Archived news and commentary: February 11 - 17, 2002

2002/03/25 - 2002/03/31
2002/03/18 - 2002/03/24
2002/03/11 - 2002/03/17
2002/03/04 - 2002/03/10
2002/02/25 - 2002/03/03
2002/02/18 - 2002/02/24
2002/02/11 - 2002/02/17
2002/02/04 - 2002/02/10
2002/01/28 - 2002/02/03
2002/01/21 - 2002/01/27
2002/01/14 - 2002/01/20
2002/01/07 - 2002/01/13
2002/01/01 - 2002/01/06

Sunday, February 17, 2002

News and commentary:

"An Intriguing Signal From the Saudi Crown Prince" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2002/02/17)
"After I laid out this idea, the crown prince [Abdullah] looked at me with mock astonishment and said, "Have you broken into my desk?" "No," I said, wondering what he was talking about. "The reason I ask is that this is exactly the idea I had in mind — full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with U.N. resolutions, including in Jerusalem, for full normalization of relations," he said. 'I have drafted a speech along those lines. My thinking was to deliver it before the Arab summit and try to mobilize the entire Arab world behind it. The speech is written, and it is in my desk. But I changed my mind about delivering it when Sharon took the violence, and the oppression, to an unprecedented level.'"

"The Politics of Dead Children - Have sanctions against Iraq murdered millions?" (Matt Welch, Reason, from the March 2002 issue)
"Yet the basic argument against all economic sanctions remains: namely, that they tend to punish civilians more than governments and to provide dictators with a gift-wrapped propaganda tool. Any visitor to Cuba can see within 24 hours the futility of slapping an embargo on a sheltered population that is otherwise inclined to detest its government and embrace its yanqui neighbors. Sanctions give anti-American enclaves, whether in Cairo or Berkeley or Peshawar, one of their few half-convincing arguments about evil U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. It seems awfully hard not to conclude that the embargo on Iraq has been ineffective (especially since 1998) and that it has, at the least, contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990. With Bush set to go to war over Saddam’s noncompliance with the military goals of the sanctions, there has never been a more urgent time to confront the issue with clarity."

Saturday, February 16, 2002

News and commentary:

"Is this how bin Laden escaped?" (Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, from the 2002/02/16 issue)
"It is to be hoped that someone will eventually write an account of the battle of Tora Bora, for it was a feat of arms; an epic of skill and courage, even by the standards of the SAS. ... By the end of the battle, the SAS was certain that it knew where bin Laden was: in a mountain valley, where he could have been trapped. ... It seems unlikely that bin Laden could have been bagged without casualties. The men on the ground did not quail at that prospect; the generals on the radio did. They wanted Delta Force to kill bin Laden; they were not prepared to allow their men to be killed in the process. ... So strategy was sabotaged by schizoid irresolution. There followed hours of fiffing and faffing, while gold coins were helicoptered in, to encourage the Northern Alliance. The USA is the greatest military power in the history of the planet, spending well over $300 billion a year on defence, yet everything was paralysed because it would not allow its fighting men to fight. While the generals agonised about bodybags, bin Laden was escaping. ... It is now time for Donald Rumsfeld to retire a number of his Vietnamised, risk-averse generals, and to replace them with warriors. After all, he will shortly have a war to fight."

"What about the French?" (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2002/02/16)
"Since Sept. 11, despite the genuine sympathy of the ordinary French in the street for the victims, the response of the elite elements has too often been pessimism, obstructionism, unfounded criticism and in general the same old blame-America malaise that they share with the rest of the Continental elite classes. ... The French are not a nation of cowards, as the "surrender-monkey" epithet implies. They are a nation of talented, creative, and brave individuals. Unfortunately, they seem to alternate being led by a crowd of moral dwarves, alleviated by the rule of the occasional flawed giant. It has been three decades since the last such grand, albeit irritating, giant disappeared. What gives France its current bad name has been the pack of moral munchkins in charge ever since."

Friday, February 15, 2002

News and commentary:

"Simplistic Criticism of U.S. Overlooks Complex Realities" (Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, Frankfurter Allgemeine English Edition, 2002/02/15)
"Those who are not indifferent to the transatlantic partnership will have to find the right answers. Strong words originating at least in part from simplistic anti-Americanism lead nowhere. On the other hand, if the Americans allow themselves to become and to be seen as arrogant, it will create opposition not just within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but throughout the West and beyond. The new honeymoon is indeed over."

"Arrogance, ignorance and the real new world order" (Tim Hames, The Times, 2002/02/15)
"If European politicians dislike American unilateralism, therefore, they should ponder the alternative. It would be an international order in which the United States rested, to borrow from Ronald Reagan, as "a shining city on a hill" while anarchy reigned supreme in the valleys. We have had at least one period of history with no dominant power at all - let alone a benign, democratic, one. It is known, quite rightly, as the Dark Ages."

