a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Sunday, June 29, 2003 L.A.Jen and I were in Southern California last weekend for a wedding, and for some reason there were a lot of friends to visit with new houses and new kids. The ones with the biggest house (in East Hollywood) and biggest kid (Sean, at about nineteen pounds and nine months of age) were Greg and Molli McIlvaine. Greg has a well-read L.A. blog that includes some fine movie criticism. I've been reading it for months but for some reason never put it on the blogroll. That shocking lapse has been fixed.Also, Radio Free Mike is undergoing a redesign. As of this week the site will use more and more calaveras ornaments from the P22 Type Foundry. Oh — and today I'm reading from the novel at this cool event, around 6:30 p.m. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:42 PM Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Impeach Bush?I doubt it'll happen, but imagine how it might look to history: After squeaking through a contested election against a man (Gore) who would have lacked the necessary guts, Bush spends just enough time in office to topple Saddam and set Iraq on a path toward — well, something besides brutal tyranny — and roil other dictators in the region. But he does it through the usual Washington program of Machiavellian lies, and for these he gets toppled by an outraged Congress, proving that democracy in the U.S. is not dead. The mood around Radio Free Mike these days is cheerful pessimism, so we're not given to flowery praise, but most of us would forgive future historians for recognizing in that series of events the hand of God. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:33 PMThursday, June 12, 2003 Too Much of NothingA full raft of nice blurbs for the novel are in. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:47 AM Weapons of Mass whatever 2A pair of good arguments against people (like me) now singing in the “Bush lied” chorus can be found at Sullivan's site (ignore the Hillary post and scroll down) and Instapundit. I find them pretty weak. Instapundit dismisses the criticisms as "conspiracy theories," which they are not. He wonders if Bush's critics would rather see Saddam still in power. And he points out -- correctly -- that Saddam should not have resisted all those U.N. resolutions if he wanted to avoid a war. I agree with that last point: Legally, bureaucratically, Saddam earned himself an invasion. And of course I don't wish he were still in power. Everyone agrees he would have been a threat sometime, and not just to his own people. The criticism mounting now is about the U.S. military build-up: Was the White House honest, or not?This article (via Sullivan) gives a pretty good idea of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons program just before the invasion. Probably skeletal. Most of the actual poison was probably not there anymore. But the scientists and the infrastructure were in place to start things up again, quickly, whenever the U.N. chose to lift sanctions. "What the story shows," writes Sullivan, "is what we always knew: the issue was always the regime, not the weapons." True enough. But what the story also shows is that Washington hawks exaggerated the weapons threat in order to push through a war through on their own timetable. They lied, in other words. And if lying earns you the mistrust of the world or dark suspicions that you went to war for oil and not world peace, you damn well deseve it. Lying is also bad diplomacy. Most of us at Radio Free Mike were reluctant hawks before the invasion, and all of us are glad to see the back of Saddam. But we think the other hawks need to be humbler and less frivolous about this WMD issue. It was the stated reason for the war. The Radio Free Mike position may have been swayed too much by a propagandist named Laurie Mylroie, and other hawks need to admit that they may have exaggerated the weapons threat right along with the White House. History's answer to, "Why did we invade when we did?" will most likely be "Because the president wanted to" and not, "Because Saddam would have been a threat in the near future. " And by the way: Saddam's evil nature doesn't wash as an automatic argument in favor of war. That's just goal-post moving. Evil is an easy argument to trot out now that the risks of war are over and most of our boys are safe. It's also a red herring: No one I take seriously believes Saddam was not an obstacle to peace. (The Saudis are, too.) The people I take seriously are proud of their democratic institutions and don't cotton to lies from their leaders, which is what the Bush defenders are missing -- the damage this kind of exaggeration will do, not just to our democracy but to our credibility as a (terrifyingly powerful) world power. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:37 AM Monday, June 09, 2003 Salam Pax exposed!It's already a week old, but just to make a complete record of this blog, here is a hilarious and almost accidental profile of the real Salam Pax. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:08 PMSaturday, June 07, 2003 The Transcriptual FallacyJosh Marshall is on a roll -- in fact he's rolling faster than I can keep up with him -- and his latest coup is a bit of reporting that wonders whether that Vanity Fair interview posted by the Pentagon wasn't scrubbed of a few details. I can't help but notice that Glenn Reynolds, who was touting the whole idea of posting transcripts to fact-check articles exactly like the Vanity Fair piece, has maintained blogging silence. (Well, New York Times thing is a big story. But come on, Glenn.) Marshall's complaint is that the Vanity Fair story reveals Paul Wolfowitz to be a fan of Laurie Mylroie's -- as we've known and reported for a long time on Radio Free Mike -- as well as an Okalahoma City conspiracy theorist. Marshall thinks both theories are wild. He guesses the Pentagon deleted references to them from the transcript to keep Wolfowitz's wild notions from embarrassing the Department of Defense.I never thought those theories were wild, but then I'm no expert. And since Mylroie's story gave cover to the whole idea of invading Iraq back in September 2001, I want to see it aired and shaken, like a musty sheet. The Pentagon, apparently, doesn't. UPDATE: Or maybe it's Wolfowitz who doesn't. He seems to have spoken off the record about Mylroie. Long-time readers of this blog know I found Mylroie's theory compelling but not air-tight. I suspected out loud that it was a major unspoken motivation for the war, and wondered why it wasn't being analyzed and debated about on TV or at more length in the press. Even after the war, Wolfowitz is shy about discussing it. Why? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:01 AM Thursday, June 05, 2003 FCCI haven't blogged about this, because everybody else was, but bipartisan opposition to Michael Powell makes me happy. Here's something else Powell's FCC has done wrong. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:32 PMTuesday, June 03, 2003 Arabization of AmericaRichard Rodriguez had a good thing on the NewsHour yesterday about war as an intimate act. He talked about Spain, the New World, and conquered races mingling with their conquerers. He predicted that the Iraq war and occupation might mark the beginning of a long, slow Arabization of the United States. I was thinking the same thing last week in a totally different context. Roman emperors threw early Christians to the lions. After a few hundred years, Rome turned Christian. But which Christian "fathers" survived those centuries of persecution? Not the sane ones, not the ones who wrote the Gnostic gospels and thought of Christ as a metaphor. It was the fundamentalists, the martyrs who touted Christ's literal death and resurrection to glorify getting torn to shreds. (Some of them were terrorists. Eric Rudolph is one of their shriveled descendants.)So if America becomes the imperial power trying to keep Islam in check, then the most fanatic Muslims might become known as fathers and heroes to whatever brand of Islam survives until, say, 2350. Pure speculation, and maybe wrong, since Islam is already organized in a way the early Christians weren't. And the U.S. is a kinder behemoth than Rome. But Rodriguez is right: History has a way of turning on its poles, and if the future is defined for too long by radical Islam vs. American liberalism, is an Islamic United States completely out of the question? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:32 PM Monday, June 02, 2003 Too Much of NothingCan now be pre-ordered in Canada. What fun. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:51 PMTranscriptHere's the transcript of Wolfowitz's Vanity Fair interview. Read the whole thing. He's very reasoned and candid. No, we didn't go to war just to get our troops out of the Saudis' backyard, not quite. But focusing on those weapons of mass destruction was a "bureaucratic" choice, a way to get everyone on board. Machiavellian politics-as-usual. I picture Wolfowitz et al. sitting around a table, scratching their heads over what to do about a smiling, deadly problem like Saudi Arabia. "Well, you know, invading Iraq would be an easier sell..." And they were right. But is it good statesmanship? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:35 AM | |
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