Adding a Hitch To The Classics...

I had been meaning to add Christopher Hitchens' "Against Rationalization" to the "Classics" links over on the right. Done. Here's where he absolutely rocks:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

[Emphasis added.] It's a sad commentary when I find ornery Marxists to be better in alignment with reality than the Dems. And I agree with everything I bolded including the comment on Robertson and Falwell. But damn he can write, can't he? Imagine what a treat Hitch would be if he didn't have most of his brains cells tied behind his back from the sauce...

You don't think I mean it? Here it is again:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

And again:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

Got that?

WaPo On Current Iraq Intelligence Problems

Once in a while, one of the major lib dailies will actually print something critical about Iraq that isn't clearly riven with ideological bias -- here's one. When they do, I'll give them credit. This has the feel of reality even to an evil old war horse like me...

Dems Question Value of Debates ...

... try to wow audiences with sleeve-rolling competition:

Often, the candidates resort to stylistic nuance as a way to stand out. In the CNN debate, some candidates engaged in an off-camera sleeve-rolling competition during a commercial break.

Mr. Edwards, General Clark and Mr. Kucinich folded twice along the cuff. Mr. Gephardt folded his cuff in half and rolled it four times. Howard Dean rolled his sleeves up the highest.

... when they realize they respect their audiences too little to find anything of actual substance to talk about!

HYPOCRISY WATCH UPDATE: Oh, yes -- and how do you think Carol Mosely Braun felt about this little episode? Strongly included? Did she have any sleeves she felt inclined to fold? But don't you worry sonny, the Dems don't take their female and black votes for granted, no siree...

More Perspective...

... on the Rummy memo. (Hat tip to Andrew.) I never cease to be amazed by the size of the Orwellian "Memory Hole" that has completely gobbled up all historical perspective in our society. In fact, it can only be a short time at this rate until Orwell's writings themselves go down his own memory hole. Hmmm -- I seem to have stumbled on the theorem of the "Orwellian Knot"! And it's not in Google so it must be true ;)

Another Inquiry Into ...

French superiority -- at societal failure that is...

Memory Hole? What Memory Hole?

Lileks is dangerous today:

No,, I didn't have Cedras' name at the tip of my fingers; I googled. And found some interesting things. From the LA Times right before Operation Restore Democracy: “The Clinton administration won rhetorical backing from Caribbean republics Tuesday for an invasion of Haiti, but came away virtually empty in its attempt to sign up allies for military action to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power.”

Sound familiar? Incidentally, In his September 15 address to the nation, President Clinton declared that "Aristide has pledged to step down when his term ends... [in 1996]."

And he did. But heeeee’s back! It’s interesting to note that on Aristide’s bio page, he has this line:

On October 15, 1994, President Aristide triumphantly returned to Haiti where he completed the last sixteen months of his presidential term.

No mention of how he arranged this triumphant return, incidentally. You’re welcome, pal. [Emphasis added.]

And Then There's Victor Davis Hanson

I love people who can think clearly and write with a beautifully light but intellectually devastating sarcasm. Victor Davis Hanson is the world's heavyweight champion -- READ IT ALL.

For some reason Paris and Berlin -- and their American admirers -- think that the reconstruction of Iraq should be perfect in six months, despite the fact that European and U.N. efforts in the Balkans are not perfect after a near decade. Yet it is likely that Saddam Hussein -- on the lam for six months -- will be found more quickly than the odious Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic who, under very suspicious circumstances, are still in hiding inside Europe five years after their hideous regimes collapsed beneath American bombs. And will the Balkans under the U.N. -- 13 years so far since hostilities commenced -- achieve stability more quickly than Iraq under American auspices? Instead, when the post-9/11 war is all over, all of the dead -- Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis -- in the first two years of fighting will prove to be a fraction of those slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia during the decade of European non-fighting. We have seen the European new world order, and its pacifist and socialist utopia leads to Sbrenica and an August of mass death in France. [Italics the author's!; Emphasis added.]

Does French euthanasia-sans-anesthetic stem from the logical culmination of ecological activist myopia, lazy poverty or both? Or was it that they thought Grandma was an expendable priority compared to marching in support of Saddam? You be the judge...

And Kosovo still hasn't had elections!

Removing dictators and implanting democracies, after all, used to be just as much a Democratic idea as was the use of force to ensure national security in a world of dangerous and criminal tyrants. But now the sorry crop of would-be presidents resembles Republican antiwar contenders circa early 1939, who would have been outraged had we agreed to join Britain in stopping a nascent Hitler in Poland and France. We can imagine that the logic of the present hysteria would have led a Howard Dean and company in the dark days of early 1943 to hold press conferences damning those who got us into North Africa or the skies over Germany ("What do all these unnecessary B-17 deaths have to do with December 7?") -- especially when we remember that the catalyst of those counter-actions, Pearl Harbor, cost us fewer lives than September 11.

