One thing at a time
Fareed Zakaria, writing for Newsweek: Let Iraq Wait. Finish Al Qaeda

Destroying the Taliban regime turned out to be easy. Finding and killing the Al Qaeda leadership could prove more difficult, requiring search missions and guerrilla warfare. But this phase of the military action in Afghanistan is crucial. Remember, we went to war against the Taliban because it sheltered Al Qaeda.

And Al Qaeda is much bigger than its Afghan base. In a series of articles last week the Financial Times painted the clearest picture yet of the shadowy outfit. Based on outside sources as well as Western intelligence agencies, it describes a vast, decentralized group of organizations with operations in 40 to 60 countries. The head of Germany’s federal criminal agency, the BKA, estimates that 70,000 people have been trained in Al Qaeda camps and are now spread throughout the world. [...]

Iraq is a serious problem. But it is not an immediate problem. There is little evidence that Saddam Hussein has been involved with Al Qaeda’s activities. His intelligence service appears to have been single-mindedly focused on circumventing the sanctions placed on Iraq—a task in which it has succeeded. The only long-term solution to the threat from Iraq is a change of regime. But this requires time to develop a serious, workable plan and garner some international support. (As of now, even Tony Blair has told President Bush that he would not support a move against Iraq.) Meanwhile, as this debate takes place, there is a vast global organization that has killed thousands of Americans and is still active and in all certainty plotting to kill many more at this moment. Can we please kill it first?

I'm including this as a better written, mainstream press version of some of my own views. Mr. Zakaria is former managing editor of Foreign Affairs. posted by Thomas Nephew at 3:03:00 PM -- |    

 

Afghanistan victories pay further dividends
Possible cause and effect:

Washington Post: Surrenders Add to Intelligence Haul: Prisoners, Papers, Videos Provide Data

...U.S. Special Forces and CIA officers have been examining seized al Qaeda documents, computer hard drives, videotapes and telephone books. The material has already produced names and phone numbers of al Qaeda members in other countries and led to some additional arrests, according to senior administration officials.

BBC: Nato raids Kosovo Islamic charity

[NATO personnel] said the [Global Relief] foundation "is suspected of supporting worldwide terrorist activities and is allegedly involved in planning attacks against targets in the US and Europe". [...]

The Nato statement said the raids - in the capital Pristina and at Djakovica - took place after they received "credible intelligence information".

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:38:00 PM -- |    

 

Never give a pundit a reporter's job? Henryk Broder visits America
Henryk Broder, who writes for the German weekly "Der Spiegel," wrote a scathingly anti-anti-American piece in mid-November titled "The arrogance of humility" ("Die Arroganz der Demut"), which I'll excerpt extensively because you can't stop me:

German war opponents feel more solidarity with the [Afghan] attack victims [than with the U.S ones] ... because if we couldn't prevent this war, then we at least wanted history to record that we were not to blame this time. [...]

Other than with anti-communism ... anti-Americanism has continued to evolve. Its greatest advantage is that it can be arbitrarily employed. If Americans intrude in foreign affairs, they're imposing their will on others. If they stay out of them, they are not meeting their responsibilities as a world power. In the Middle East, both accusations were made simultaneously ... [...]

The debate whether the Germans were liberated or democratically colonized simmers beneath German-American relations... It's still humiliating that one did not liberate oneself, [let alone] that it was gum-chewing Negroes who stripped German academicians of their Nazi insignia. [Whew!! I kid you not. --TN]

The resentment is deep, and always surfaces whenever the darn Americans [Amis] are about to liberate some people or other again. Then anti-Americanism awakes from its slumbers. [...]

