So what was I writing in March 2003?? Damn, I was writing a lot…
In chronological order, with quotes as strike me…
Before we accuse the Maine administrators of ‘protecting child abusing teachers’, let’s prove that the abuse is happening, that it isn’t an aberration, but a pattern. If it is, let’s root it out.
But until we provide some hard evidence, we’re the ones out on a limb here.
It’s insane. We make bets each time we make a decision based on risk. We bet that the bank will be solvent, the car safe, the medicine will work without ill effect. But we’re choosing to make the sucker bets while leaving all the winning bets unmade. No wonder we’re going broke.
It’s mindblowingly frustrating for me, that as I become increasingly convinced that Bush and his Administration are mendacious and lack the real clarity of moral vision and ability to broaden and sell that vision that is required to deal with the current world situation, I become more convinced that the people who oppose his policy are morons. It doesn’t leave me with a lot of places to stand on this.
“And so Bergreen is pounding the pavements of Washington, looking for money and support for a new organization, to be called Democrats for National Security. “The problem,” says Doug Wilson, a former Clinton Pentagon official who counts himself among Bergreen’s supporters, “is to be able to say ‘Democrats for national security’ and not have people think it’s an oxymoron.”
I don’t want people to think – just because I’m a bit skeptical of the level of fervor around the Maine reports – that I don’t believe that teachers can be strongly antiwar and antimilitary and then act inappropriately on their feelings.
1) We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
2) We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipeline, we won’t lie to Congress and the people and go sell the oil to Japan)
3) We’re in this for the duration.
Jewish organizations condemned Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) today for delivering what they said were anti-Semitic remarks at an anti-war forum in Reston, in which he suggested that American Jews are responsible for pushing the country to war with Iraq and that Jewish leaders could prevent war if they wanted…
Folks, we on the left have an obligation not to sit still for this nonsense. Many of the anti-Semites in the Democratic Party get a free ride on the issue because they are black, and the cost of taking on that fight is huge. Here’s a low-hanging fruit, and I’m going to kick and scream on this for a while.
Look, I’m not calling for the guy to resign; the voters in Virginia do and should pick their Representative.
But the guy is clearly a sleaze (on his better days) and deficient in several kinds of judgment.
But better, it serves as a springboard in talking about my disinterest in hearing what the French and Germans have to say about Iraq and the Middle East.
They have had forty years to step up and lead the world toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. They have had ten years to lead the world toward a resolution of the issues around Iraq. And they haven’t done a damn thing.
And now, when the moment to act is at hand, when if they can’t stand with the U.S., they should be coming up with some realistic third way they hide behind a fig leaf of proceduralism and bless a reluctant sham of compliance that was only granted – grudgingly – by Iraq as U.S. tanks and carriers moved into position over the objection of the French and Germans.
Rancho Palos Verdes is one of the wealthy communities just up the hill from where I live. Apparently the possibility that Marines might conduct live-fire training on an abandoned theme park there…as they have done many times in the past…is just too anxiety-provoking for them to deal with.
Good News on a Friday – Moran Steps Down As Asst. Whip
Here’s one where the mainstream press was ahead of the liberal blogosphere; something I’ll dig into and comment upon at some point.
More Good News on a Friday – the Marines are Coming!
I think the Marines will be getting the cooperation they need…
And a part of what I have realized is that as long as states – particularly wealthy states – are willing to explicitly house terrorists and their infrastructure, or implicitly turn a blind eye to their recruitment and funding, we can’t use the kind of ‘police’ tactics that worked against Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction. The Soviet Union and it’s proxies offered limited support to these terrorist gangs, but they didn’t have a national population to recruit from and bases and infrastructure that only a state can provide.
So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do…but that’s weather, and I’m worried about climate.
…
But Bush has failed to sell this war in three arenas.
He has failed to sell it (as well as it should have been) to the U.S. people. The reality of 9/11 has sold this war, and our atavistic desire for revenge is the engine that drives the support that Bush actually has.
He has failed to sell it diplomatically. Not that he could have ever gotten the support of France or Germany; as noted above, even with an AmEx receipt for the 9/11 plane tickets signed by Saddam himself, France would find a reason to defer this war. But he should never have let them get the moral high ground, which they have somehow managed to claim.
He has failed to sell it to our enemies, who do not believe today that we are serious about achieving our stated goals. This is, to me the most serious one, because the perception that we are not deadly serious is a perception that we are weak; and we will have to fight harder, not because we are too strong, but because we will be perceived as too weak.
But most of all, today, I want to send my own best wishes out to the men and women from our military and the U.K.’s and Australia’s, and whoever else is marching, riding, or flying alongside them. Be brave, be honorable, be careful, be successful; come home to us safe and proud.
Thank you all for defending us all.
The void filled with Byronic passion is what Qutb means to fill; we in the West have a set of secular values to fill them, but they are out of favor now.
They may need to come back.
[Belated update: I eat crow for not updating this as no evidence of chemical weapons was found at the plant]
But I think the real reason goes to the underlying process, and the desire of the self-selecting protesters not to join in and possibly win a national dialog, but to meet some needs for moral cleanliness and managing one’s identity by confronting authority.
Is there some greater moral weight that we can give to evil (or good, for that matter) when doing it, rather than fighting it, is a matter of social policy?
People like my friend think not. They see themselves an entrapped in a world of evil, where every action carries with it, not the possibility of hope and the risk of tragedy, but the certainty of failure.
And if we are ever going to be conquered, this is what will do it.
It’s never good to be made an example of, except a) when you deserve it, and b) when you learn something from it.
Hmmm. What would I take back (other than the obvious one that I did?). Not sure. What do you think I would/should walk back from?
You should walk back from supporting the war and painting war opponents as dirty hippies.
LOL – well, I expected 1) but 2) leads me to a “huh?” moment? Where do I call war opponents ‘dirty hippies’? Do you have me confused with Mike at Cold Fury??
A.L.
A.L.,
They’re still morons.
At this stage possibly even genocide enablers.
A.L., its beyond hilarious that people who don’t want to hear your message have to invent reasons to convince themselves that they don’t have to listen.
I’m impressed by the things you were saying then – particularly your early doubts about Bush and his ability to handle the politics of going to war. Like you I still support it. I’m usually strongly in agreement with your position as someone with a US Liberal background, but my favorite insight here is the one on Romanticism which I have recently, by a quite different route, have been seeing as playing a big part in the current split in Western civilization. I’ll check out Isiah Berlin.
unravel the knot, shaking up the entire Middle East, pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall – yeah, we gotta do something, somewhere down there and Iraq is just such goddamn convenient target, nevermind they don’t have much to do with islamism, terrorism and nothing with 9/11, let’s bomb the heck out of them to show these arabs we mean business, who cares how things’ll pan out afterwards all that matters is perception
thanks for reminding us all how shallow the war supporters’ reasoning really was