common sense of the Anglosphere's people is making itself felt.

More evidence, today, in the form of a new poll of the British people by YouGov sponsored by The Spectator. The results are simply staggering in their implications.

-- Tony Blair's original plan option of detaining (terrorism) suspects without charge for up to 90 days is backed by three-to-one (69% to 23%)

-- 73% agree that "the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life" while only 8 per cent think that "Islamic terrorism is a regional problem that poses no real threat to the West".

-- When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism, just 12% say that it should be made more conciliatory, against 53% who say it should become more aggressive and 24% who want no change.

-- A majority of 55% to 29% of the public supports the introduction of passenger profiling by the authorities in airports.

-- Half of respondents said that most British Muslims are moderates, but 28% disagreed and almost as many said they didn't know. People are increasingly preparing for a long, bitter and potentially bloody struggle, with 60% of respondents saying they expect the threat from terror groups to worsen over time. Only 6% said they thought the conflict against Islamic terrorists would last five years or less and 18% believe that it will be over within 10 years.

-- Fewer than a quarter of respondents accuse British politicians of deliberately exaggerating the threat and only a small majority think Tony Blair should have returned home to oversee the emergency.

These vast numbers do not, as yet, have a political party speaking for them nor a leader worthy of them. But they are there, and their number grows daily.

The head-loppers are busy sharpening their beheading knives, laughing with the flush of victory, secure in their beliefs, confident of their final victory.

And all the while the quiet middle-class that will be their utter doom grows, unseen, unheard and unheeded.

For now.

It's Dead, Norman.

I was planning to write a long post rebutting Norman Podhoretz' latest piece in Commentary Magazine defending the President and arguing that the Bush Doctrine is alive and well.

But, really, why bother?

The matter is so obvious, so over-the-top and clearly blindingly obvious that I really see no need. In any case, I have written here in detail before how the President has abandoned the case for war he set forth in late 2001/early 2002, how he failed to mobilize the United States for the action that the Bush Doctrine's actual application would have required, how he allowed the siren-song of an "international coalition" to cause him to back down and go to the United Nations, how disastrous it was politically to take up the British view and focus on WMD, how shameful and downright dangerous it was for the United States to declare enemy states hostile and then do nothing to disturb or vex them.......

So, really, why bother?

Instead, let me just present you with two quotes.

First, from the President, making his original case for war, before Congress in January, 2002:

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons. (Applause.)

Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch -- yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch.

We can't stop short. If we stop now -- leaving terror camps intact and terror states unchecked -- our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.

Second, from the Secretary of State, from an interview, in today's USA Today:

Susan, I don't think there is an expectation that this force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah. I think it's a little bit of a misreading of how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of a militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily. You have preliminaries where heavy arms are, but the disarmament of militias is essentially a political agreement and the Lebanese Government has said that it intends to live up to its obligations under Resolution 1559 and something called the Taif Accord, which was signed in 1989 in Saudi Arabia--it shows you how long we've been at this--that they will not have any groups in Lebanon carrying arms that are not a part of the central security forces of Lebanon.

So the political agreement is in place. Now the plan for disarmament is to be worked out. Kofi Annan is to present a plan. This will have to be worked with the Lebanese Government, it'll have to be worked with the Lebanese armed forces, and I'm sure to the degree that support is needed for that, the international forces can help. But even if you look at how we disarmed--how the Afghans disarmed militias in Afghanistan, it was not by the quite substantial coalition forces going up and physically disarming Afghan militias. So I think there's a little bit of a--when people say, "Are they going to disarm Hezbollah," that's not actually how militias disarm. They're disarmed by a plan under political agreement and then support can be given to the Lebanese in doing that.

If it isn't obvious to you now, there is nothing I could say or write that would change your mind. If it is obvious to you, there is nothing I could say or write that would make you feel better about it.

We are in deep, deep trouble.

And President Bush is badly failing his office, his trust and his people.

Imagine My Surprise

Please see update below.

Nobel prize for literature winner and Germany's moral spokesman Gunter Grass had something to say this past June. The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui was on the spot to report the facts:

Gunter Grass, celebrated German novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, sculptor and commentator, is a living legend. When this Nobel laureate speaks, people listen.

His address in Berlin to the annual Congress of International PEN, the worldwide organization of writers, had been much anticipated, especially given his long admonition to intellectuals to speak up on the political and moral issues of the day.

He himself has done so all his life, most famously against the Nazi past and contemporary neo-Nazism and xenophobia. He has not always been right, of course, having opposed post-Cold War German unification.

Grass, at 78 still spry and energetic, quickly gets into his topic, "The hubris of the world's only superpower," and proceeds to offer a sweeping critique.

His words find resonance among the writers gathered here, including another Nobel laureate, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer.

"Armed force is used by this superpower to defeat the terrorism it is itself responsible for," Grass says, citing Osama bin Laden, the by-product of American support for Afghan jihadists in the 1980s. "The war (on Iraq), deliberately started in blatant disdain of the laws of civilized societies, produces still more terror."

"Yet George W. Bush is searching for new enemies and targets.

"Dictatorships, and there are plenty to choose from, are referred to as rogue states and threatened vociferously with military strikes, including the deployment of nuclear weapons. But it only further stabilizes the fundamentalist power systems in those countries.

"Whether the term 'axis of evil' is used to refer to Iran or North Korea or Syria, politics could not be more stupid and hence more dangerous. Yet the entire world is watching and pretending to be powerless."