We don't mind that the German mark is preferred currency in half of Eastern Europe -- it's only a little embarrassing for us that there's hardly a restauraunt on the Mediterranean coast without a menu in German.
Because as much as we like to talk about the Americanization of the world, we turn a blind eye to to the Germanization of Europe. We hold against the Americans that which we'd like to do ourselves.
They're open and happy about it, they put the US flag out on the law, sing "I'm proud to be an American!" and "God Bless America" at baseball games and barbecues. They have no qualms considering their system the best in the world, while we are primarily concerned with differentiating and relativizing: Yes, what the Taliban do with women isn't nice -- but women are poorly treated and discriminated against here too...
...the "Amis" don't give a hoot about world opinion and get out of the [Kyoto] climate protection accords, which we would never trust ourselves to do. [...]

The latest peace-struggle edition of "Stern" [link -TN, and what an unmitigated piece of crap it was] assembles 44 prominent Germans who fear that America could "bomb us back into the war criminal business." We are given to understand: "Now we're headed for the Hindukush. German soldiers weren't even that far away from home under Hitler." Thus writes "Stern" columnist Heinrich Jaenecke. And adds, "It's not our war ... It's America's war, a war with dark motivations and hidden goals."
Everything comes to an end. It's only German innocence that will never die.

Except for the weird and wince-worthy "gum-chewing Negro" part, which takes some close inspection to interpret as an ironic comment rather than a shared opinion, this was an unalloyed joy to read. So I was looking forward to Broder's journal of his 3-week trip to America: "A nation under a state of emergency" ("Nation im Alarm-Zustand").

Well, it's day 7, and so far it's been pretty much a huge waste of everyone's time. Broder checks out the tabloids ("Bin Laden killed Diana!"), finds a handful of peacenik/homeless types in Lafayette Park, observes the singles pickup scene on the fringes of the Trade Center cleanup site, attends a Christmas tuba concert, observes the apparently listless D.C. gay scene, etc. It's the kind of "random walk" journalism that is really non-random: you arrive with a preconceived, slightly lazy checklist of things to do, dress them up as "dispatches", and spend most of the visit shopping. There are occasional sympathetic insights: he admires the quick production of jokes about Tali-boy Johnny Walker, for instance. But even these are the same kind of "drive-by insights" he seems to have tapped into his Palm Pilot on the flight from Germany, along with "missing peace movement," "commercialism," "shallow reactions," etc. I'm looking for "geographically challenged," "racial tensions still exist," and other cookie cutter stories next.

It's a shame, doubly so because Spiegel's other American dispatch guy, Martin Kilian, is always a waste of time. And by design, too: his dispatches are under the heading "Beating about the Bush," which is hardly a promising start, objectivity-wise. Lord knows I'm not a Bush fan, but I'd like my news straight and my coffee unflavored.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought there was an interesting, different story to tell about America after 9/11, one that showed some strength and poise underneath the comfortable clutter of American everyday life. One that explained that some of the elements of this god-awful tragedy -- flags on the lawn, firemen, "let's roll," final cell phone calls -- show a good side that deserves some thoughtful reporting to Germans and Europeans. One that found purportedly missing dissent, thoughtful flag-wavers, smart military personnel, emotionally engaged professionals, tolerant Southern Baptists, and all the other easy-to-find "impossibilities" of American life. Ignorance comes in many packages. Many Americans typically don't give a hoot about Uzbekistan until they need to. Many Euros seem to not bother challenging their carefully acquired preconceptions, whether they need to or not.

Well, there are still a couple of weeks to go, maybe Broder will put them to better use. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:00:00 AM -- |    

 

More on Iraq
Steve responds to my prior post:

It was more the case that Roosevelt and Churchill were friends than that there was any kind of alliance. So the fact that Germany was engaged in war with the UK wasn't a sufficient political excuse to justify a war. The reason for the US going to war against Germany would be only because Germany was dangerous to the US -- which it was, in spades.

Steve is right, we weren't allies; I should have used a phrase like "vital interest." But my point was less about our formal relationship with Great Britain than about Germany. Unlike Iraq today, Nazi Germany on December 7, 1941 was not just potentially dangerous, it was in a shooting war with a country of vital interest to the United States. It was by waging that war that Nazi Germany became actually injurious to the US, rather than merely menacing, and that's what made the case for war against them. Iraq, like it or not, has not done the same.

