Silver Linings - Any man's death diminisheth me. Nevertheless, I was struck by this story on Pakistan's International News site. The Pakistani Interior Ministry released a report on the impact of terrorism in that country over the last decade. Here's a passage:
...during the period 1990-2000 as many as 955 innocent persons were killed and 4,341 injured in 1034 incidents of bomb blasts. During the year 2000, it says, 110 people were killed while 569 were injured in 118 incidents of bomb blasts.
The first thing to note is a chastening fact for some of my fellow proponents of the "blowback" aspect of the September massacres on our eastern seaboard. Lots of countries are free, 'decadent' and full of spunky women,, goes the argument, but terrorists don't attack them. In fact, terrorists attack lots of countries, and many countries face far more terrorism (in number of incidents) than we do.
But get all bloodless and analytical about those numbers for a minute. 955 people died in 1034 bomb blasts. Bombs - big, scary exploding things - managed to kill about nine tenths of a person per kaboom, and injure slightly over four. The pattern holds for the Y2K numbers too. (Injuries increase to 5 per bomb.) Bombs.
50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center. Thousands more visited or shopped there at any one time. In the awful hours of September 11, we were told to brace ourselves for death figures in the tens of thousands. The current estimate is an order of magnitude fewer deaths. Early estimates of Pentagon deaths were above one thousand, revised to 800+ and turned out to be a couple of hundred. In the minutes and hours after the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Fransisco we braced for thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths in that stretch where the upper deck of the Expressway collapsed on the lower. It was a light traffic day and the actual toll was in the low hundreds.
Every one of those deaths was a calamity, in every one of those incidents. But there's a clear pattern here: it's never as bad as you think. We were told that Saddam had a million men in Kuwait, and we encircled them. I remember Norman Schwartzkopf's cease fire press briefing. What happened to all of those troops, General? His answer, included the statement, "There are an awful lot of dead." One inferred hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the "complete encirclement." In fact, the encirclement was far from complete, Iraq probably had considerably fewer troops in Kuwait than they (and we) claimed, and we seem to have deliberately let a bunch escape for fear that Iran might rush in on an undefended enemy. The US is currently under an onslaught using "weapons of mass destruction," with the death toll from anthrax under a dozen. During and after the Kosovo war, NATO's official "estimate" of ethnic Albanians massacred kept dropping, from 100,000 early in the fighting to 10,000 toward the end to "more than a thousand" as searches for mass graves proved fruitless.
There are cases in which lethality figures hold up, the Holocaust and Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture most prominently. (In each of those cases, those who had the correct figures came under vicious, sustained attack from politically motivated opponents. Still do in the case of the Holocaust. Those provide important cautions to minimizers.) But there is also an important sense in which those atrocities differ from the kinds of spasmodic violence that concern us here. Both the Holocaust and Stalinization were sustained, bureaucratic enterprises - murder as the Motor Vehicle Administration would do it. They are not much like commandeering jetliners or dropping smart bombs or even, and this is where I'm going with this, spreading germs around.
Aum Supreme Truth had Sarin on crowded trains and got fewer than 20 kills. We know about anthrax. This matters. I've seen articles claim that smallpox could kill tens of millions of Americans; I've even seen people put the figure above 150 million. I've also seen articles that say smallpox has a 20% lethality rate. This is a big, big country. I don't believe you can even expose half of its people to a germ, let alone kill them from it. Yes, smallpox is incredibly contagious. But people adapt to threat conditions. In gambling parlance, take the under. Do so also with Taliban civilian casualty figures and, if Pentagon press conferences get to the body count stage, allied figures on enemy military dead.
