May 2002 Archives

Al Pacino is a national treasure. From The Godfather through Serpico to Dog Day Afternoon, Sea of Love, Glengarry Glen Ross and beyond, Pacino can play small (Donnie Brasco) just as well as he can play big. And the biggest of all was big, bad Tony Montana in Scarface. So I read, with not a little interest, the rare interview with Pacino in the current issue of Newsweek. But what stopped me cold were the comments of hip-hop legend Snoop Dog:

“I think any brother watching [Scarface] can identify with what the main man is going through. And when you throw in Pacino—who hip-hop got mad love for since ‘The Godfather’—I mean, you’ve got to love it. Pacino keeps it hard-core and real gangsta in all his films. I go see them all just for that Pacino flava.”

Hoo-ah!

Are we planning a war with Iraq or not? If you parse Pres. Bush's words carefully ("there are no plans on my desk") you're not sure. John Derbyshire of the National Review writes that he is sure: we're not going to war:

I was once in the capital city of a country that was going to war. That was London in 1982, when Margaret Thatcher took her country to war against Argentina. I remember the electric sense of urgency in the air, the fevered preparations: welders working 12-hour shifts to rig helicopter pads on to the decks of requisitioned cruise ships, the lights on all night in the barracks, the seasoned army officer I knew who told me, so grim-faced I believe he really meant it: "I will kill to get a berth on the Task Force." (He didn't get one. Serving officers were clambering over each other, gouging eyes and ripping out hair, to get their names on the Task Force rosters.) ... Do I see these things when I look at Washington DC today? No, I don't. Shall I see them a year from now, when our resolve, our anger, our desire for revenge, have had twelve more months to dribble away like sand between our fingers, and every excuse for inaction (never any shortage of those) has been rehearsed on a thousand TV talk shows by everyone with an interest in making the Bush administration look foolish (definitely no shortage of those)? When 9/11 is a fading memory, washed over with layers of frivolity — the latest celebrity murder, the latest political squabble, the latest judicial outrage, the latest stock market spike? I'm not betting on it.

The reason? Colin Powell. Listen:

Bringing Powell into the cabinet will, I believe, come to be seen as a classic error by George W. Bush ...Powell has a huge constituency, far larger and more committed than the President's own. To be sure, a lot of people don't like him. Blacks don't like him because he's not "authentic" enough ...White liberals don't like him because he escaped from their plantation somehow. White conservatives don't like him because he's squishy on a lot of issues they care about... However, if you add up all [of them] you only have about one-third of the electorate. The other two-thirds l-u-r-v-e Colin Powell. Which means that Powell can't be fired ...Powell has an absolute veto on our foreign policy. This is the Colin Powell who has sold out to the Riyadh-Cairo line on the Middle East, the Colin Powell who lined up in the dove camp with Jim Baker and the striped-pants Neville Chamberlain Appreciation Society from Foggy Bottom when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Colin Powell who wrote in his autobiography that Saddam was left standing at the end of the 1991 Gulf War because the desire to avoid further slaughter overwhelmed the desire to get rid of the dictator.

Essentially, Derbyshire is saying that Bush is revealed for the crafty politician he is; having chosen Powell, he is going to ride him all the way into a second term, moral clarity be damned. I don't agree with much of what Derbyshire says elsewhere; but I agree with him here. I think the day Powell shook hands with Arafat, the war on terror ended. And we surrendered.

Lots of email reaction to my piece on John Derbyshire's bizarre rant about Bush's hands being tied by the PC crowd:

Derbyshire is, I think, completely correct. Fears of the accusation of racism has been preventing us from doing many things we ought to be doing, and should have been doing for the last 10+ years. Democrats' favorite way to demagogue is to play the race card--they do it shamelessly, and at every opportunity, and without apology or any apparent remorse. It's by far their worst--and most destructive--trait as a party. But it's also their most effective weapon, and they'll never stop doing it until it stops working. Republicans cower in fear of this club, constantly. Their worst trait as a party is cowardice in the face of it. This is remarked upon ruefully by most conservatives--you'll find very few who disagree with that assessment.

