Articles which have caught my interest. Mostly Israel stuff and other nubbins from the ongoing holy war.

 
9/12 Reading List

There's a bountiful harvest of wonderful articles out in the last couple of days:

Victor Davis Hanson on the Wages of September 11.
Hanson on the Europeans:

Indeed, as the months progressed the problems inherent in "the European way" became all too apparent: pretentious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European hobbits after September 11.

Marty Peretz on Iraq and the Palestinians
Peretz points a lot of fingers (rightly) at most of the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams for their mishandling of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He argues strongly in favor of taking out Saddam as the right thing to do. Also, that the road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad.

Daniel Pipes on the American death toll from Radical Islam
Pipes argues that the current war started 23 years ago with the Iranian hostage crisis. He then provides a detailed body count since then.

James Lileks on the year since 9/11
Lileks, one of the premier writer on the blog circuit, provides a heartfelt reflection on the world this last year.

Bernard Lewis on the Muslims and history
A lengthy, but highly readable history of Islam's 300-year grudge against the West. Lewis constantly gets attacked by the Mid East Studies establishment as a conservative pawn. This mainly comes from his refusal to poo poo the very real problems inherent in Arab culture (or to blame these problems entirely on "Orientalism"). Great background material here.
posted at 12:16 PM

 
And to think there was a time in my life that I actually admired Susan Sontag

La Sontag published a wonderfully stupid Op-Ed piece in the NY Times two days ago which essentially argues that the evil Bush administration will use 9/11 as an excuse to expand America under the guise of a phantom "war on terror."

The article highlights just about every bit of the idiotarian worldview that gets under my skin:

• The moral equivalency thing
  
  
  This runs through the entire course of her argument. At one point she reminds us that some groups like the French Resistance or the ANC were once called terrorists and are now considered freedom fighters. (And there are many more examples from the Algerians, to the Basques, to the IRA, not to mention Hamas and Fatah who were terrorists then and are still terrorists today).
  
  Later on she complains about the "jihad language" used by the American government in reacting to the attacks. As opposed to the groups that actually declared a jihad before the attacks.




• The lack of basic decency thing
  
  
  Her sterile prose shows no evidence that last September's attacks moved Ms. Sontag at all. Instead, a large chunk of the editorial is taken up with a straw man argument here that the government is trying to silence the anti-war dissidents. Which, of course, is nothing but overblown rhetoric. This seems to be Sontag's conclusions from the tongue lashing she got in the media after her original post-9/11 remarks did. But that's the price of democracy: you have the right to make an ass of yourself, and other people have a right to be pissed off at you when you do.




• The denial of reality thing
  
  
  Reading Sontag's piece, you could almost conclude that America was never actually attacked. Instead we have a "phantom war" or a "pseudo war" with a "pseudo declaration." What gives? Why this PoMo retreat into a world of metaphors and signs?

Bottom line, Sontag appears to be cheesed off that the war on terrorism isn't as clear cut and defined as, say, WWII. On the other hand, how many conflicts have been that clearly demarcated?

For an even more in-depth evisceration of this piece, check out Andrew Sullivan's highly entertaining column in Salon.

posted at 11:57 AM

 
What We've Learned

Like a lot of people I suppose, the last year has influenced my worldview. I've been doing a lot of thinking about America, the West and its relationship with the rest of the world, especially the screwed-up part of it in which I live. Herewith some semi-random thoughts about The Situation:

1. Reality and Morality make a comeback
   
   If anything, the attacks kicked the legs out from under most of the dominant paradigms that run rampant on college campuses: moral equivalency falls when there is a definite good guy and a definite bad guy; the postmodern denial of the real fails in the wake of real horror and real death; the cult of Third World worship falters when you take a closer look at what many Third World cultures are really like.
   
   None of this will change the viewpoint of the Noam Chomskys of the world, but I think a lot of people are more comfortable with the idea that America is not the world’s bad guy.




2. The search for “root causes” is a bottomless pit.
   
   The problem with looking for a root cause for “why do they hate us?” is that most of the causes posited (poverty, US support for dictatorial regimes or for Israel) are shallow and easily refuted. And the causes that are less shallow are much harder to deal with.
   
   Ponder this: the root causes of the 9/11 attacks are intrinsically linked to Arab Islamic culture. To the Osamas of the world, Islam should be victorious everywhere. Three centuries of evidence to the contrary creates extreme cognitive dissonance, distress, and rage. Nothing America can do – short of mass conversion to Wahabbist-brand Islam – is going to change that.
   
   (For a more in-depth analysis, I recommend Bernard Lewis’ excellent 1990 article The Roots of Muslim Rage).



3. The West has an Islam problem
   
   Following up on the last point, the West is not at war against Islam, but the West certainly has an Islam problem. Europe is seeing the growth of deeply conservative, insular enclaves of Islamic immigrants who are openly hostile to the host country.
   
   That this isn’t happening as much in the States I think has to do with the fact that American culture is a lot more robust and dynamic. The American system encourages immigrants to join in the American way of life and get in the game. The European system encourages immigrants to replicate their native cultures as is. You be the judge as to which works better.



4. What America should do
   
   Democracies are always at a disadvantage when faced with the kind of barbarians we’ve seen come out of this region. At a certain point in the fight, you need to trade some freedoms in order to safeguard the rest. Some freedom of privacy needs to get sacrificed sometimes.
   
