Busy day, having fun, no time to blog, see you tomorrow!
Making a mockery: terrorism in Iraq
Today there was a car bomb attack in Iraq characterized as the largest terrorist act there since May, when the new government took office. Over sixty people were killed in the blast, which occurred in a street market located in the troublesome and poverty-stricken Shiite area of Baghdad known as Sadr City.
This is just business as usual for the terrorist “insurgents” of Iraq. And no one should be the least bit surprised, for it’s been said time and again that these attacks will continue for a very long time.
What struck me–other than the tragic human cost of the ongoing struggle to set up a relatively democratic government in Iraq–is the fact that attacks of this magnitude used to be much more common. That seems to represent progress, although I have no illusions that the situation couldn’t reverse itself. The truth is that car bombs are relatively easy to set and difficult to intercept. The fledgling government and security forces in Iraq are up against a group that is not going to go gentle into that good night; and so we can expect more of this. I say “we” but, of course, it’s the Iraqi people who suffer.
Terrorists themselves know that the odds are in their favor as far as successfully mounting an attack: those who defend against terrorism have to be lucky (and smart) all the time, and terrorists only have to get lucky once, or occasionally. That’s one of the appeals of terrorism, and one of the reasons it’s called asymmetrical warfare. And it doesn’t take a giant brain to figure that out.
Those who would fight against terrorists have to–they must–keep this in mind. But when I read the linked Reuters article that began this post, I wondered about what the journalists at Reuters are keeping in mind when I saw the following sentence [my emphasis], “No one claimed responsibility for the attack but it had the stamp of al Qaeda and made a mockery of a three week-old security clampdown in Baghdad.”
The increase in the sort of editorializing represented by the phrase “made a mockery,” occurring in a straight news article, is one of the reasons many of us criticize the MSM, including Reuters. And it’s not just that the statement seems out of place; it seems unintelligent and simplistic, at best. A security clampdown in the sort of atmosphere that is present-day Baghdad is, by definition, not going to be perfect, and anyone who expects it to be is naive and unrealistic.
Yes, it would be wonderful if no bombs were ever to kill innocents in Iraq again. But to call this particular attack a “mockery” of security efforts is precisely the sort of thing the terrorists are aiming at, and represents an almost hysterical overreaction that, unfortunately, makes a mockery of coalition and Iraqi efforts to reverse the situation–efforts that have been showing some slow, difficult progress lately.
Blog talk
Last night I went to a meeting of the Boston bloggers.
It’s really the New England bloggers, since not all of us live in Boston (I don’t, for example). We’ve gotten together a couple of times before and it’s always been fun. Because, you know what? We bloggers are fun people. Strange perhaps, but fun.
I’ve written before on the topic of meeting bloggers. The New England group shares the general blogger characteristic of being a bunch of talkers. Two things in particular seem to be the most salient characteristics of bloggers: ideaphoria, and an especially energetic way of expressing themselves.
Some, no doubt, would call us a bunch of blowhards. But I say no; we are intense and thoughtful, as well as articulate.
For many of us, I suspect, we’ve been this way our entire lives, and never found a really good outlet for the type of thinking we do and the personalities we seem to have. For many of us, I suspect as well that the minute we discovered blogs we realized that it was a good match. And so that’s why, when bloggers get together, there’s often a certain “here I am, with my peeps at last” feeling wafting through the air; a real zest and zing.
I’ve been a writer of sorts for many years, and I’ve participated in writing groups for about fifteen of those years. I remember a similar feeling when I first joined one: here were people who, if not of exactly like mind, were somehow of a slant of mind that was akin to mine.
This doesn’t always happen in life; for instance, I only sometimes feel it among fellow therapists. But when the feeling does come, it often means you’re in the right place, doing what you were meant to do, with people who understand and share that feeling.
Is blogging a calling? That’s way too pretentious a way to look at it. But sometimes I feel that, for most bloggers, we didn’t choose blogging so much as blogging chose us. And, for most of us, it’s a labor of love, requiring us to do work without a great deal of remuneration–except, of course, for the wonderful rewards of saying one’s piece and even being heard and responded to in thoughtful and meaningful ways.