Grass quotes liberally from the blistering speech given last year by British playwright Harold Pinter in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature: "The United States supported and, in many cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after World War II - Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador and, of course, Chile ...

"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place in those countries ... but you wouldn't know it. The crimes of the U.S. have been systematic, constant, vicious, and remorseless but very few people have actually talked about them.

"You have to hand it to America. It has exercised quite a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's brilliant, even witty, a highly successful act of hypnosis. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?"

Of course, looking back, it's not so much what the great intellectual Grass said in June in front of his admiring audience that is so important, but what the great truth-teller and moral conscience of Germany forgot to add.

In the end, though, the truth about Grass came out. And, lo and behold, while we Americans are international war criminals, running around killing every Third World peasant we can find, while Grass was leading the charge against neo-Nazism and xenophobia, it turns out that in this little thing called "reality"....

...Grass was a fucking Nazi.

Not just a foot soldier, mind you. Not just some poor, young German schmuck who got drafted and believed in his government.

Nope. Grass was a member of the WAFFEN-SS. Something the great moral authority and judge of America just forgot to mention in his speeches denouncing the unique evil of the United States. And accusing it of genocide.

You know, the United States. The country that smashed Grass' Nazi project and ended the horrific genocide committed by the sophisticated, nuanced, superior German people.

From today's Telegraph:

Germany was rocked by the revelations last night that Gunter Grass, its greatest living author and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS.

The Nobel laureate, who has been the country's moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was driven by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his "shameful" past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month.

"It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: "It had to come out finally." He added: "It will stain me forever."

Imagine my surprise.

I'm just shocked that Grass went from being a dumb-ass national socialist who thought the United States was an enemy to be fought to being a fashionable Stalinist socialist who thinks the United States is an enemy to be fought.

Sometimes my well-meaning liberal friends ask me why I think the United States is so hated around the world. They ask me if it means something that so many Europeans hate our guts.

Yes, it does mean something.

UPDATE I:

I want to be clear what I think is Grass' failing in this incident. It is not simply a question of being a member of the Waffen-SS.

There are certain types of Waffen-SS membership that automatically by their nature place the member beyond the pale of civilization. For example, those who volunteered for Waffen-SS Einsatzgruppen units, those who volunteered for the foreign units (33rd SS, Charlemagne; 23rd SS, Nederland, etc.), those who served as concentration camp guard units, etc.

There are also other types of Waffen-SS membership that do NOT automatically by themselves place the member outside the bounds of acceptable human conduct. (Purely my opinion, of course). As has been noted here, many joined out of nationalism, an urge to join the elite units that were "defending" Germany, a desire to fight the Bolsheviks, youthful idealism, etc. These people are blameworthy and guilty of a serious moral failing, but not, by that action alone, beyond the pale.

It is obvious to me that Grass' Waffen-SS membership is of that second, serious-but-less-serious-than-it-could-be type. I understand that he was 17, that he volunteered and that he was assigned to the Waffen-SS unit in question by the authorities.

It is not just that fact that I am objecting to here. Rather, it is the fact that such a person would then, after the war, pose an an artist with the right to judge the actions of foreigners and other countries WITHOUT REVEALING that he himself has had personal exposure to an episode which defies easy moral judgments.

In short, he extended himself the moral credit he refused to even consider worthy of others.

In other words, a typical leftist.

MICHAEL - With regard to your post specifically, I simply do not agree that Grass does not speak for a large number of Germans. He holds a position of influence and respect well above that held by Norman Mailer and his ilk here in the United States.

I realize that there are millions of Germans and other good Europeans with their heads screwed on straight. But, at the same time, it seems obvious to me that these good people are a decided minority and are almost invisible in the intellectual and political discource of that once-great continent.

While there are pockets of resistance and good sense, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of Europeans have fully bought into a political world view which is statist, anti-liberty, childish and, frankly, dangerous.

I wish it were otherwise, and I do see signs of hope, but I have no illusions on that score. Especially when it comes to the eerie staying power of rank anti-Semitism.

Why We're Losing: Ideology

I am currently working on a very long essay on this topic, which is why I've been largely silent on the huge issue of the moment--the U.N. cease-fire agreement regarding Hezbollah and Israel. But I wanted to merely highlight here in advance an example of the kind of respectable, decent and honorable thinking I will be writing about that is handicapping us and getting us killed, both literally and figuratively.

From yesterday's Sunday Times, the lead editorial:

Muslims have to be persuaded that we are on the same side, that there is no witch-hunt against Islam and that the wars involving British troops are about stopping Islamists and the corruption of their religion. This means Muslims being alert to extremists in their ranks and being prepared to identify them to the police. It means Muslims becoming intolerant of radical mullahs and hounding them out of their mosques. Equally the authorities have a responsibility to crack down on extremists in universities and in prisons, to close internet sites and bookshops that spread hatred and violence, and to take all reasonable measures to protect their citizens.

At times this may seem unjust. Muslims who visit Pakistan will have to be more closely scrutinised and it may seem that they are being systematically targeted. But Muslims will have to understand that it is their co-religionists who are bent on bombing trains and planes and that requires extraordinary measures. A mature Muslim response will be to co-operate and help to eradicate extremists in their midst. It requires the vast majority of Muslims to believe that their future is tied to Britain, a country in which their religion can be respected and freely practised. If the radicals succeed, it will foster only hatred and intolerance.

You will not find in one place a better example of the various ideological blinders we have collectively put on ourselves than this splendid, fair-minded, wonderfully written and utterly idiotic piece of commentary.

More to come...