Guess You Had to Be There - There is a picture on the left hand side of the front page of my edition of this morning's Washington Post. It is a full-length shot of Michael Jordan being interviewed after a recent game. The only man in the picture, Jordan stands against the wall, hands behind his back. Huge bags of ice taped to his slightly bent knees. His head angles to one side. Two flanking, hand-held microphones point toward either side of his face. The photographer is Robert Reeder, and the picture establishes him as a genius. He need never take another and his posterity is secure. Because the picture is a stunning piece of iconography - its echo of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien is uncanny. The hands behind the back, as if tied, the body in pain, the pointing microphones like metaphoric arrows. Since Ralph Leahy's accompanying article chronicles the physical punishment Jordan's comeback decision has inflicted on his body, the "cycles of bad days and better days," the tendinitis, Jordan's unprecedented stoicism about his limitations, the correspondence deepens with the context. Camille Paglia would wet her pants over this.
Now here's the problem: you can read the article but you apparently can't see the picture. It does not accompany the online version of the story, nor does it appear anywhere else on the website that I can find. From this I draw two lessons: 1) You can't find everything on the internet; 2) Someone at washingtonpost.com goofed.
Get That Man a Blog! - While researching the Pakistani anthrax story (in vain!), I stumbled across columnist Kamran Shafi of Jang Group Online. This guy is great - droll, biting, cheerfully scornful of all that is illiberal in his country's politics. Deeply humane too. As a sampler, try "Hypocrisy, Oh Hypocrisy," dated October 20. Warning: jang.com.pk loads slow - at least, it does here. Shafi writes weekly and I'll be bookmarking him.
Anthrax in Pakistan - The first incidents seem to have involved US firms receiving spores via international mail, according to Pakistan's International News website. That story dates from 10/24, and references samples sent to a hospital for testing on "Friday last" - presumably the 19th. The more recent incident involves an envelope hand-delivered to the offices of The Daily Jang.
Someone hand-delivering a contaminated envelope in Pakistan is unlikely to be a member of a domestic US hate group. (I can actually think of a vector by which a US hate group could do this, but it has to rank pretty low on the possibility list.) So let's move al-Qaeda-connected terrorists back up the suspect list. Now tell me: What are they thinking?
They Say that a major aim of al-Qaeda is to separate Pakistan from the US and "Talibanise" it, depriving the US of a staging platform for the Afghan war and either a) grabbing some Pakistani nukes, or b) provoking some combination of the US, Israel and India into using force to grab the nukes first. Our Enemy - whether it is the Taliban, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or a combination - either gets nukes or the propaganda victory of all time. But invoking the sacred Unqualified Offerings principle of Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM), the Germers seem, on the face of it, to be trying something very stupid - inspire Pakistanis to support you by attacking them. Bombing people doesn't make inspire them to support you. Flying occupied planes into occupied buildings does not encourage a country to soberly reflect on its foreign policy. And I can't think that launching germ warfare on your fellow muslims is going to convince them that you're the folks they want to team up with. The Pakistani anthrax attacks can be explained by the "The Terrorists Are Stupid" theory, but I still resist TTAS, because from here the campaign against America looks like pretty effective economic warfare so far. So what is going on?
Naked Emperor Sighting - Washington Post movie reviewer Stephen Hunter is right about almost everything - politics, movies, you name it. He keeps the streak going in today's edition, with an article about how 2001: A Space Odyssey...sucks.
Stray Thoughts on Bellicose Soccer Moms - Yes, middle and upper-middle class white women with children are big on the war and hot for revenge. But is this really playing against type? These are the people who made a folk hero of Janet Reno because her underlings burned dozens of people to death, and because she sicced the big dogs on those swarthy Univision refugees. Soccer-Maternal Bellicosity has its dark side.
Gene Callahan Points Out that it is okay to complain about the progress of the war - if your program is that we need to add more enemies to the list more quickly and use force less discriminately. William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer this week moaned essentially the same moans about "bogging down" that one has heard from leftist and libertarian skeptics. But it's apparently not "disunity" or "defeatism" if you're undermining the administration from the hawkish side. I've been meaning to write about this, but Callahan already did it.