As I understand it, we have a kind of U.N. warrant to "search Iraq's house" for weapons of mass destruction, but not one to knock the house down. I may be mistaken about the latter. If not, I believe that we need that warrant, and that we can't issue it ourselves. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:03:00 AM -- |    

 

Iraq "Crossfire" resumes
Steve Den Beste responded at some length to my own rather lengthy 12/11 post. I'll try to be briefer here.

I have no problem with much of what he says; for starters, I completely agree that "we don't strive for peace as such." When I spoke of "the emergency we seek to end," I meant that we seek to end the cause of the emergency, and not merely that we prematurely declare it over and go home. So maybe I was unclear there. But until I see some more evidence, the cause of that emergency is strictly Al Qaeda. I believe taking on other foes would delay ending the Al Qaeda emergency at hand. Like Steve, I believe there are only two acceptable alternatives for Al Qaeda troops: death or unconditional surrender.

But Steve goes on to say about Iraq,

Even if Iraq was not actually involved, it surely sympathized -- and more importantly, it has a clear potential of being involved in future. Germany was not involved in the Pearl Harbor attack, but we fought against Germany nonetheless. By the same token, Iraq may well end up being part of this conflict because it is now too dangerous to ignore any longer. (That's a possibility, not a certainty.)

But the immediate reason we fought Nazi Germany was that Hitler (somewhat inexplicably) declared war on us, not the other way around. Even if Hitler hadn't declared war on us, he was already at war with a key ally, England, so we'd have had sensible grounds to intervene. So I concede that if Iraq declares war on us, or if it attacks England or some other ally, we should bust them up. But obviously, that's quite different from a pre-emptive attack or a declaration of war by the U.S. on Iraq.

I'm not trying to score little points here, I just think Steve's particular analogy is weak. I continue to think that "international support" is best when you want to start a war, as opposed to when you defend yourself. Otherwise, the U.S. would be seen as an arbitrary tyrant of international affairs, starting wars as it pleased on grounds known only to itself. That may work for us for a short while, but soon we'd be earning ourselves more enemies than we'd defeated.

=====
Update: Steve responds, I respond to that. See above. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:11:00 AM -- |    

 

Bin Laden on tape: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties"
DoD News: U.S. Releases Videotape of Osama bin Laden: Text (Acrobat file), Video.

UBL: (...Inaudible...) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (...Inaudible...) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gasin the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.[...]

UBL: They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: be patient.

UBL: The difference between the first and the second plane hitting the towers was twenty minutes. And the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon
was one hour.

I never would have thought there'd be a tape like this; what a bunch of clowns, for all their murderousness. I wonder who the video was for? It seems so boring; maybe it was the "Shaykh's" souvenir? ("Yup. I sat right next to him; we talked about the Trade Center and *everything*. What a guy. That's me!") posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:06:00 PM -- |    

 

Ivory tower watch
From The New Republic: Franklin Foer reports on the Middle East Studies Association's annual meeting in mid-November:

September 11 may have dramatically altered the global order, but it hasn't altered MESA's worldview. In San Francisco, presenter after presenter referred to "so-called terrorism" or "terrorism in quotation marks."

As Foer notes, this matters; these guys could have been producing "the scholarship on Islam and the Arab world that deepens our understanding of the terrorists." But obviously not if they don't think there are any.

Sidebar:
MESA turn-ons: Edward Said. His book Orientalism is "almost Koranic in its prestige."
MESA turn-offs: Martin Kramer, editor of Middle East Quarterly, not surprisingly, for his book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:10:00 PM -- |    

 

War aims, emergencies, extraordinary measures
So far, so pretty good in the war against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, and their Taliban lackeys. But as that war appears to near the end of its Afghanistan phase, it's time to carefully consider our war aims before barrelling onward. Aside from my perhaps high-falutin' foreign policy reservations, there is a second kind of reason to resist the temptation to widen the war: concern for our rights and our system of government. In an article in The American Prospect, "The Unending War," Robert Reich argues

On the one hand, the White House describes the war as one without obvious end. [...] On the other hand, the war is also described as a national emergency ... It is also understood that a wartime emergency may require extraordinary measures, including some abridgment of freedom at home[...]