My guess is that many of the commenters here may share some of the same traits as bloggers: lots of ideas and the need to express them. And now, with blogs, we don’t have to bore our friends and relatives silly–we can entertain each other.
[Whoops–forgot the links. Present and accounted for were: Sissy Willis of sisu, Richard Landes of Second Draft, Sol of Solomnia, Teresa of Technicalities, Harry of Squaring the Globe, Marybeth of Miss Kelly, New England Republican of blog of same name, and special guest Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe. Regretfully absent but ordinarily a regular: Daniel in Brookline.]
Out of the Republican closet: Black Like Me
Reginald Bohannon is a Republican.
That in and of itself is not remarkable. But what is unusual–although certainly not unheard of–is that he is a black Republican, raised in a culture in which 90-95% of the ethnic group to which he belongs is Democrat, and in a family with a politically active Democrat mother.
Not altogether unlike myself, actually, come to think of it (although I’m not a Republican; I’m an Independent).
And, in another similarity, Bohannon has written about his “change” experience, in a book entitled Coming Out of the Republican Closet: Coming to Terms With Being Black, Patriotic, and Conservative (it could be subtitled: not an oxymoron.)
Here’s a recent interview with Mr. Bohannon. His “coming out of the closet” metaphor is especially apt, I believe. It’s one that has come up quite often on threads on this blog that discuss the experience “changers” have had (see this, for example).
As you all no doubt know, “coming out” is a phrase that previously had been used primarily to describe the experience of gays who’d been hiding their sexual identities for fear of discrimination and recrimination, and who finally decide they can no longer live the secret life. They tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may; sometimes they fall hard and painfully.
Before my own change experience, I would not have believed in any possible comparison to the experience of gays; I actually might even have considered it preposterous if someone had asserted discrimination from liberals because of “turning” in a conservative–or a neocon–direction.
But now I’m a believer. Personal experience, and being the recipient of emails from all over the world describing the phenomenon, have convinced me. And yet I still feel some amount of shock at the depth and breadth of it all. I like to think–and really, I know, since I always had a few conservative friends–that in my liberal days I would never have had this reaction to a “changer.” After all, doesn’t it seem especially antithetical to the openmindedness and respect for opinions of others that liberals profess to feel?
But, as I’ve written before, a political identity is much more than that: it often becomes a moral and personal identity, and there are groupthink aspects that lead to ostracism of the apostate. Zell Miller likens political identity to a birthmark, and in a way it is.
In his interview, Bohannon discusses the tagline to his book, “Not wanting to disappoint his family and bring ill-repute on them, Bohannon chose to keep his political viewpoints to himself.” He feared name-calling and anger directed not only at him, but at his family.
But over time he gained the courage of his convictions, bolstered by the history of the Republican party’s support of freedom for blacks during and after the Civil War. An especially interesting aspect of his position is that he believes black people to actually already be more conservative on many issues than they themselves know. He sees himself as a person willing to point this out and make it easier for more of them to cross over into formerly-dreaded Republicanism. Bohannon sees the scarcity of blacks in the Republican Party as a function of lack of education as to what Republicans really stand for–now, and historically–and an incorrect perception of the Party as racist.
Bohannon says:
…it takes some intelligence to be a black Republican because you have to do your homework. …To be a Democrat, you just have to join the Party that your family belongs to and you don’t have to learn anything at all.
No, it’s not true that black Democrats–or Jewish Democrats, or any other ethnic or socioeconomic group that’s predominantly and overwhelmingly Democratic, for that matter–are unintelligent. Not at all, and I would strongly quarrel with Bohannon’s use of the word.
But I do identify with Bohannon’s larger message–which is that, as I grew more interested in reading about political events, both domestic and international, as well as historical–I grew away from the Democratic Party and more to the right.
That certainly is not an inevitability; I know that some people go in the opposite direction. But, as I’ve written here, it appears to be a trend. Reginald Bohannon is part of it–and, if he has his way, more black people will join him.
First step
After a certain amount of research and thought, I have decided to institute the simplest possible change to the blog. I have now closed Blogger comments and installed Haloscan.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to use; I think the instructions are self-explanatory. We’ll see how this goes.