Derbyshire right? It goes WAY beyond that.... Derbyshire's thesis is dipped in irony. He seems to want Bush and the Terror War to fail so that PC can finally be proven to be a destructive fraud. The irony? PC is alive and well inside the Bush administration: Sec. Powell is afraid of offending the Arab allies and Bush himself was the candidate that counseled against ethnic profiling of Arabs. So (being a Democrat) I must be the pot calling the kettle black. Be that as it may, Bush is the President and whatever happens next, happens on his watch. Can you believe people actually want to be POTUS? [P.S. More irony: Peggy Noonan is convinced that the reason people like Bush is that they perceive that he can take this job or leave it.]

John Derbyshire writes a bizarre and bitter piece in the National Review that seems to exonerate the clueless CYA postion being staked out by the administration. When the administration says another terror attack is inevitable, they are saying they've done everything they can to stop it, within political bounds:

They believe, in other words, that the American people would not stand for seeing (to take one example) Saudi visitors and students being asked to leave. Or, at a minimum, they believe that such actions, if initiated, could be spun by skillful operators to the great political disadvantage of the administration. Bush and Cheney probably believe that their war on terror would be vitiated by major domestic controversies, and they don't want those kinds of distractions. The fact remains: They believe that any strong measures — let me emphasize that I am talking here about things that are perfectly and obviously constitutional, and could easily be solidified into laws by act of Congress — are politically impossible.

Let me be perfectly clear: I am not advocating a border guard made up of the US Army standing shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter of the 48 states (sorry Hawaii and Alaska). Nor am I suggesting that we pay a bounty to anyone who gives information that leads to the arrest and conviction of a terrorist or their helpers. I am not that kind of hot-head. Here are some things we could do but aren't doing. Shy of that, I am offended that Derbyshire lays the blame at the base of the imagined shrine of political correctness:

We far prefer an agonizing death to the possibility we might give offense to the differently religioned. Here in what my colleague Florence King calls "The Republic of Nice" we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of racial sensitivity: Better dead than rude.

I'm offended because the subtext of his commentary is that the administration has its hands tied by a bunch of communist sympathizers ("better dead than Red" indeed). This is so laughable because the very people he excoriates for holding these opinions are inside the administration, if they are anywhere at all! What do you think animates Colin Powell's quest to prop up Yasser Arafat, if it isn't a desire to curry favor, to not offend, certain Arab allies? It's baloney. Forget those allies. Like Kissinger always said: there is no foreign policy, only domestic policy. Bush could do the tough things and still keep his domestic relations, his re-election chances, intact. He has banked an enormous amount of political capital. What is he saving it for, if not this? [P.S. Take a moment and recall Candidate Bush's call for an end to racial profiling of Arabs during campaign 2000. Then re-read Derbyshire's piece.]

The very best movies tell us a small story, and in so doing, reveal a larger truth about us in the process. There's a fancy word for this technique: "metonymy."

Spiderman reaches an emotional peak by its use of metonymy. For those few of you that haven't yet seen it, I recommend it; the following paragraph will not spoil the story. The Green Goblin taunts Spiderman by capturing a cable-suspended tramway full of innocent kids in one hand and Mary Jane (Spidey's true love) in another. He will force Spiderman to choose between the two by dropping them both simultaneously. But before he can do it, the crowd of onlookers perched on the nearby Queensborough Bridge begins to pelt the Goblin with rocks and bottles, telling him to knock it off, already! They're telling the monster to "stop messing with my town!"

It's a brief moment. We don't need it to be spelled out who the Green Goblin is a stand-in for; nor do we need to be reminded that the crowd is clearly made up of native New Yorkers. After all we've been through, we know. Boy, do we know. The scene is inspiring and poignant at the same time. It is carthartic. You will walk out of the theater standing up a little straighter.

The English professor calls this an example of metonymy. The average guy on the street just says, "I get the picture."

I'm reminded of this when I read the CNN report about Magician David Blaine who will be "performing" his latest stunt atop an 80-foot pillar in midtown Manhattan. He will be perched there for 35 hours.

Amid cheers from a few hundred fans and curious passersby, Blaine stepped onto the [80 foot] pillar, which at its peak has a width of about 22 inches. Event organizers said Blaine is not harnessed to the column and the only concession made to safety is two handles on either side of Blaine, which he can clutch onto in the event of intense winds. The stunt will culminate on Wednesday night when Blaine, who models himself on the legendary Harry Houdini, dives from the platform onto corrugated cardboard boxes. When asked why his public spectacles have been sheer endurance tests rather than magical feats, Blaine [who has endured being entombed in a block of ice for 61 hours and being buried below ground for a week] said "...endurance is ...important to me because it represents something greater ... It's a sign of trying to do your best to do something."