But emergencies are temporary; extraordinary measures are not ordinary. Banana republics routinely declare "emergencies" that end up being permanent, but American democracy doesn't work that way. Regardless of how popular a war might be initially, a state of emergency cannot continue forever.

At some point, our war aims will have to be specified with greater clarity, and emergency measures will need to be delimited. The White House will have to provide us with criteria for how we will know when we have won the war and how we can gauge progress along the way. Indeed, the longer and more ambitious the war, the more important is such clarity.

Now, I've exercised some editorial discretion here, sidestepping some familiar bleats about "no one dares question" etc. Trimmed of such baggage, I agree with Reich. While I don't agree with Jacob Weisberg that there is no value to public discussion and dismissal of shopworn ideologies, or that there aren't plenty of leftish misconceptions to clear up, I may share with him a feeling that there are more important things to do now: we need to look forward and decide what it is we hope to accomplish, and at what cost to our freedoms and system of justice.

Steve Den Beste and others see a wide array of enemies, and, if I may summarize, seem to want to capitalize on our momentum and vanquish them as well. But I think that by adding countries like Iraq to our to-do list, instead of focusing on Al Qaeda havens in Somalia, Sudan and/or elsewhere, we would dilute our efforts and prolong the emergency we seek to end. This administration has surely proven it's able to wage a war, but I distrust its attitude towards civil liberties and towards working within the checks and balances of our republic (however "unfortunately" Democratic its Senate may be). Ashcroft's Senate performance was that alarming to me, the manipulations in Florida and by the Supreme Court are still that fresh in my mind.*

Way, way back in late September (it really does seem a long time ago to me), Matt Welch wrote a good piece, "Keep Hope Alive", urging dispirited "lefties" -- but surely the rest of us as well -- to formulate war aims. I'm not sure any of us ever adequately followed up on that. I think it's high time we did; before we settle into a permanent state of war abroad and emergency at home, let's at least decide that's what we want, and why.

=====
* As ever, this is based on my view that Iraq has not been persuasively shown to be involved in the 9/11 attacks, or in ongoing support for Al Qaeda. I may be mistaken about either point; if sufficient evidence exists, we should make war on them until their rulers fall. I also assert, by the way, that Gore would have risen to this occasion as well -- and, if so, surely for many as unexpectedly -- as Bush did. We might be a few weeks behind Bush's schedule militarily, and have a few more carefully limited domestic anti-terrorism measures. The United States is strong as a nation; its leaders contribute to the margins and guidance of that strength, not to the substance of it. No matter who was elected president, we'd be at war now, and at war to the finish. Thus I'm not at all inclined to view Bush's election squeaker as the "Miracle of Midway" event that (fellow Gore voter!) Steve does.

Update: Steve responds. posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:47:00 PM -- |    

 

Cloning followup
Several days ago, I suggested ("Cloning debate continued here") that full term (better term: reproductive) cloning would involve an ethically unacceptable level of failure and experimentation. A detailed article ("In Cloning, Failure Far Exceeds Success") in today's New York Times Science section, by Gina Kolata, supports that suggestion to some extent:

[Dr. Dominko, attempting to clone monkeys,] left a year ago, with a cloning portfolio that she calls her gallery of horrors. After three years, and about 300 attempts, the best she got was a placenta with no fetus. Most of the time, she saw grotesquely abnormal embryos containing cells without chromosomes, where the cell's DNA resides; or cells with three or four nuclei and one time even nine; or cells that looked more like cancer cells than the cells of a healthy animal.

