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October
17, 2002 9:25 a.m. |
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harlie Rangel, among others, says that he opposes military action because
too many “black and brown” people serve in the military.
This brings up all sorts of problems. First, there’s the suggestion of racism in the Rangel position. Second, there’s the rank separatism (are these not Americans?). Third, would he bar black and Hispanic citizens from serving in the military? Fourth, does the presence of “people of color” in the military act as a veto on any American military action (except for occasional invasions of Haiti, at the insistence of a fasting Randall Robinson)? Fifth, if that is the case, why maintain a military at all? Sixth . . .
And yet, it’s so absurd, there’s no need to keep going.
Do you remember when we were proud of the military’s integration? It was the shining example, to all of us. Now . . . a source of division. Figures.
The
Wall Street Journal had what I would consider an unfortunate headline:
“With Iraqi Vote, Hussein’s Party Shows Its Cohesion.”
Cohesion? It showed its effectiveness in terror. Those people “voted”
at the point of bayonet.
I loved this line within the article: “The mass of the population, freely or not, announced its loyalty.” Freely or not — that’s a fine clause! And how ’bout the word “loyalty”? “Sheer fear,” and instinct for self-preservation, would be more like it.
Saddam Hussein was not content with 98.9 percent, or 99.7: He had to go for the whole enchilada — 100 percent. This scores . . . well, a perfect ten, so to speak, on the Tirana Index.
Connoisseurs of Charles Krauthammer will remember the Tirana Index. The columnist invented this sometime in the mid-1980s, I believe. Enver Hoxha, the Communist dictator of Albania (whose capital is Tirana), used to “win” by 99.6 percent — numbers like that. You always wondered about the .4 percent — democratic window-dressing, in all likelihood. Krauthammer decided that you could gauge the democratic legitimacy of a country by measuring it on a “Tirana index”: The higher the percentage, the less free the election.
We’ll be applying it forever, somewhere.
One
thing to be worried about, in this coming war: the patience of the media
class. Will it have it? I have confidence — based on the evidence
of history — that Americans at large will have such patience; but
one can be less sure about the media. Only a couple of weeks — or
was it days? — into Afghanistan, the media were talking about “quagmire”
and “the Big Muddy”: quagmire, quagmire, quagmire; muddy, muddy,
muddy; Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. And then, poof: Afghanistan was
“over” (at least that stage of it).
But the “quagmire” people will be back, big-time, in Iraq. They’re used to “hundred-hour wars.” If they don’t get one — if this war isn’t wrapped up in one neat news cycle — will they go all “quagmire” on us?
A concern.
Everyone’s
all atwitter about whether Israel will fight back — whether it will
respond, militarily, if Iraq, or some other nation, attacks its people.
It is my belief that people don’t understand the utilitarian —
the practical — aspect of Israel’s concern.
It is not merely a psychological, emotional desire to hit back when you yourself are hit. Some analysts believe that the PLO and other enemies of Israel were emboldened when Israel “holstered” itself in the 1991 Gulf War. Did this suggest to others that Israel was something of a paper tiger, a softie? Israel was struck by 39 Iraqi missiles, and it sat there, nice and quiet, for GHWB and Jim Baker. Did some Israelis, later, pay for this restraint — this season of non-responsiveness, or superhuman “self-control” — with their lives?
That, sports fans, is a worry.
And speaking of responsiveness versus non-. The following line appeared in a USA Today article: “Beyond reassurances on Iraq, Bush [was] expected [in his meeting with Ariel Sharon] to urge Israel to show restraint in trying to prevent, or retaliate for, Palestinian acts of terrorism.”
That is asking an awful lot of a country: to “show restraint” in merely trying to prevent, much less retaliate for, the murder of one’s citizens. In fact, that is too much.
Caught
Chris Matthews the other night, talking with Christopher Hitchens, and
would like to make a correction. Both of them said — Matthews started
it, and Hitchens agreed — that Jeane Kirkpatrick’s invocation
of “San Francisco Democrats” was an anti-gay slur.
Nothing of the sort. Remember: Kirkpatrick was a Democrat, serving in the Reagan administration, as ambassador to the U.N. She had fought long and hard to save the Democratic party from the New Left, particularly in foreign and defense policy. She was speaking at a Republican convention, in the summer of 1984. That must have been rather a hard thing for a lifelong, committed Democrat to do. She didn’t want to knock “the Democrats,” tout court, because she was one, and she loved that party (or what was left of it, from her point of view).
The Democrats had had their convention — in San Francisco. This convention, which nominated Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, was dominated by exactly the kind of Democrats she lamented and despised. So, at the Republican convention, she spoke against “the San Francisco Democrats” — those who had nominated Reagan’s opposition, weeks earlier.
It had nothing to do with gays. It’s not her fault that the Democrats held their convention in San Francisco. If they’d had it in Dubuque, they would have been “the Dubuque Democrats” — and you’d’ve gotten a nice alliteration out of it.
Linda Chavez had this same problem when she ran against Barbara Mikulski two years later (for the Senate in Maryland). Chavez, too, was a Democrat, or had been, until a few seconds before this run. She campaigned as a “true Democrat,” if you will, which is to say an old-school Democrat — a betrayed and abandoned Democrat — not a radical one. Maryland was (as it is now) a staunchly Democratic state, and it would have made no sense to run against “the Democrats.” So she denominated her opponent a “San Francisco Democrat,” which she was — and is (as is the senator’s whole party now, to be fair).