Thursday, February 14, 2002

News and commentary:

"Qaeda Deputy Reported to Plan New Attacks" (Philip Shenon and James Risen, The New York Times, 2002/02/14)
"An elusive 30-year-old Palestinian who travels the world using false passports and multiple aliases has emerged as the new chief of operations for Al Qaeda and is now believed to be organizing remnants of the terrorist network to carry out new attacks against the United States, American officials said. The Palestinian, Abu Zubaydah, has been linked directly to the planning of the Sept. 11 strikes in the United States. He has also been tied to plans for a wave of terror attacks in Europe that were supposed to take place last year, including a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, sometime after Sept. 11. While the European attacks were thwarted by the arrest of several plotters, American investigators said they were convinced that Mr. Zubaydah was now trying to activate Qaeda sleeper cells for new strikes on the United States and its allies."

"Left's Got Columbia in a Stew" (Jaime Sneider, New York Daily News, 2002/02/14)
"The most active student organization opposed to the war is known as People for Peace. It decries military strikes and other measures taken to defend national security. Outlining the People for Peace philosophy to me, one member gave the example of a missile heading toward a densely populated American city. According to him, 'If they [the city's citizens] were a moral and enlightened people, they would wait patiently for death, encouraging a spirit of nonviolence.'"

"Arafat takes blame for arms shipment" (BBC News, 2002/02/14)
"The United States says Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has accepted responsibility for an attempt to smuggle arms on board a ship intercepted by Israel last month. Until now, Mr Arafat had denied any knowledge of the affair, which cast a shadow over US efforts to implement a ceasefire between the two sides. ... Mr Arafat's comments came in a letter to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He [Arafat] wrote me a letter three days ago on the Karine-A, accepting responsibility - not personal responsibility, but as chairman of the Palestinian Authority," Mr Powell told a Congressional committee." (Note that Arafat blamed the Karine A incident on the Israelis just a couple of days ago: "Retracting earlier comments blaming Hizbullah, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat said in remarks published today that Israel was behind an arms shipment captured by Israeli commandos last month. In an interview with Lebanon's An-Nahar newspaper, Arafat said Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, had engineered the arms ship episode as a blow against the Palestinians, Iran and Lebanon's militant Hizbullah group."("Arafat: Israel behind Karine A weapons shipment", The Jerusalem Post/AP, 2002/02/12))

Wednesday, February 13, 2002

News and commentary:

"Which god has failed" (Paul Hollander, The New Criterion, from the February 2002 issue)
A brilliant essay on the fascinating fact that socialism and Marxism still are viable despite more than 80 years of totalitarian tyranny and catastrophical economical results: "Ramsey Clark (born 1927) has converted his rejection of American society into fervent support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq and virtually any movement, or country, opposed to his own. As he notes in Challenge to Genocide: Let Iraq Live, this unique embodiment of evil, the United States, "has created weapons systems and executed plans to devastate a small and defenceless country [i.e., Iraq] … first with a direct assault by fire, then with more deadly ice of enforced isolation, malnutrition, and impoverishment… . There was no war. No combat. There was only a deliberate, systematic genocide of a defenseless population." ... Residual sympathy for leftist ideas and systems lingers because it is part and parcel of the wider currents of hostility to Western ideas and institutions, such as multiculturalism, radical feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and anti-globalism. All these are, in turn, nurtured by the continuing quest for spiritual values which would transcend the benefits that a market economy, consumer society, and political democracy offer. Russell Jacoby, in The End of Utopia, rightly says that multiculturalism and the other trends noted have become substitutes for the utopian longings and beliefs discredited by the experience and fall of Communist systems: 'Bereft of ideas, leftists and liberals … celebrate cultural pluralism to fill the void … the demise of utopia makes way for the party of multiculturalists.'"

"As Good as Doctrine Gets" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/02/13)
"The chief points for the "axis of evil" doctrine may be seen in considering the chief points against it... It is simplistic, or simple-minded, as the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something, sniffed last week. C'est vrai. It is indeed "simplisme" to pick fights with evil regimes just because those regimes want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer and far more profitable path of shrugging one's shoulders in a fetchingly Gallic fashion and sending one's Jews off to the camps, as one's new masters in government request. On the other hand, as the foreign minister might have noticed, the French may today enjoy springtime in Paris without the annoying sounds of jackboots all over the place, and the reason for that was the simple-minded determination of the British, the Russians and the Americans to fight the Nazis and to die by the millions, in order to make the world safe for, among other creatures, future French foreign ministers. "Simplisme" works. Against evil, it is the only thing that does."