Rewatching movies
Ann Althouse has written a post about rewatching movies.
She says:
To watch something the first time is to respond to some mysterious mix of your own imagination and the various things you’ve heard. Maybe something about a poster or some feeling about a movie star pulls you in. Then you find out if it was what you thought it would be or if you’re surprised in a good way. But rewatching a movie, you know basically what’s there, and you’re making a choice to relive what you know or you have a sense that there are places in there where new things can be found. It’s a richer, deeper experience. Oh, that reminds me of what Andre says about marriage — as opposed to an affair — at the end of my most rewatched movie, “My Dinner With Andre.”
Ann and I part company there–I wasn’t all that keen on “Andre” the first time I saw it–although perhaps if I watched it now I’d like it. But her remarks resonate nevertheless, reminding me of my own earlier comments on love, the theme and variations vs. the symphony.
It’s true that rewatching a movie involves a type of love. Same for rereading a book, or going to a play we’ve already seen. We know what to expect in the general sense, just as we know the character of the beloved. But there’s always some sort of surprise amidst the repetition, and part of the surprise is that we ourselves bring new knowledge and experience to it.
One of my favorite authors, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a story entitled “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” about a writer who set about re-experiencing and recreating Cervantes’s writing of his novel Don Quixote. Borges’s story is a gently humorous dig at, among other things, literary criticism; but it also makes the interesting point that a work can be exactly the same, but if the context is different the work itself changes for the reader.
With film rewatchings, the context is never the same. I watched familiar favorites of mine post-9/11 and often saw something new and different in them than before (see this for a recent reassessment of “High Noon,” for example). The same is true of the romantic movies I loved as a teenager, although this has nothing to do with 9/11 but more to do with age; the old Zefferelli “Romeo and Juliet” says one thing to a nineteen-year-old and another to a fifty-something-year old, although it speaks volumes to both.
It turns out, now that I think of it, that my favorite rewatchings over the years don’t include many new movies. The only one I can think of is “Groundhog Day.” But that seems appropriate; isn’t it what that movie is about? Keep doing it till you get it right, with deepening understanding every time.
Construction has begun #2
Last night I was up late, working. I went to bed very late, fully expecting to sleep in; I didn’t have any early commitments.
Ah, but the best laid schemes….
I was awakened at around 7 AM by the sounds of blasting. Rock blasting. Just outside my bedroom window, it seemed. I hunkered down and covered my head with every piece of bedding I could muster, determined to squeeze a few more drops of sleep out of the morning. Which I managed to do, although not for long enough to suit me.
When I got up and looked outside, I saw that the end of my small driveway was no more. Instead, there was a twelve-foot-deep trench, and three workmen next to two enormous gray concrete pipes.
Yes, I knew they’d been working on the sewers lately in my neighborhood–but, till now, nowhere near me, and rather quietly at that.
I asked them why they hadn’t at least warned me this was going to happen, since it would have been a simple matter to have taken my car out of the driveway before they started and parked it a little ways down the street. Now I was trapped here. Their answer was that this was their first day on the job, and they hadn’t thought of it. I politely suggested it might be something they should consider adding to their job description in the future whenever were about to obliterate someone’s driveway.
Fortunately, today was a rare day when there was no place I absolutely had to be; I was able to jettison the things I’d scheduled. It’s actually been sort of fun to have an enforced day in the house, although I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. I’ve even been getting a few–just a few–long-postponed tasks accomplished. I’ve been able to notice just how very excellently the new gutter performs during a deluge–because, like almost all the other days here since I’ve returned, we’ve had rain. I’ve wondered just how much more rain we can stand. I’ve been grateful I live on a hill and therefore don’t have to worry–yet–about my basement flooding.
The workmen promised me that this would be done by late afternoon, the hole miraculously filled in as though it never had happened, and that I’d be liberated to use my car once again. But the rain has made the workers stop and start periodically, and so I wonder–and then, at the very moment I’m typing this sentence, I realize the noise itself has stopped just a few moments ago.
And so I stop as well, look out the window again–and voila!