Get the picture?

First Richard Cohen denied he was anti-Semitic. Then Robert Wright denied he was anti-Israel. Along the way, I observed that their protestations were beside the point: This crisis in the Middle East is not about the Jews or about Israel. Arafat wants you to think it is. CP Abdullah wants you to think it is. Saddam Hussein definitely wants you to think it is.

The fact is that this is about terrorism and whether the Bush Doctrine means anything anymore.

Now Michael Kinsley weighs in with his take on the war on terror:

The Israeli Prime Minister and his supporters say: President Bush has declared an all-out war on terrorism. The United States has already invaded one country (Afghanistan), toppled and replaced its government, and killed thousands of its citizens, including many civilian noncombatants, in aid of this supposedly transcendent cause. And President Bush not only asserts the right to do the same thing anywhere terrorism may be deemed to lurk, but ostentatiously flips through his appointment book looking for a good day to invade one other country (Iraq) in particular. Sharon says: Suicide bombing surely counts as terrorism. And yet the United States insists that Israel not only restrain its response to each new outrage, but actually negotiate with the sponsors of the terror.

Is it wise (or even possible) to negotiate with terrorists before the war is over? If so, why didn't we negotiate with the Taliban and/or Osama bin Laden? Or Saddam Hussein? Or Hitler? Under what circumstances do we decide to circumvent well-established policy against negotiating with terrorists (a policy that pre-dates the Bush Doctrine by several decades)? Do we now acknowledge that terror is divisible? Are there "good" terrorists and "bad" terrorists? Kinsley continues:

...terrorism is not an evil that transcends all other considerations. This does not mean, as some would have it, that suicide bombing is justified as a legitimate response of an oppressed people. There may be circumstances where that is true, but the circumstance of the Palestinians (who, among other considerations, have effectively won their fight for statehood in principle and are arguing about the details) is not even close.

Hmmm. "There may be circumstances where [suicide bombing is justified]"...but this ain't it. What a relief! Suicide bombing is not justified.....this time. When is it justified? He doesn't exactly answer that question in a specific way, but he does proceed with a clever taxonomic sub-classification of terror:

...an illegitimate tactic used in a legitimate cause, as part of a conflict with legitimate and illegitimate tactics and aspirations on both sides, is different from an illegitimate tactic used for purposes that are utterly crazed and malevolent.

Confused? Me too. But he does offer a helpful summary (the "Kinsley Doctrine?"):

In short, circumstances matter. They may not matter morally, but they matter in terms of what you do about it. This fairly obvious point - which the Bush administration clearly believes, though it cannot say so - undermines the very concept of “terrorism,” which is based on the premise that circumstances do not matter. The axiom is that terrorist tactics are uniquely evil and uniquely threatening to civilization and demand an uncompromising response.

In short, I think he is saying that "even if" you believe our war on terror is justified, surely you must believe that "Sharon's war on Arafat" (as Tom Friedman's puts it) is not. Why not? Because the cause of Palestinian statehood is a legitimate cause. It is justified in using "illegitimate tactics." This, says Kinsley, stands in stark contrast to using terrorism to achieve purposes that are "utterly crazed and malevolent." But....dang it! Mr. Kinsley doesn't ask the logical follow-up question: Would the destruction of Israel qualify as a "crazed and malevolent" purpose? Because there are those of us that believe that is the ultimate purpose of the current leadership of the Palestinian people. So ... if you believe that there are "legitimate terrorists" as opposed to "crazed and malevolent terrorists" then I would say that you are soft on terror.

Patrick Tyler of the NYT writes that the administration is chasing its tail in a debate about how to handle Yasser Arafat. As a result, Middle East policy is dead in the water. Tenet's expected trip to the ME has been delayed. Arafat's inner circle has caught wind of Bush's paralysis. They have sent an emissary to Washington to plead his case:

In an unusual meeting about a week ago, that adviser, Muhammad Rashid, debated the "centrality" of Mr. Arafat's role with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has been one of the critics of Mr. Arafat in the administration.