Most of these researchers have concluded that routinely cloning animals or growing human embryo clones long enough to extract stem cells could be years or even decades away, and Dr. Dominko said her experience with monkeys might tell why.

She said her work suggested that even if researchers could grow human embryo clones to the blastocyst stage, the stage of development occurring when stem cells arise, most of the blastocysts might be unusable. The embryos may have few stem cells, and the few that are present may have abnormal chromosomes. [...]

Dr. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly, a sheep that was the first animal cloned from cells of an adult, said at the meeting that there were as many species in which cloning failed, as those in which it succeeded. While scientists have cloned sheep, cattle, mice, goats and pigs, no one has been able to clone rabbits, rats, cats, dogs or monkeys.

"Even the same teams that succeeded with other species failed with these," Dr. Wilmut said.

In general, he said, just 1 to 4 percent of cloning efforts in the species where it has worked results in the birth of a live animal. That, he said, indicates that cloning appears to create serious abnormalities in almost all embryos.

Cloning techniques will doubtless be refined. But the article suggests that the critical prerequisite for most successful cloning efforts appears to be a plentiful supply of eggs to fail with; techniques to date appear to have been refined more by gradual trial and error than by theoretical insight followed by experimental verification. While the current research focuses on early, blastocyst stage embryos, I see no reason to expect better success rates at later (5, 6, 7, 8-month) developmental stages, let alone the near-certainty of success I believe one ought to demand -- at the first attempt -- for the prospective babies involved.

Maybe this is not in dispute among the public or those of you reading this blog. Sorry to bore you if that's the case. I solicit your opinions (especially but not only informed ones) on this topic. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:25:00 AM -- |    

 

James Fallows and Walter Mead discuss "Special Providence"
James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly has identified a book worth having a look at: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, by Walter Mead. In what has already proven to be an interesting discussion ("Policies of Power"), Fallows and Mead explore the idea that the United States may be among the best practitioners of great power foreign policy in history, for the very reason it has sometimes been assumed to be the worst: its democratic, "unsteady" foreign policy. From Fallows' introduction:

Essentially it begins with the claim that everyone has the wrong idea about how the U.S. makes foreign policy—journalists and politicians, historians and diplomats, foreigners and good wholesome American citizens. Virtually all of them, as you present it, make the mistake of thinking that the United States is bad at foreign policy. [...]

But the main surprising point you make, it seems to me, is that far from being the buffoon of the diplomatic world, the United States is actually its wily champion. We stumble and bumble around—and somehow we end up being the one that keeps getting its way, whose culture keeps getting exported, whose power seems only to grow.

From Mead's reply:

My argument is that democracies do better than expected ... because the national policy that emerges from the clash of interests and ambitions within at least some democratic states over time and on the average gives a better reflection of the true national interest than policies made by small, isolated elites who inevitably often mistake their own class or economic interest for the general interest of the country.

Mead identifies several competing schools of thought in American foreign policy ("Wilsonian", "Jacksonian", etc.) each of which is briefly in the ascendant before being overtaken by events and newly elected administrations. The book looks interesting, and the discussion is free. Both seem worth reading. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:25:00 PM -- |    

 

No, what's new is that Bin Laden thought that was funny
From the New York Times today, Tape Surfaces With Remarks by bin Laden:

Administration officials say they have read transcripts of the amateur videotape, which the White House is debating whether to make public, and that Mr. bin Laden seemed amused that many of the hijackers in the attacks apparently had not known they were on suicide missions.
"He suggests that they just thought they were involved in a conventional hijacking," one administration official said today.
"There is a lot of laughter on the tape," he added. "What's new is the notion that some of the hijackers didn't know they were going to die."

Compare also another item in the same edition, Jihad's Lost Battalions Mourned by Pakistani Kin:

(Syed Zaffar Saghir, disillusioned supporter of Sufi Muhammad, an Islamist Pakistani rabble-rouser now in jail): "So a lot of innocent people have died, and Sufi Muhammad and other religious leaders are responsible for this. They sent people who had no training whatsoever to war, and then they stayed back in Pakistan. They are still alive, while so many others have died."