For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues -- the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home -- now hinge on America's efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians -- in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others -- are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States -- a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian. [Emphasis added.]

Even Amnesty International admits that Saddam murdered about 10,000 people a year -- and now the mass graves being uncovered suggest much worse -- not to mention plucking out children's eyes in front of their parents. Just assuming Amnesty's death rate alone gives us the proportionate equivalent of nearly a 911 every week being inflicted on the Iraqis by Saddam! And I have yet to see a war opponent admit this -- can you spell "intellectual bankruptcy"?

One Hot ...

Darren Kaplan today -- check him out on cellular jammers and Iraqi informants!

All Right-Thinking People Know That Bush Is In Bed With Saudi Arabia Of Course ... Not

The Post adds that Arab countries, with the exception of Kuwait, also are refusing to pony up:

"Yes, they are balking," one U.S. official said of the Arab states, as the American side continued to press hard for a breakthrough. Without Saudi participation, he said, it would be difficult to create a "snowball effect" among Arab donors. The Saudis are the " 'big brother' of the Gulf, [but] they have not helped in a constructive fashion," the official said.

This is hardly surprising, since a stable Iraq moving toward democracy would be an enormous threat to nearby Arab dictators' hold on power. (Hat tip OpinionJournal again -- I just added Taranto to the Links section.)

I never cease to be astounded by people who can simultaneously hold the thought that Bush/Cheney are completely in bed with the Saudis (oil of course) and completely in bed with the Israelis (Joooooos rule the world!). The elder Bush may still be tilted Saudi -- but something major has changed for GW...

More Hatred -- And The Big Lie About Israeli Apartheid Exposed

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, "distributed leaflets in Jerusalem on Wednesday threatening to execute Palestinians who sell their property to Jews or act as intermediaries in such deals," the Jerusalem Post reports:

"The Aksa Martyrs Brigades warn those thieves and traitors who are selling [Arab-owned] lands through Israeli real estate agents," said the leaflets, some of which were distributed on the Temple Mount.

This refutes the anti-Semitic lie that Israel is an "apartheid state." Whereas Israel has perhaps a million Arab citizens, Palestinian Arabs are willing to murder fellow Arabs in an attempt to ensure that the disputed territories are Judenrein.

(Hat tip OpinionJournal.)

And where did all those Arabs in Israel come from you ask? Some were local Muslims that were absorbed, but Israel absorbed the majority of the 800,000+ Arab (Mizrahi) Jews that were persecuted and expelled by the Arab countries before and since Israel's founding. All while the Palestinians were used as political pawns to divert attention away from the hovels of hate otherwise known as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Hussein's Iraq...

Whoops! Spoke Too Soon!

"If the war is to be lost, the nation also will perish. There is no need to consider the basis even of the most primitive existence. On the contrary, it is better to destroy it, and to destroy it ourselves." -- Adolf Hitler

"In the end, the German people were unworthy of living…they are not worthy of me… that is why I decided that they must all perish" –- Adolf Hitler

The penultimate definition of nihilism is summed up in these two quotes. And how does one get there -- just look to the previous quote...

The good news is that the far-left must agree by definition that Hitler is bad -- for if they don't they are by definition Nazi-sympathizers at minimum. And sure enough, their mantra is "Bush = Hitler". Keep an eye on where I take this...

Quote of the Day

"Hate, hate, and more hate. There is nothing that sustains you like hate!" -- Adolf Hitler

Do you really, really hate Bush? Maybe you should consider the company you keep...

Taking the Fight...

...to the enemy.

Well, Isn't It Obvious?

Looks like we have quagmires all over the place! I see Dick Cheney's fingerprints all over this one! Wait, there's a lot of light being reflected on the ceiling and it moves whenever my head does ... they're out to get me again... (Hat tip Instapundit)

NOTE: After my last few posts I had to lighten up a bit in case you haven't figured it out yet...

A Very Disquieting Account

of educated Muslim anti-Semitism via Andrew (scroll to "ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH") to offset the tiny slice of hope offered by "The Six Dilemmas of a Moderate Islamist". (Which has just been promoted to a "Classic" over on the right.)