There can be no debate. Arafat must go. If we are talking to anyone it should be Omar Karsou or his moral equivalent. If Wolfowitz is giving Rashid the time of day then this shows, again, that the adminsration does not consider Israel to be fighting battles in the war on terror. Wolfowitz, and his allies in the administration, consider Israel to be fighting Sharon's war on Arafat. This is what we get from coalition building with suspect partners like the Saudis:

The notion of working with Mr. Arafat was implicit in the agreement reached between Mr. Bush and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah at the end of April at the president's ranch in Texas... One Saudi political adviser said that the prince felt he had brought Mr. Arafat around, but that Mr. Bush had yet to bring Mr. Sharon around. "The crown prince feels that he has delivered his guy, and now the president needs to deliver his guy," the adviser said.

So, that's how it is? This adviser makes the "summit" in Crawford sound (in retrospect) more and more like a scene out of The Sting with POTUS playing the role of the outwitted Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). The Saudi adviser goes on to say:

"Arafat has made his commitment on political and security reforms, and we want to hold his feet to the fire, but unless the process moves forward, we could lose the momentum and that could spell disaster."

Oh, and this just in: "A homicide bomber in (insert name of Israeli town/city) killed (insert number) and injured (insert bigger number). The Palestinian Authority strongly condemned this attack and that said all terrorist actions, both Palestinian and Israeli, should end now." If there is a "cycle of violence" this is it:

1. You negotiate with terrorists
   
2. The negotiations break down
   
3. They kill some of your allies
   
4. You start negotiating again
   
5. You reach another impasse
   
6. They kill more of your allies
   
7. You go back to the bargaining table and start the cycle all over again.

Is this what passes for a foreign policy in the Bush administration?

I don't want to get overly picky here, but something about President Bush's latest pronouncement bothered me:

Urged by Saudi Arabia to temper support for Israel, President Bush said Friday his message to the Arab world is unequivocal: "We will not allow Israel to be crushed."

The implication here is that anything short of total annihilation would be .... well...negotiable. Is Bush going wobbly again? Was this statement put out there to mollify the Arab street? Prince Abdullah, for his part said:

"America is a country that was based on justice and freedom and doing what's right. America should pursue those principles in its foreign policies."

Right around then, the following story crossed the newswires:

[In Ramallah] dozens demonstrated this afternoon for the release of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from the siege the IDF has placed upon his compound in Ramallah. Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and foreign peace activists marched towards Arafat's compound and Israeli troops pushed them back with tear gas.

Bush's reaction? He sent Israel the following message:

"The Israelis understand my position. ... There has been some progress, but it's now time to quit it altogether."

It gets worse. This morning:

Four Israelis, including a 5-year-old girl, were shot dead in their houses by Palestinian gunmen who dressed as soldiers and snuck into a West Bank Israeli settlement Saturday. The shooters sliced through the protective perimeter fence of the Adora settlement just west of Hebron, slinking from residence to residence and firing at people in their bedrooms....In [one] home, a young girl was murdered; her mother and two younger brothers were wounded. Yaakov Shefi, the father of the slain girl, was in the synagogue and rushed home when he heard the shots. Shefi, a policeman, said his wife was sitting with their daughter and two sons, aged 4 and 1, when the gunmen broke into the room and sprayed them with gunfire. "She remembers pushing the children under the bed. She said, 'Be quiet and don't cry, so that they don't come back,"' Shefi said.

As it turns out, Prince Abdullah knows full well that while he lectures President Bush about right and wrong, his regime is funding terrorism:

The Saudi Arabian government paid more than $5,000 each to families of suicide bombers and other Palestinians killed in the terror campaign against Israel, according to documents obtained by Fox News. The documents, discovered by Israeli intelligence officers, contain a list of 102 deceased Palestinians whose families have each been paid 20,000 Saudi riyals — the equivalent of $5,340 — by the Saudi Interior Ministry.

It all adds up to the indelible impression that the Saudis take President Bush and his foreign policy team for wimps. Is this Kruschev and Kennedy, in Vienna, c. 1961 all over again? I hope not. At that meeting, Kruschev sized up Kennedy as being soft. The next year, he proceeded to send missiles to Cuba and bring the world to the brink of World War III. He thought he could push Kennedy around. He was wrong. But perhaps had Vienna gone differently, we might have avoided the entire Cuban Missile Crisis altogether.