Chavez details all this in her fantastic new book, An Unlikely Conservative.
Again, it’s not their fault — not Jeane’s and Linda’s — that the Democrats held their 1984 convention in San Francisco. And yet, the Matthewsesque charge will always be held over their heads.
A
word about the late Stephen Ambrose. Not long before he died, he was hit
with charges of plagiarism — charges that were true. And yet all
“plagiarisms” are not equal. Ambrose was certainly a sloppy,
careless old cuss, toward the end. But he was an unusual sort of “plagiarist.”
He footnoted everything, even if he (or those assisting him) didn’t
put quotation marks around everything, and in one footnote he said something
like, “I have stolen shamelessly from Professor X, in his
book . . .” That is not the usual action of a plagiarist. A plagiarist
moves with stealth, trickiness, deception.
When he was at his lowest, we published him in NR. The piece — “The Master (Nation) Builder” — might have been his last. I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m glad we did it.
By the way, in his last years, Ambrose was viewed as something of a conservative, because he was a patriot, but he had been a radical Democrat. I remember his boasting to a college seminar that he had heckled Richard Nixon over Cambodia. He said — about his biographical subject, Nixon — “I’m a Nixon-hater from way back.”
Of course, a lot of conservatives are “Nixon-haters” too, and I’m not sure that . . . whoa: That’s a whole ’nother subject. Later.
You’ve
got to hand it to terrorists, at least in this instance. Tony Blair
decided to trust the IRA with peace and coalition government. The group’s
code name for him? “The Naïve Idiot.”
In
an article concerning Jimmy Carter’s Nobel prize, the New York
Times’s Michael Wines wrote the following: “Jimmy Carter
won [the prize] ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful
solutions to international conflicts’ — and, by the declaration
of the prize panel’s chairman, for his labors as a critic of the
Bush administration’s pistols-cocked brand of geopolitics.”
Pistols-cocked brand of geopolitics — this was in a Times news column, mind you, not an editorial. But then, what, these days, is the difference?
As
the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, the U.S. has just
had a successful missile-defense test, involving a Navy Aegis destroyer.
(Let us thank Bush — one more time — for withdrawing from the
ABM treaty.) Concluded the Journal, “The destroyer participating
in Monday’s test was the USS John Paul Jones, named after the Revolutionary
War naval hero who famously said, ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’
When it comes to deploying sea-based missile defenses, Monday’s test
shows that the U.S. has finally begun to fight.”
Nice — both the style, and the fact.
The
story of the Japanese abductees in North Korea has the elements of a tragic
and gripping novel. Listen to this, from a report by the Journal’s
Sebastian Moffett: “One abducted Japanese, Hitomi Soga, 43, is married
to Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. serviceman who defected to North Korea
in 1965.” Amazing. What must that marriage be like? How did it come
about? What did they say to each other? What are they saying now?
Another couple “were dating when they were kidnapped by [North Korean] agents in 1978, thrust into sacks and taken to [the country] by ship. They married in North Korea.”
Still another couple “were already engaged when they were snatched from a seaside observation deck. They too were trussed up in sacks, and then taken to a spy-training facility in Pyongyang to instruct agents in Japanese.”
And so on.
Incidentally, it’s typical of a Communist government not to allow family members to travel out of the country with those permitted to leave — have to have some hostages, you know, to ensure the return of the departees. Castro does this reliably, on those rare occasions when he allows the few to skip his island for a day or two. But do our media notice or mind? Please.
Bill
Kauffman had a nice review in the Journal of three books about
the American Revolution. The review reminded me of something — of
a couple of things, actually. First, it used to puzzle me, as a boy, to
read about “the tyranny” of George III. That tyranny seemed
so . . . mild, in a century (my own) of genocide and other evil (well,
I guess you can’t get much more evil than genocide). Tyranny?
Some bothersome taxes?
Also, isn’t it amazing that Americans today will accept near-Swedenization, in light of the Friedmanite fighting faith of our fathers? From Kauffman: “‘America’s hatred of being taxed was at the heart of the resistance,’ writes [Richard M.] Ketchum, who notes that these ‘Liberty Boys’ drank an astonishing 28 toasts to the repeal of the Stamp Act — the hated exaction that was hardly more onerous than the sales taxes we complaisant moderns pay every day.”
“Complaisant moderns.” Very nice. Well, we have to attend to our daily lives — we can’t all be Howard Jarvis.
Kauffman concludes, “Once independent, New York enacted punitive antiloyalist laws. The radical-dominated assembly stripped active loyalists of the vote and the right to hold office, but then, as patriots said with a smirk, they were merely giving the Tories what they had wanted in 1776: taxation without representation.”
Sweet.
Finally,
a marvelous note from a reader in Colorado Springs. I had written, in
a previous Impromptus, that pundits, pols, and others were “laying
down markers” concerning Iraq, gravely pointing out what could go
wrong, so that they could be right, no matter what.
The reader informs us, “I have been married for 52 years. Every time my wife and I drive anywhere she says to me, ‘The car smells hot.’ I remind her that it is supposed to smell hot — cold cars don’t operate efficiently. One time about 30 years ago the car blew a radiator hose and overheated, and she said, ‘See, I told you the car smelled hot.’ She should be in Congress.”
Beautiful.