Halloween Postmortem - Reports on the level of Halloween activity this year vary from region to region and blog to blog. Here in Silver Spring, just across the Beltway, traffic was definitely down on our block. A fraction of the number of kids of all ages compared to last year - I thought about a third, though a neighbor believes it was more like a fourth or less. And while there was definitely a dropoff in tykes, I think there was an even bigger dropoff in older kids, the high elementary and middle-school ages. That probably makes sense: They're the kids who are aware enough of the news to scare themselves silly about it. Meanwhile, that e-mail chick's Afghan boyfriend seems to have gotten sidetracked on his way to the mall.
Pre-Correction Newsflash - The USA Today website has a story saying that the Saudis have finally frozen terrorist-connected financial assets. Or that they've agreed to. Or that the Gulf Cooperation Council has agreed to do so, and Saudi Arabia is a member. Or something. The story lacks even a single quote from an official Saudi source on the subject.
Asked whether the Saudi government had actually blocked assets, Gurule replied, "I think what's most important is cooperation." In some cases, it may be more desirable to keep bank accounts open and monitor them as part of an investigation, he said.
Prediction: It will turn out, over the next days and weeks, that the Saudis haven't done a thing.
The Vodalus Approach - In which we offer a real conspiracy theory.
So Prince Abdullah wrote President Bush in August suggesting that "a time comes when peoples and nations part." This site and others have kicked the Saudis around for quite awhile now, and folks ranging from the peacenik right to prowar types across the spectrum have suggested that the US should dump the ungrateful bastards. The irony is supposed to be that if bin Laden hates anyone more than the US, it's the Saudi royal family, and he'd make short work of them in our absence.
It hit me this afternoon: In Gene Wolfe's fine novel sequence, The Book of the New Sun, the Autarch (absolute ruler) of the Commonwealth faces an internal enemy, the rebel armiger Vodalus, aka "the liege of leaves." But as the Autarch makes clear to Severian, New Sun's protagonist, he knows pretty much everything there is to know about Vodalus' organization and leaves him and it in place. Because Vodalus exists, all opposition gravitates toward him, which makes threats of sedition that much more manageable for the Autarch. When Vodalus dies and Severian ascends to the Autarchy, his enemy and former lover Agia takes over Vodalus' organization. Vodalus' "rebellion" functions, tacitly, as an auxiliary of the Commonwealth government.
Are we starting to make a connection? Consider this: bin Laden tells his followers not to attack Saudi Arabia's oil production facilities because they represent "the wealth of the people" that he'll see gets redistributed when a just regime takes power in Riyadh. That's an awfully convenient sworn foe to have if you own that wealth, eh? And I realize Americans don't get comprehensive international news, but - you hear about bin Laden blowing up Khobar Towers; you hear about bin Laden blowing up the USS Cole. But has his organization struck any serious blow against the government in Riyadh? Killed any Saudi ambassadors, kidnapped any princes, bombed any ministries? al-Qaeda has proven its ability to commit violence on the penninsula generally and in Saudi Arabia specifically. You'd think someone sworn to bring down the regime would get to it.
On the other hand, you'd think an "official opposition" might do exactly as bin Laden has done.
Justin Raimondo Writes Mad, which means that his columns not infrequently contain cheap shots and even, on occasion, spittle-flecked incoherence. But he frequently picks deserving targets. Today's demolition job is on John McCain, who remains one of the scariest people in public life. I have long thought that, if you lacked the time to follow current events closely, you could do pretty well just finding out where John McCain stands on an issue and taking the opposite position. From campaign finance reform to the war on drugs to the regulation of "ultimate" fighting, McCain has a flawless instinct for finding the most authoritarian and least workable view. Raimondo specifically takes out after McCain's wrongly praised op-ed of last weekend. His focus on one particular part is deadly accurate:
A peculiar sub-theme of McCain's appeal to bloodlust is the idea that war and diplomacy must conflict. "We cannot fight this war from the air alone," he avers. "We cannot fight it without casualties. And we cannot fight it without risking unintended damage to humanitarian and political interests." Say, what? War, as the saying goes, is the continuation of politics by other means. So a war that damages the political and diplomatic interests of the US in the region is, by definition, self-defeating.
