Matthew Duss

A Poor Excuse For Statecraft

Michael Ledeen, last Thursday, outraged over the Turkish invasion of Iraq:

I thought we were supposed to be the guarantors of Iraqi sovereign integrity. Yet we mumble into our beer and do nothing when the Turkish army invades Iraq, attacks Kurdish positions and carries out all manner of military operations there. […] The current situation is an invitation to open warfare between groups we should want on our side. It's a poor excuse for statecraft.

Michael Ledeen, in 2002, clamoring for the American invasion of Iraq:

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.

Smarter, please.

Low-Hanging (Organic, Of Course) Fruit

Over at The Corner, one of Jonah Goldberg's emailers responds to Goldberg's latest iteration of his argument that torture is no big deal by suggesting that Jonah "go read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It will tell you all you need to know about torture." Jonah fires back:

I've read the Gulag Archipelago. It didn't tell me everything I needed to know about torture, it told me almost everything I needed to know about the evil of the Soviet Union. And, guess what? The comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union is idiotic and slanderous.

Now, obviously, one doesn't have to believe that the U.S. and the USSR were morally equivalent in order to be deeply troubled now by the U.S.'s operating a global network of secret prisons wherein suspects are held indefinitely without charge and tortured. One just has to be decent. What brings Jonah's sanctimonious response to the level of farce, however, (or, as Frank Zappa used to say, "out of the realm of mere mumbo-jumbo and into the world of mumbo-pocus") is the fact that Goldberg, as you may know, recently published a book in which he compared American liberalism to fascism, spending over 200 pages arguing that liberals are the political heirs of Naziism. So, while he considers it reprehensible, unacceptable, out-of-bounds to compare the Soviets' use of secret prisons and torture to the U.S.'s use of secret prisons and torture, he thinks the contention that Adolf Hitler was a non-smoking vegetarian who believed in unity just like liberals who support national health care, shop at Whole Foods, and also believe in unity is not only permissible, but compelling enough to justify an entire book. The sad thing is, I really doubt Goldberg would admit any inconsistency here.

(cross-posted to TAPPED)

So I Guess She Won't Be Cradling Bush's Foot, Then.

Maybe if Peggy Noonan tried to avoid writing things like:

This, truly, is a good man. And that is a rare thing. Agree with Mr. Bush's stands or disagree, there can be no doubting the depth of his seriousness and the degree to which he attempts to do what he is convinced is right, and to lead his country toward that vision of rightness. We have had many unusual men as president and some seemed like a gift and some didn't. Mr. Bush seems uniquely resolved to be as courageous as the times require and as helpful as they allow. There is a profound authenticity to him, and a fearlessness too. A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift.

She wouldn't look so silly years later when she writes something like:

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues. Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.

On the other hand, someone who writes something like:

I first saw [President Reagan] as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little ...frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

Is clearly already playing for the silly team. And I haven't even mentioned the dolphin thing.

(c/p to TAPPED)

Kristol to the New York Times

Really? Really? If there's a pundit out there whose ideas have been more conclusively discredited than Bill Kristol, I don't know of him. Or is this just a devious attempt by the NY Times to further discredit neoconservatism?

The Innocents Abroad

In his continuing coverage of the NRO fabulist, Andrew Sullivan directs us to the Human Province, a Lebanon-based blogger who further disassembles W. Thomas Smith, Jr.'s fantastical tales of phantom Hezbollah brigades invading Beirut.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere. Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic.

Indeed. But it's only blogging, and we all know that blogging "tends to be less formal."

Interestingly, the HP sorts Smith's work into the same round file as "the ridiculous and sensationalist" reporting of Michael Totten, another conservative journalist who, like Smith, seems to consider the sworn enemies of Hezbollah a reliable source of information about Hezbollah, and who, like Smith, tends to produce work that invariably confirms conservative assumptions about Islamic political movements in general. (I commented on some of Totten's peculiar assertions here.) Given that Sullivan regularly links to Totten's work, I wonder if he bothered to click through?

Defending Journalistic Malpractice With Colonial-Era Racism

I hope you're enjoying the NROBS saga as much as I am. If not, go read about it. Tom Edsall has done some great work here. (Greenwald and Sullivan also have some good follow-up.)

In what I can only hope will come to be remembered as the most regretted post of her career, editor Kathryn Jean Lopez sort-of apologizes for W. Thomas Smith's fabrications with an appeal to the bigotry of National Review's readership. The Arab, you see, is very crafty:

"[W]e “should have provided readers with more context and caveats” – the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn’t always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.” While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him." (emphasis added)

Jonathan Schwarz responds:

"It's not often these days you see this kind of raw, open prejudice in American publications. And certainly you can only get away with saying it about Arabs. You won't be reading about the Asian or African or Jewish or Buddhist "tendency to lie" anytime soon."

...At least not until the U.S. decides to go to war against any of those groups, at which point National Review will be among the first to inform us that lying is simply "part of the culture" of our new enemy.

Now, I think it's one thing (though still an indefensible and atrocious thing) for to call Arabs "shiftless and violent" in in the op-ed pages of a tabloid that no one takes particularly seriously anyway, quite another for the online editor of the flagship publication of American conservatism to traffic in the same sort of unreconstructed bigotry. Or am I unrealistic to imagine that there's any difference? Probably.

Just as disturbing as the fact that Lopez would endorse such a view is the idea that a substantial portion, probably a solid majority, of NR's audience considers it perfectly reasonable.

Guns for Everyone!

And the award for "Most Transparently Ridiculous and Astonishingly Vulgar Attempt to Commandeer the Armenian Genocide Resolution Controversy for Their Own Pet Issue" goes to …National Review's Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne D. Eisen:

"Whatever may be said about the U.S. House of Representatives committee vote concerning the use of the term “genocide” in reference to Turkey’s atrocities against the Armenians during World War I, two facts are indisputable: It was gun confiscation that made the atrocities possible. And it was the possession of firearms that saved many Armenians."

I suppose one of the rhetorical benefits of being a Second Amendment zealot is that there isn't an atrocity in history that you can’t at least somewhat plausibly argue could’ve been averted if only all of the victims had been armed to the teeth. For example, look at post-Saddam Iraq: Everybody was allowed to keep their guns, and it’s one of the safest, freest, and happiest places on earth!