The second report says some 2,000 to 3,000 men from a single Pakistan valley north of Peshawar are still missing -- of the at most 15,000 or so men who left for jihad in October.

Two articles confirming my impression of a latter day "children's crusade" and its Pied Pipers. It will be as important as any "psyops" in the ground war to use news items like these to utterly discredit Islamicism in Pakistan and beyond. Maybe Israel should just leaflet the West Bank with the simple message, "They laugh every time one of you blow yourself up." posted by Thomas Nephew at 3:43:00 PM -- |    

 

I still don't agree with Den Beste on Iraq
Today Steven Den Beste writes (about this Alan Judd article in the Telegraph, "Supposing bin Laden was Saddam's junior partner"):

Iraq has to be dealt with because of its potential danger, and for that it isn't necessary to demonstrate that the danger has actually manifested. All that's needed is a plausible demonstration that there's a significant probability that it could in the future, and of that there is no doubt whatever. Like so many commentators on this war, they're still fixated on this war as being intended for revenge and retaliation for prior attacks, rather than to prevent future ones.

First off, I want to quickly take care of the final sentence above: I absolutely see the primary purpose of this war as preventing future attacks. Although I'd also argue that retaliation in and of itself helps deter such attacks by other groups, the main thing here is finding and killing or otherwise neutralizing Al Qaeda troops, leadership, and allied organizations.

On to the meat of his remarks, and I'll try to be as brief as Mr. Den Beste was. Basically, I think that not only "plausible demonstration of future danger" is needed -- no argument, Iraq is definitely dangerous, and is likely getting more so. The additional requirement is how to distinguish Iraq, in this respect, from any number of other countries that are also plausibly dangerous in the future. Repeating my old list, these include Pakistan, North Korea, China, Iran, Libya, and no doubt other countries as well. Without a well-defined doctrine that defines exactly how Iraq is different from these countries, a war on Iraq for this reason would be a declaration of war on any similar country. I believe even our most loyal friends could not support that kind of carte blanche; we would pay a heavy price diplomatically, strategically, and militarily for arrogating that right to ourselves. Defining such a doctrine may well be the diplomatic order of the hour, but it has not yet been done, and for it to be accomplished, we must truly consult with our friends and even with the United Nations. Otherwise we arguably become something of a "rogue state" ourselves.

I offer this rejoinder in the spirit of our previous amicable exchanges on this topic; I also take this opportunity to thank Mr. Den Beste for the challenging honor of being included in his short link list. I welcome all comments, either by the "comment" link or by e-mail. If the latter, let me know whether you mind being quoted.
=====
Edit: "an open-ended declaration" to "a declaration." I just felt shorter was better; I note it here because Steve cited the 1st version in a quick response. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |    

 

What he said
In clear violation of my own weak blogger/journalism conventions, I will simply link to this wonderful post by James Lileks without "value added" commentary of my own:

Sometimes I have to put on earmuffs when I read the wires, because the blood shoots out my ears and gets alllll over the walls. It happened tonight when I read another defense of Johnny Walker, the Hairy Taliban from Marin County - this time it’s a column by Glenn Sacks in the SF Chronicle.

It just gets better and better. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:28:00 AM -- |    

 

John Ashcroft is a big fat idiot
There, that will get me plenty of Google hits, I hope. Now that you're here, go see Patrick Nielsen Hayden's "Electrolite" blog, where he assembled a superb who's who, from Andrew Sullivan to Jacob Weisberg to Matt Welch to Jimmy Carter to himself, of thoughtful and scornful negative reactions to Mr. Ashcroft's policies and Senate appearance last week.

Lest we forget, here are Ashcroft's own words again:

To those [...] who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil."