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

News and commentary:

"What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America" (Institute for American Values, 2002/02/12)
A letter signed by 60 American intellectuals - Fukuyama and Huntington, for example - on why the war on terrorism is justified:
"At times it becomes necessary for a nation to defend itself through force of arms. Because war is a grave matter, involving the sacrifice and taking of precious human life, conscience demands that those who would wage the war state clearly the moral reasoning behind their actions, in order to make plain to one another, and to the world community, the principles they are defending.
We affirm five fundamental truths that pertain to all people without distinction:
1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
2. The basic subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing.
3. Human beings naturally desire to seek the truth about life's purpose and ultimate ends.
4. Freedom of conscience and religious freedom are inviolable rights of the human person.
5. Killing in the name of God is contrary to faith in God and is the greatest betrayal of the universality of religious faith.
We fight to defend ourselves and to defend these universal principles."

"'If you need terrorist allies you think Iraq'" (Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 2002/02/12)
An interview with Kanan Makiya, "Iraq's most eminent dissident thinker": "[Cruelty and Silence] fiercely attacked Arab intellectuals in the west for colluding, through their silence, in the atrocities being committed in the Arab world. In placing the fight for Palestinian sovereignty before everything else, he argued, they gave succour to Saddam's campaigns of extermination. ... The hysterical anti-Americanism that created Osama bin Laden and motivated the attacks on New York and Washington is a psychosis in the Arab world now, Makiya says - "a sickly, thought-killing resentment". It may be rooted in legitimate grievances: America's backing of anti-Palestinian policies; George Bush Sr's abandonment of the Iraqi opposition after the Gulf war. But now it has ballooned into a resentful victimhood that blinds its followers to failures closer to home, and specifically to the prevalence of savage dictatorships and the absence of democracy among the Arab nations. ... "Forget about Osama bin Laden - he's a walking dead man. It's the next generation, hundreds of them, who will come out of a place like Iraq," he says. "September 11 set a whole new standard as to what could be achieved, and if you're in the terrorism business you're going to start thinking big, and you're going to need allies. And if you need allies in the terrorism business, you're going to think Iraq." Even to ask why America is hated, as so many leftwing commentators have done, is to concede to the terrorists' view that their anti-Americanism is essentially valid and to accept their attempt to blur the line between resentful elements in the Arab world and the whole of Islam."

"Attack Possible in U.S. or Yemen, the F.B.I. Warns" (David Johnston, The New York Times, 2002/02/12)
"Based on information law enforcement officials said was obtained from detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay, the F.B.I. tonight issued a new security threat alert, more specific than any one before, warning of the possibility of an attack as early as Tuesday in the United States or Yemen. ... "Recent information indicates a planned attack may occur in the United States or against U.S. interests on or around Feb. 12, 2002," the alert said. 'One or more operatives may be involved in the attack.'"

Monday, February 11, 2002

News and commentary:

"Review: Afghan Civilian Deaths Lower" (Laura King, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/02/11)
"Although estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands, a review by The Associated Press suggests the toll may be in the mid-hundreds, a figure reached by examining hospital records, visiting bomb sites and interviewing eyewitnesses and officials. ... Afghan journalists for the official Bakhtar news agency, whose reports were used as a basis for Taliban claims, now say their dispatches were freely doctored. Mohammed Ismail - then a Bakhtar reporter, promoted to acting director after the Taliban fled - told AP that in one typical instance, he went to the scene of an airstrike in Kabul's Khair Khana neighborhood on Oct. 20 and saw eight bodies. "But it was changed in our dispatch to 20," he said. When he heard the report later on Taliban-run radio, the figure had gone up to 30, he said." (See also: "Annabel Croft can't take on Accrington Stanley" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/01/19))

"Arab Press Glorifies Bomber as Heroine" (James Bennet, The New York Times, 2002/02/11)
"Ms. Idris, 28, has been hailed in the Arabic-language press as striking a blow not only against Israel but also for woman's equality by blowing herself up on Jaffa Road here two weeks ago, killing an 81-year-old man and wounding many other people. She has been compared to Joan of Arc, the Mona Lisa and the Virgin Mary. "From Mary's womb issued a child who eliminated oppression, while the body of Wafa became shrapnel that eliminated despair and aroused hope," Dr. Adel Sadeq, head of the department of psychiatry at Ein Shams University in Cairo, was quoted as writing by the London- based newspaper Al Quds al Arabi. Dr. Sadeq said that "it is not surprising that the enemy in both cases was the same," apparently a reference to Jews."

"Hostile Allies" (Doug Bandow, National Review, 2002/02/11)
"There are Christians, too, but Pakistan's beleaguered Christian community accounts for barely two percent of the population. Religious persecution has worsened since September 11. ... The oppression of Christians is morally offensive. (One poor Christian complained to me: "We are human beings like Muslims.") Such discrimination also hinders the development of a more secular political culture, which would provide a stronger barrier to Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, the Musharraf government is better than a fundamentalist alternative. But he deserves support only if he helps to contain the murderous impulses of a medieval theology hostile to human life and dignity."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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