Fixed:
Construction has begun
My “technical advisor” has started work on the changes to the blog, since the nuts and bolts of this type of thing is not my forte. It will take a while, probably as much as a week, but I wanted to let you know that it’s at least a work in progress. Patience.
Inside the mind of the Times
Cassandra at Tigerhawk speculates on how the NY Times, in its infinite wisdom, decides for us what is newsworthy and what is not.
Islamist totalitarianism
I’ve written before about the dilemma of choosing a term to describe our enemies in this war.
Islamofascists? No, not exact enough; and misleading, hearkening back to our World War II enemies who had different political ideologies and methods. Islamic fundamentalists? Incorrect as well; not all Islamic fundamentalists have adopted violence as a way of life. “Jihadis” is too inclusive and not specific enough.
Austin Bay has called attention to a recent article appearing in the London Times, written by Michael Gove. Well worth reading, it is a good summary of the aims and ideology of the enemy, as well as offering the useful and descriptive term “Islamist totalitarians” to refer to the movement.
The piece is an excerpt from Gove’s recently published book, Celsius 7/7. The thrust of Gove’s article is that the enemy we face is, first and foremost, our old nemesis: totalitarianism. The jihadis are at war not only with the West, but with most of their co-religionists, whose version of Islam they consider fatally compromised and in need of revision, violent if necessary (and they deem violence to be necessary).
“Islamist totalitarianism” may indeed be the very best name of all for those who adhere to this vision, since it places the movement firmly in the twentieth/twenty-first century context in which it belongs, which is one of world dominance through force, and the negation of human freedom. That is why all totalitarian movements are, in their dark hearts, a reaction to and a profound rejection of the Enlightenment. Islamist totalitariansim is no exeption to this rule.
As Gove writes:
Islamism is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Like its sibling ideologies, fascism and communism, it offers followers a form of redemption through violence. Like fascism, Islamism envisages the creation of a purified realm purged of toxic outside influences and internal corruption. Like communism, Islamism is not ethnically exclusive, it seeks to enlist new converts through proselytisation, political education and military advances. Like both, it reserves a special hatred for the West, for political freedom the separation of the public and private realms, dissent, sexual tolerance and a belief in the sanctity of individual life. And like both it finds a dark and furious energy in hatred towards the Jewish people.
Politically correct thinking dictates that we respect all religions. When Islamist totalitarianism is described as the enemy, many have a kneejerk response that such thinking as anti-Moslem or racist in some way. But it is not. Make no mistake about it. The war the Islamist totalitarians have decreed is every bit as much against the everyday, garden-variety Moslem as it is against all the rest of us.
The ailing NY Times: the watchdog has rabies
Recently the NY Times has been engaged in what appears to be a campaign of its own: the publication of security secrets in the current war (on terror, on jihadis, call it what you will) waged by the US. Why is the Times bent on forcing the issue, publishing secrets that appear to violate no known rule or law, using as its excuse the public’s need to know?
Yesterday, in response to that question, I discussed one possible motivation for the Times’ behavior: to relive the glory days of the Pentagon Papers case. But there’s more.
The issues are large; see Alexandra’s post of today for a further discussion and roundup of the case against the Times. Also today, columnist Michael Barone ups the ante, asking, “Why does the NY Times hate us?”, writing that the paper’s editors, “have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.”
Towards the end of the piece, Barone asks:
Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical.
I submit the following answer:
The press has long seen itself as a watchdog protecting the people. I’m not sure when this attitude began, but it was certainly present in the activities of the muckrakers of the early years of the twentieth century, journalists and writers who saw it as their calling to expose and publicize some of the excesses of big business, especially trusts. As such, they were crusaders, but they never (at least as far as I can determine) published secret information that threatened national security. Their concerns were almost exclusively domestic.
That changed, as so much did, during the Vietnam and Watergate era, in which national security concerns were added to the muckraking function of the press. I’ve delineated and explored the change in many previous posts (see this and especially this, for example).