When peaceniks have to remind warmongers about Clauswitz, warmongers need to take a deep breath. Note that Raimondo is no pacifist and is all for retribution against bin Laden and the Taliban. (As is Unqualified Offerings.) But he's fierce against calls to promiscuously widen the war. UO will be giving him the Bloomwatch treatment at some point. But not today.
The Three Men I Admire Most, They Caught the Last Train for the Coast - Instapundit approvingly quotes Michael Barone approvingly quoting Orwell as follows, writing during World War II: "When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?" I have greatly admired Instapundit, Barone and Orwell. That makes the entire citation sequence too depressing for words.
No! A European peacenik on a music-related mailing list I subscribe to nevertheless writes: "I agree that the atrocious Taliban regime has to be taken down, on account of all the things you stated (and then some). I also agree that the Taliban donīt give a shit about civilians being killed...NATOīs goal is to take down the Taliban regime, "rebuild" the country, have open elections and a democratically elected government. Letīs all hope they reach this goal without the senseless killing of innocents lives."
I sure hope that those are not NATO's goals, except for taking down the Taliban regime. In fact, not only must they not try those other things, it's vital that the US and Britain foreswear any interest whatsoever in rebuilding Afghanistan and reforming what passes for its political system. One of the problems with imperialism, neo or classic, is that it gets you coming and going. First, you piss people off when you mess with them. Then they get used to expecting you to solve all their problems for you and get pissed when you don't. If we let the idea get around that we somehow accept responsibility for the political shape of Afghanistan's future, then South Asians and others will get all huffy when any aspect of the "solution" turns out not to their liking. (As it must.)
Not just our mission but our declared mission should be, "We are going to destroy the Taliban because they turned their country into a platform for violence against us. That done, Afghans can do as they like with the mess the Taliban's actions left them. Our own interest is at an end. But if the next Afghan government makes itself an enemy of the United States, we'll be back."
The Enemy of My Enemy Is In Trouble! - Mickey Kaus links to the Washington Post's account of the last days of Afghan rebel Abdul Haq. Stuff That Should Not Be News to Anyone: Haq's pre-capture reports make it clear that, as other sources have claimed, the bombing is galvanizing support for the Taliban and anger at the US among the Pashtuns in the south and east. This is what bombing always does and always has. Any planner or decision maker who tells you that a bombing campaign will demoralize an enemy government and inspire the locals to overthrow it needs to be shuffled off to a sinecure at the Weekly Standard. There may be good reason to bomb someone, but inspiring the bombed to support you is not one.
Haq's relationship with the CIA was ambiguous and his relationship with Pakistan's ISI, an organization that practically qualifies as a "root cause" of terrorism, problematic. But there's a certain whiz bang factor in Haq's end:
Besides, Ritchie said, the witnesses reported that Abdul Haq had already been captured by the time the bomb was dropped. He said more than four hours elapsed from the time Abdul Haq's companion called Peshawar and the moment the bomb was dropped.
"Ritchie," a Chicago millionaire is described as a "one of Abdul Haq's close associates." Here is what happened in "four hours."
- Haq gets thrown from his horse when ambushed in a canyon.
- A member of his entourage calls Peshawar on a satellite phone. Ritchie is "summoned." (The article doesn't make it completely clear whether he was in Peshawar or Chicago.)
- Ritchie calls Robert McFarlane of Iran-Contra fame.
- McFarlane "contact[s] the military."
- A suddenly appearing surveillance aircraft pinpoints Haq's location.
- "Two U.S. jets bombed a vehicle convoy spotted on a road several miles away." (And the "ineffective bombing" theme recurs.)
Well, I don't mean you can. But some people can.