   There is nothing wrong with profiling people at airports. We’ve done it here for years and as a result our airplanes don’t get hijacked. Neither is there anything wrong with a national ID card or national standards for driver’s license designs.
   
   On the international scene, the hatred towards the US in many parts of the world is a PR failure. The US needs to do more by way of nation-building and exporting market systems and democratic institutions. All those arguing that you can’t solve anything by force are wrong. Ask the Bosnians.
   
   Western democratic capitalism, backed by a willingness to use massive force, has the potential to become the guiding power for good in this world. We need to act carefully, but we need to act forcefully. But, mainly, we need to act.
   
   Next year in Baghdad.

posted at 2:19 PM

 
Do You Remember 11th September

So, here we are again. I can't believe how fast this last year has passed.

Everyone has a "so, where were you?" story about that day. Here, the attacks happened at around 3:45 PM local time. We had a meeting scheduled for 4 PM to talk about the new company phone dialing system. A little before the meeting I was trying to check the news and noticed a lot of traffic on the usual Web sites. One of the sites that I did manage to get through reported that a light aircraft had hit the WTC.

My initial association was an incident in the 1940s when a military plane crashed into the Empire State Building. I didn't give it too much thought.

News of the second attack came in right before the meeting started. It was now clear that we were talking about a terrorist attack. The news sites at that point were all down and we didn't have a TV in the office, so we went to the meeting.

For the next 45 minutes we sat and listened to a guy rabbiting on about the new phone system. Meanwhile, cell phones keep ringing every 20 seconds or so with other updates, some true some not:

"A plane has just crashed into the Pentagon"
"A car bomb exploded outside the State Department"
"Omigod, one of the World Trade Center Towers just collapsed"
"There was a suicide bombing in a Washington Mall"
"The other tower just collapsed"

Etc. It is a tribute to the guy lecturing about the phone system (who I know think of as "Sept. 11th Guy" whenever I see him) who didn't break his drone the entire time.
posted at 9:26 AM

 
Barak Speaks

The former Prime Minister in his first major interview since being voted out of office nearly two years ago. The interview is of interest for this reason alone.

In it, Barak reminds me why towards the end of his tenure I got sick of seeing his mug on TV all the time. He comes off as haughty, arrogant, and smug. He did everything right, but reality failed to fall into line.

The interview does include a couple of interesting tidbits about Barak's relationship with Clinton during the negotiations with the Syrians (who demanded that Israel agree to all their demands as a precondition to negotiations) and the Palestinians.

The most relevant bit is Barak's summation of the failure of the Camp David and Taba talks. He claims that the outcome of the talks defined the framework of a future Palestinian-Israeli peace settlment by breaking Israel's taboos and by exposing Arafat as a liar and a terrorist. He also brought the majority of the Israeli public to terms with reality when it comes to dealing with the Palestinians:

"With the exception of a few solitary fringe elements, the overwhelming majority of the public understands today that the Palestinian demand is not for peace or for justice in return for justice, but for their version of absolute justice. That is a demand not for the margins but for the main thing. For everything. It is painful to grasp that reality. Very painful. ...True, peace was not achieved at Camp David, but as a result of Camp David almost all of us are today standing with our feet on the ground, able to see the essence of the conflict and the essence of our adversary and understanding the essence of the solution. "

For all his faults, the man has a point.


posted at 12:42 PM

 
Fatah declares a halt to terrorism...

Something new from the "Talk is Cheap" department. We've heard similar declarations on at least a half dozen occasions in the last two years.

The Palis always qualify these declarations by saying they don't apply to terror attacks against soldiers or settlers. And since the vast majority of Israelis are in fact reservist soldiers, you can connect the dots. It's about as much of a breakthrough as Arafat offering to resign yesterday.

[Update] As I suspected, this declaration is not even fit to wipe your behind with. Senior Fatah activists are already denouncing it.
posted at 12:41 PM

 
The Oslo Years

The holiday edition of the Haaretz magazine features a lengthy, fairly important piece by Benny Begin (Menachem Begin's son and a former MK in his own right) which looks at the failure of the Oslo accords. During the optimistic years 1993-96, Begin was one of the few voices saying that Arafat was negotiating in bad faith. Begin, then as now, argues that contrary to their stated intentions, the Palestinians had no intention of settling for a two-state solution (the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside israel) to end the conflict.

Rather, he argues that the Oslo accords were part of the PLO's phased strategy: first establish a Palestinian state, then demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees into Israel proper, then slowly take over Israel as well. Whatever could not be achieved diplomatically would be achieved by terror, as we are seeing today.

Begin chooses the '93-'96 timeframe to counter charges that the Oslo accords went off the rails once Netanyahu was elected and the Palestinians' "political horizon" suddenly shrunk. He proves fairly convincingly that even during a period with a left-wing Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority failed to meet the most basic obligations (such as annuling the Palestinian Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel) and worked in participation with the terroristic Islamic elements, all the while deceiving the Israelis about it.

Haaretz being Haaretz had to include not one but two rebuttal articles. (The paper's latest ad campaign reads "Haaretz. Not what you think." Which I suppose is true if you think that Haaretz is not naive and left-wing in its editorial orientation).

One rebuttal comes from the hopelessly deluded Yossi Beilin, who still can't come to terms with the fact that his life's mission went up in flames two years ago. The other one comes from Palestinian Legislative Council member Ziyad Abu Zayad who makes the exact same points as Beilin, but throws in some classic Palestinian prevarication for good measure.
posted at 6:54 PM