Here’s an especially relevant quote from the latter:
The antiwar movement that rose as a result of the Vietnam War had a distrust of American power and intelligence gathering and of agencies such as the CIA. The events of Watergate only “deepened the aversion,” since the burglars included former intelligence officers, and Nixon also used the CIA to obstruct the work of the FBI in trying to investigate the break-in. Furthermore, the CIA was engaged in some domestic spying scandals and other acts considered excesses, such as attempts to assassinate foreign leaders (investigated by the Congressional Church Commission of the mid-70s). The upshot of all this was, among other things, a desire to limit the power of the executive branch of government and of intelligence-gathering, because the fear was that these entities, unchecked, could (and would) combine in corrupt ways to undermine our liberties.
Some have said, cynically, that the Times editors are simply out to sensationalize and boost readership. This certainly may be operating, at least in part. But in my opinion that it’s not the main motivation. I see the driving force for this campaign as the editors’ deep conviction that providing this information to us is their way of protecting us: it’s the muckraking impulse gone mad.
In the decades since the 60s, the press has come to see itself as a sort of secret society, bound to protect and serve us by curbing what it sees as a government that–as in Watergate, as in 1984–is bound and determined to spy on us and curb our liberties. As such, editors make the decisions as to what is in our best interests, and they have deemed the threat from the actions of our own government to be far greater than any threat from jihadis.
This is both arrogant and an inappropriate throwback to the Vietnam-Watergate era, but I actually believe (and call me naive, if you like) that the vast majority of these MSM campaigners (such as Keller, Times editor) are convinced of their own rightness and self-rightousness, and that this is primarily what fuels them. And their arrogance has continued to grow because they have suffered virtually no consequences for their actions; they have become a law unto themselves.
Alexandra’s post quotes Glenn Reynolds, who makes the important point that:
The founders gave freedom of the press to the people, they didn’t give freedom to the press. Keller positions himself as some sort of Constitutional High Priest, when in fact the “freedom of the press” the Framers described was also called “freedom in the use of the press.” It’s the freedom to publish, a freedom that belongs to everyone in equal portions, not a special privilege for the media industry.
Reynolds refers to the Times editor’s position as “hubris,” and I think he is exactly right, at least in the metaphoric sense. And Austin Bay sums it up quite succintly when he says that, “exposing the terrorist finance-monitoring operation information amounts to spying for terrorists.”
There is really no other way to put it. The press considers itself to be a watchdog, but the Times is a rabid one that has turned on its owners and keepers, the people.
What to do? One possibility is the passage of a National Secrets Act, as I’ve discussed here and here. But perhaps that’s not necessary. The current Espionage Act may be enough, as Barone suggest in his column; rather than prosecute the Times itself, the leakers who are breaching national security by divulging information to the Times could themselves be prosecuted, and in the course of discovery for such a case, the Times would have to testify as to who the leakers are or face contempt of court charges.
Would that be enough? Hard to say, but I think it should be done. The watchdog is ill, and needs to be curbed.
NY Times cruising for a court battle?
The Anchoress has an excellent roundup of posts about the recent publications by the NY Times of security leaks.
The Anchoress asks whether the Times “is trying to force a legal confrontation”¦are they actively trying to have members of the fourth estate brought up on charges of treason? To what purpose?”
I submit the following answer to the Anchoress’s question: The Times is trying to relive its glory days. Don’t forget that, as I described in this post, a lawsuit by the Nixon White House against the NY Times to stop the publication of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers in 1971 was a seminal step in determining the freedom of the press to publish national security secrets. Although the security breaches involved in the publication of the Pentagon Papers were smaller than those involved today, the precedent is there. The Times was victorious, and the case set the stage for the publication of today’s security leaks.
In that earlier post, I quoted from a book on the Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers case, written by David Rudenstine and entitled The Day the Presses Stopped. I’ll quote the book again:
Despite Americans’ constitutional right to a free press, certain government information–particularly that concerning military affairs–has been placed beyond the realm of public access. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1971, however (brought about when the Nixon administration sued the New York Times) knocked a howitzer-sized hole in that theory when the case allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000- page document regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Why wouldn’t the Times think that history will repeat itself? After all, it’s been clear for a while that Vietnam is the liberal template for the Iraq war. The left is counting on it.