Another Russian “dissident” gets sick, and guess who is blamed. As I said in my column the other day, Russia is getting the same treatment these days as Syria, a bona fide member of the “axis of evil.” A Lebanese taxi driver put it this way:
“‘It’s very clear,’ said the Beirut taxi driver, a Sunni Muslim. ‘They blame everything on Syria. If a man divorces his wife, they blame it on Syria.'”
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Via Daniel McCarthy, an excerpt from The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, by Russell Kirk and James McClellan (1967):
War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. His natural conservatism made him a man of peace. He never had served in the army himself, and he did not relish the prospect of compelling others to serve. Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, break in upon private and public morality. The constitutions of government in America were not made for prolonged emergencies; and it might require generations for the nation to recover from a war of a few years’ duration.
If these would be the consequences of war to America – even though no hostilities should occur within American territory – the damage inflicted elsewhere in the world would be graver still. Even though war might be inevitable in the last resort, men must not expect large benefits to result from victory. From the Second World War, as from the First, no increase of liberty and democracy would come: on the contrary, in most of the world a host of squalid oligarchs must be the principal beneficiaries, whatever side might win. For the United States, then, war was preferable to conquest or to economic ruin; but if those calamities were not in prospect, America should remain aloof. The blood of man should be shed only to redeem the blood of man, Taft might have said with Burke: “the rest is vanity; the rest is crime.â€
Taft’s prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions – and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, an intolerant “democratism†imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America’s domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the “garrison state,†a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.
“If it’s newsworthy, it gets on the air, whether it’s Bush or bin Laden.”
So began the first few days of Al-Jazeera‘s English language news channel, a stream of glitzy slogans and swirling views of the Doha newsroom, punctuated by the occasional ad for a Qatari development corporation or Gulf state-based airline.
The news reports show footage that in the United States one could only get watching sensational Spanish language shock shows. On the day Pierre Gemayel was assassinated (undoubtedly a “good” break for Al-Jazeera English’s kick-off), I must have seen the Lebanese minister’s brains splattered in clumps on his passenger seat 15 times.
But supported by the impressive production quality are news and analysis shows which seem to still be trying to find their groove.
One of the touted strengths of the channel, for example the fact that its Middle East experts would actually be from the Middle East, seems to also be a weakness: the guests many times can’t seem to finish articulating the answer to a question before, due to time restraints, the host must interrupt them to move on to a new subject or point of view.
My favorite shows so far are Riz Khan — sort of like Larry King but not obnoxious — and People and Power, a magazine-style news program. A recent show on the Palestinian government and political prisoners was fascinating and in-depth, if only because it showed and told me things I’d never have seen or heard on CNN. And for those of you who saw Control Room, former US mouthpiece Josh Rushing is now refreshingly “with them.”
There is also plenty of non-Middle Eastern coverage. Just today I saw exclusive Al-Jazeera footage of battles in Chad, and a fluff piece on a show called 48 about Havana, which was (irkingly) light on the Castro regime. Last week I saw disturbing footage from 1994 of Argentine Jews staring in horror at the pile of rubble and bodies that was made of their community center in Buenos Aires.
There’s a lot I am leaving out because I simply don’t have time to watch TV all day, but also because I want you to go to Al-Jazeera today and subscribe to the broadband service for $6/month. Of course, this is only if you’re in the US — most other countries have companies which have agreed to provide the channel to their subscribers.
The verdict is: Al-Jazeera rocks, and for now, I’m addicted. There’s definitely room for improvement, but at least it’s not full of the puke-inducing blatherings of self-important morons like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough.
[O]ur leaders may be so demoralized that we could just surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the realists and the antisemites desire.
That’s Michael Ledeen over at The Corner. Now, using the standard neocon definition of anti-Semite (anyone, Gentile or Jew, who doesn’t carry around wallet-sized photos of Bibi), this means that to oppose the ongoing war in Iraq (and what the hell, let’s throw in Afghanistan too, just for symmetry) is wrong because Likud should get what Likud wants. Whew, glad we have that out in the open now – you could get called an, er, anti-Semite for saying that a few years ago.
Ledeen lunacy via Arthur Silber, who has much more.
A remarkable article in tonight’s Haaretz, remarkable not so much in that it talks of a ceasefire between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because those are certainly common enough, but remarkable in how succinctly it illustrates just how close the two sides are.
An Islamic Jihad leader is quoted as saying (and claiming that Hamas and Fatah are also on board), that they are willing to halt the incessant Qassam attacks on Israel if Israel stops it’s attacks on Palestinian territory. Pretty cut and dry offer of a ceasefire, right?
Then an Israeli government spokeswoman is quoted as saying they are willing to halt their attacks once the Qassams stop.
And therein lies the rub: both sides are willing to stop, but neither wants to go first. Why should that matter? Locked in a seemingly eternal stalemate and with scores of innocent people being killed: there seems so little to lose and so much to gain. All that needs to happen is for one side or the other, and it doesn’t particularly matter which one, but one side or the other to accept the offer, tell their army to take a long weekend, and see if maybe this thing will stick.
The ceasefire that eluded so many is sitting there on the ground like a lost coin, will anyone bother to bend over and pick it up?
Jonathan Schwarz examines the sunny side of Iraq-Vietnam analogies, and Leon Hadar measures Israel’s window of opportunity for attacking Iran.