Mr. Ashcroft's only long-term contribution to civil liberties may be as the poster boy for why we should never have given an inch of them away in the first place. I say this with regret and in self-accusation: I was too willing to let the rules be stretched a little, despite my opinions about Ashcroft (and Bush) in particular and about wartime and civil liberties in general. I think the tradeoff between security and civil liberties might theoretically be adjusted -- temporarily. I also acknowledge that reasonable people may decide differently how vigilant to be on behalf of non-citizens. But after his Senate appearance, I simply do not trust Ashcroft to make those adjustments or decisions. If he sticks around much longer, I'll have to reconsider the trust I've gradually placed in Bush -- and, as Matt Welch suggests, the trust I've invested in the Democratic Party.

Among the fundamental problems here, in my opinion, is that we are in an open-ended and ill-defined conflict. As I believe I've made clear, I support waging that conflict with ferocity, and let the BLU-82s fall where they may. Within a reasonable circular error probable. Overseas. But we don't have the advantage that wartime Americans usually have: this one may arguably never be "over." Had the administration put time limits on their measures -- with the possibility of re-enabling them with the consent of Congress -- rather than tying them to the current emergency, I'd feel somewhat reassured. Instead, the Bush administration and John Ashcroft seem to positively revel in their total control of the machinery of justice. They don't seem to care that they risk putting those dreaded ironic quotes around the word: "justice." Of course, the Supreme Court led the way there, why shouldn't the Bush administration it midwifed? posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:19:00 AM -- |    

 

Principle of ex-terrorism applied to ex-terrorist principal
The usually reasonable Matt Welch makes far too much (twice!), in my opinion, of an LA Times story ("School Expansion Is One More Milestone in Proud Progress of Little Armenia"), that waits until the 12th paragraph to mention that the school principal was involved in a plot to attack a Turkish consulate.

To me, the relevant facts appear to be that
1) the principal served his 2-year sentence for the 1982 crime.
2) he does not support that kind of revenge anymore: "I've been transformed," he said. "Violence is not the answer."
3) the story was about a school expansion.

According to Matt,

the importance here is watching how a newspaper can bury a shocking & fantastic lede – that a local elementary school principal is actually an ex-con who spent two years in federal prison on a charge of conspiring to blow up the Turkish consul in Philadelphia – under 12 paragraphs of pandering swill about how lovely our Armenian community is.

Now I happen to believe our Armenian-American community is lovely, doubtless influenced by the fact that I married a lovely Armenian-(Norwegian)-American. (Who has more or less patiently put up with my late-night blogging.) And I sympathize with the long-held frustration of that community that the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918 has been steadfastly denied by the Turkish government to this day. I invite any of you who are Jewish -- no, I'll invite all of you -- to imagine for a second your reaction if Germany were doing the same thing about the Holocaust. None of this leads me, my adopted Armenian-American family, or indeed any Armenians I know to support terrorism about this issue. Returning to the story itself, the principal in question apparently now agrees. Matt Welch himself buries his own worthwhile point that the principal

most likely has a very interesting story to tell about growing up. The Times, if they could recognize what makes a “story,” would have seen that as a fantastic opportunity, instead of an embarrassing footnote.

True enough. But did this story have to accomplish this goal? Is it not somewhat reasonable to report "school expands" without saying "under ex-terrorist principal"? And would it have been really fair to this man -- who, unlike Johnny Walker or Sara Jane Olson, is already punished and has apparently changed -- to make him the page 1 headline Mr. Welch seems to demand?

I agree completely with Mr. Welch's (and many other bloggers') well-expressed scorn for Johnny Walker and his various apologists. But by pretty much the same token, I don't agree about this principal. I'm not a journalist, I'm just a blogger, so I am doubtless missing the nuances of Mr. Welch's point. I don't doubt that there are downsides to Glendale/"Little Armenia," and I take Matt's word for it that the LA Times is underreporting them. But this school expansion, and I would guess even this principal, are not among such stories.

Sorry, Matt, I don't agree: I think the LA Times did pretty much the right thing in this case. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:17:00 PM -- |