Seems that CP Abdullah's visit to President Bush has had the effect of softening Bush's resolve in the war on terror. Abdullah apparently was able to convince Bush that the only way to fight the war on terror was to stop PM Sharon from enlisting on our side. In return, he promised to stop Arafat from continuing to direct terrorist attacks against Israel. Here's what Todd Purdum had to say in his article in the New York Times:

Mr. Bush insists his approach can work, if only the Israelis and the Palestinians follow his lead. "I'm optimistic we're making good progress," he said on Thursday, after meeting with European leaders about the Middle East at the White House. "After all, a week ago, Yasir Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of evidently, German peace protesters and all kinds of people. They're now out. He's now free to show leadership, to lead the world."

Lead the world? Lead it in what? Terrorism?

...in recent days, the Israeli officials have been campaigning to dismiss Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as a plausible negotiating partner, based on documents Israel has seized in raids on the West Bank, and interrogations of some 1,800 Palestinians arrested during the offensive, including senior aides to Mr. Arafat. Israeli intelligence officials have ... what they say is evidence showing that the Palestinian Authority presides over a terrorist network, one that plans, finances and executes its own suicide bombings against civilians, and cooperates with militant Islamic groups. Israel has begun to show a sampling of what it says it has ...: homemade weapons, disguises, stolen Israeli identity cards, posters in honor of the suicide bombers and some of the roughly 500,000 documents seized. Among the documents are ones that appear to record Mr. Arafat's approval of a $600 payment to the leader of an attack on a bat mitzvah party that left six people dead and 50 wounded, and a Palestinian request to build a heavy arms workshop. There is also a document bearing the logo of the Saudi Committee for Assistance to the Al Quds Intifada that, the Israelis say, details more than $500,000 in payments to the families of 102 "martyrs," at least 8 of whom were involved in suicide attacks.

Here's the problem the Israelis have: they think they are fighting a war on terror based on the Bush Doctrine. But the White House has discarded the Bush Doctrine. It now believes that you can negotiate a political settlement with terrorists:

White House officials say that even if the documents are convincing, they do not remove the political necessity to work with Mr. Arafat under the kind of peace plan that Mr. Bush is trying to pursue with the help of friendly Arab countries.

Allow me to defend the Bush Doctrine even if the man for whom it is named no longer believes in it.

Robert Wright wants you to know that he is pro-Israel. Yes, he is. And he is anti-Sharon. He wants you to know that all of this is possible and probably healthy. Never mind that Richard Cohen already covered this ground earlier when he stated that he was anti-Zionist but not an anti-Semite. Both writers made their arguments elegantly and in a sophisticated manner. But in both cases it was totally beside the point. Because, unless you really are an anti-Semite, this whole thing is most definitely not about Israel. It is about the war on terror. And if we are choosing up sides then I think we ought to be deciding who's hard on terror and who's soft on terror. Wright justifies his stance with an appeal to compassion for Israel

:...since Sept. 11, I’ve worried about the fate of Israel more than ever. My highly non-altruistic reason is that it’s clearer than ever how deeply intertwined America’s and Israel’s fates are.

Sounds good so far. Israel's war on terror is, after all, the same war on terror that is mandated by the Bush Doctrine, right?

If the Palestinian problem doesn’t get solved, Israel will see years and years of increasingly horrendous violence, probably culminating in nuclear and/or biological attacks that kill hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

I can't decide if this is condescending crap or fatalistic nonsense. Either way, Wright has caved to the terrorists and we're only a few months into this war!

And Americans, too, will be at much greater risk - because, though Osama bin Laden’s actual grievances had little to do with the Palestinian cause, continued Palestinian-Israeli conflict is probably the biggest recruiting asset for al-Qaida and other such groups.

So it's not enough that the Israelis throw in the towel, but the US should surrender right now as well.

Of course, those “pro-Israel” American conservatives say that they, too, have America’s interests at heart.

How nice of you Mr. Wright to concede that someone else besides you has America's interests at heart.

They think a take-no-prisoners policy toward terrorists around the world (regardless of differences in, say, the legitimacy of the grievance) will make America more secure even as it makes Israel and other nations more secure.

Well, there it is: "regardless of ...the legitimacy of the grievance." Mr. Wright, terror is never justified. The killing of innocent bystanders is never justified. Terror is indivisible. We don't subdivide terrorists into groups of "good terrorists" and "bad terrorists." And so, Mr. Wright, if you think that there is any grievance that justifies terrorism, then you are soft on terror.