Badgers of Honor - Cynthia McKinney says she'll wear the scorn of her critics like a badge of honor. Last time I remember a politician using that phrase was Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debates. I didn't like it then, either. Now, I was a partisan Democrat in 1988 and I'm a libertarian now, so maybe they each caught me at a bad time. But using the "badge of honor" thing non-ironically constitutes awarding yourself a medal. Even figuratively speaking, that's hard to take.
The Age of Reason - Instapundit made the reasonable and scientifically sound suggestion this morning that perhaps some of the anthrax traces they are finding in post offices and public buildings was there all the time. Anthrax is naturally occurring, in small enough quantities it doesn't do anything, and we haven't thought to look for it until recently. This is a reasonable theory, and even testable. (Look for anthrax in a bunch of public buildings where you are pretty darn sure the mail vectors wouldn't reach.) What I found on more than one occasion today is that it's a tough sell: "Are people dying?" a coworker retorted this morning. "Why does everything have to come down to a ridiculous conspiracy theory?" someone else asked.
The illogic of the responses is depressing. The reaction, abreaction really, is that if you say any anthrax just happened to be there when people went looking, you must be saying all anthrax just happened to be there.
This Just In! The sorts of people who call Pacifica radio stations are more skeptical of the war than most Americans. No, really! So says Jonetta Rose Barras in a column in today's Washington Post. Actually, what Barras says she's writing about is the greater skepticism of African Americans than white ones, but her examples come mostly from callers to her WPFW radio show and people she has run into at "receptions, dinner parties and public meetings" - presumably the sorts of receptions, dinner parties and public meetings at which a left wing radio talk show host finds herself. The article is worth reading, but mostly for reasons Barras can't have intended:
o The anecdotal evidence is drawn largely from callers to her show.
o Contrary to what she imagines, it doesn't establish a specifically black critique of the war at all. You've heard the same stuff from white leftists:
"The historical discussion is critical to what is going on," said one caller, named Anthony. "The Bush administration wants to set aside the Kyoto, the ABM treaties; his people walked out of the race conference [in Durban, South Africa] . . . . You can't ignore this stuff."
Kyoto and the ABM treaties?
o Then there's the very beginning of the article:
On Oct. 16, more than 200 people packed the moot court at Howard University's School of Law for a "black community national dialogue" on war, terrorism and peace. The participants had plenty to say about the military campaign in Afghanistan -- its antecedents and posthumous ramifications -- and much of it was critical.
Howard University's website tells us that Howard has 9000 undergraduate and 1200 graduate students and a faculty of 1700. I'm supposed to be impressed that 200 "pack" a teach-in? I suspect that when it comes to this kind of thing that a historically white university like Amherst can hold its own.
And at bottom, there's the non-anecdotal evidence Barras notes in passing: "More blacks than whites question or object to the so-called war on terrorism. According to a poll conducted earlier this month by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 20 percent of African Americans surveyed -- compared with 6 percent of whites -- do not support the president's military assault; another 17 percent of blacks -- but only 11 percent of whites -- are undecided." Add it up and 63% of blacks support a war effort led by George W. Bush, a man who got about every seventeenth black vote just last year. 20 looks a lot bigger than 6, but 94-to-80 - the "not opposed outright" percentage comparison, just isn't as impressive. The actual "support" ratio becomes 83-63. 20% is a significant disparity. But the very context Barras adduces, blacks' differential experience of America and American power - as University of Maryland professor Ron Walters says in Barras' article, "White patriotism is a patriotism of ownership of the state. Black patriotism is one of ambivalence; it is patriotism that has suffered." - and the very different levels of support for the administration that blacks and whites took into September 2001, isn't what's striking is how small the gap is?
If you are geeky enough, you can crunch the Pew data Barras provides, looking for both "support" metrics and "agreement" metrics. Here are some of the outcomes that fall out:
o Put a random African-American and random a Euro-American together. 55% percent of the time, you have two people whose opinions agree. The most likely "support" result is two people who support the war (52%). Those are outright majority outcomes. (2% of the time you have paired white and black undecideds, and once every hundred pairings you have two people united in opposition, most likely on a Pacifica call-in show.)
o In 12% of cases, the "black" opinion will be more hawkish than the "white" opinion. e.g. black support-white neutrality or opposition; black neutrality-white opposition. In 33% of cases, the reverse obtains - the white person "outhawks" the black person.
o It's this last outcome that is Barras' whole thesis and it crops up in only a third of all one-on-one black-white encounters. Interested parties are welcome to calculate a comparable "comity index" for other racial issues - affirmative action, welfare reform, mandatory minimum laws. I'm not going to bother, but I'll bet the CI would be much worse in each case.
Close Call - There was a second yesterday, the length of time to read a headline, when I was afraid I was going to agree with Ellen Goodman about something, thus blowing an unbroken streak stretching back to the seventies. Goodman's column, "Evil and Blowback," addresses the contending theories, or, if you want to get all postmodern, the competing narratives, about 9/11. It didn't take long for the danger to pass, though. Ginger Stampley complains about the idea that "somehow US foreign policy caused this, as opposed the idea that evil people could conceive of the idea on their own and enact it?" Ellen Goodman, it develops, hates both the evil people and the blowback explanations:
The truth is that I find myself homeless, a foreigner in the neighborhood of people who talk about evildoers and in the neighborhood of people who talk about blowback.
There's more. Way way too much more, but after all, Goodman has inches to fill. What it all adds up to is, first, one more attempt by a liberal to split unsplittable differences; second, the familiar preening faux oppositionalism of the coastal left taken to a higher power - Goodman is at pains to show us that not only are her sensibilities more refined than those of the hoi polloi, they are even more refined than those of her fellow lefties:
Standing like many Americans at the heart of this debate, while a cacophony of voices swirl around and inside me, I long for a simple argument, a simple solution. But I resist and resent the simplified arguments and the simplistic solutions.
Well that's good to know! In these dark times, America must ask itself, "Does Ellen Goodman resist and resent simplified arguments and simplistic solutions or not?" Because if we lose our first line of defense, not just Ellen Goodman's refinement but her exhibition of same, what hope for us?
Now here was the close call: I believe both the evil people and the blowback explanations. Each are necessary but not sufficient causes of what has happened. If the likes of WIlliam Kristol and Robert Kagan can use the word "imperialism" favorably when discussing US foreign policy, I can use it unfavorably. If the Ellen Goodmans of the world can call abortion bombers and even tax-cutters evil, I won't foreswear the term when talking about Mohamed Atta or "UBL," as the national security bureaucracy refers to bin Laden.
The danger lies, and I think this is what bothers Ginger, in the idea that to explain is to excuse - that if we identify Iraqi sanctions or US support for Pakistan's ISI as contributing factors in what was done to us, that that somehow means the hijackers were not evil after all. This danger is more than theoretical - we've read and heard entirely too much from people for whom US policies really do excuse the murders of 9/11. We are not talking about "moral equivalence" either. Neocons abhor what they call moral equivalence, but, properly considered, true moral equivalence is the only acceptable eithical standard for judging foreign policy and state violence. What we get from the anti-American left, at home and abroad, has nothing of equivalence in it; rather, any perceived US transgression from the Arbenz coup to the Kyoto abrogation utterly vitiates any American right to respond to the attacks of September or even to complain about them. It's ethical prestidigitation with "moral equivalance" used for misdirection only.
But to explain is not to excuse. The delusion that it does is an outgrowth of a historically recent movement, the therapeutic managerialism that goes, alas, by the trade name "liberalism" these days. The best argument for both the necessary separation and the necessary inquiry into explanations (including US policy) is by Gene Callahan, here. (Note that Gene Callahan writes for a fire-breathing website that will curdle the blood of many mainstream liberals and conservatives. If Unqualified Offerings can find any meaningful niche for itself, it is to bring you the best writing from organs you wouldn't be caught dead reading.)