Rummyflap Bleating

Lileks has the best analysis of the latest Rummyflap. As a manager myself, the idea of a manager not periodically (if not incessantly) challenging their reports is ludicrous and a sure path to failure. You can argue about style and technique -- but you can't argue it isn't necessary...

In North Korea Do They Burn Books?

Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned. -- Heinrich Heine

No. They're long past that point -- they don't allow them to even be published. But it's OK by us. (And we've completely forgotten the Islamofascist's hateful persecution of Rushdie.) A whole country built on the big lie:

The great mass of the people...will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one. -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

We tried to negotiate with Hitler. Luckily there were only 70 million dead from that farce. I fear we won't be so lucky this time -- Hitler didn't have nukes...

This just leaves me absolutely speechless...

My stomach is just absolutely nauseous right now because of this and this. The world doesn't really give a damn about slavery. It is a form of the utmost denial -- no, make that de-nihilism. You will hear much more about this from me but for now, act like a real human being and ask yourself why you don't fight this with every fiber of your being.

Child slave labor and multiple generations of families literally wiped out. That's all I can get out without wretching and I'm trying to keep my gaze fixed. Good God in heaven. The far-left Dems call Bush "Hitler" and then when you listen, you can't distinguish their rhetoric from Kim Jong Il.

Never mind the second Holocaust in progress in Israel. We have not learned the lesson of the first Holocaust:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me. -- Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller

They MUST Like Me...

Adam Kushner takes on Wesley's myopia. (Hat tip to Andrew.)

More on Hate: A Philosopher Takes It On

I've been following Keith Burgess-Jackson's columns on TCS. His analysis of hate in what passes for modern political discourse gets my MUST READ certification -- but with an asterisk.

I think he loses the bead a bit in his ending:

Unfortunately, some of Krugman's readers may unwittingly infer normative authority from his authority in the technical realm of economics. If he were honest he would disabuse them of this and never let them forget it. He would say that the values he expresses or argues for in his columns get no additional weight from the fact that he is an economist. When he plumps for a bundle consisting of high taxes and ample social services rather than a bundle consisting of low taxes and minimal social services, as he did in a recent New York Times Magazine piece, he is expressing a preference that has nothing to do with his economic expertise. At that point he has become a political player or ideologue. But then, if Krugman were honest rather than hateful, he wouldn't be writing about matters that lie outside his field of expertise to begin with.

I don't think the connection between hate and writing about things you don't know about is very strong. For instance, many would argue I'm always writing about things I don't know anything about and -- oh, dear -- time to go to bed before I make your point for you ;)

Positively Swimming...

...in "No Evidence". Must be more of those silly coincidences...

Not Exactly a "Fisking"...

But well worth the read from Michael Totten. Michael does a nice job of explaining that there's a whole lot more to the world than Bush haters and Clinton haters. There's lots of room for civilized disagreements on policy between left and right -- and the idea of treating either as static, simple or monolithic is one of the few "great mistakes".

The only good thing about hate is that it makes the haters suffer and waste their lives -- a small morsel of justice at least...

UPDATE: A reader response on Totten's site is kind of a fun read on the "labeling thing":

The whole thing is kind of stupid and is a way of the far left wing to label the supporters of the war. Its the same kind of demonization of saying you're a "zionist".

What the hell does any of it mean?

1) I support the war
2) I do believe we didn't plan well for the aftermath
3) I support reconstruction there fully
4) I support the State of Israel and believe the reason there is not peace and a right wing government is Arab Rejectionism, fluffed up any way you want it. Arafat wants a state or quasi statehood without making any final peace or concessions, he doesn't want a final agreement that will end the conflict.
5) I don't give a shit about Leo Strauss or Pat Buchanan or Jerry Falwell.

I know what I believe in and what I think. And anyone who thinks Hitchens is a Conservative in any sense of the word is delusional or that Trotskyites morphed into this. The "Trotskyites" or "Marxists" today are the most wacko fervent critics of Bush, America and Israel, I've been to their speeches. And Hitchens is a Marxist through and through except he's got some fucking common sense, on the almost Hitleresque oppression that was going on in Iraq.

Totten likes to somewhat wax poetic about Hitchens as a kind of lefty saint. Hitch is just a controversial, opinionated Marxist with some common sense, a British accent and a propensity to drink a lot of whisky.

If you want to read some reasonable Marxists, check Norman Geras's blog.

The whole labeling thing and history makes me somewhat nauseous to tell you the truth and panders to the Indmediaidiots that label the 'secret' "neo-con Jewish cabal" that planned out the making of history.

Mike

What's that you say? There's a link to Norman Geras on my blog? And links to Hitchens? Could it be that I like people who use their brains and not just people who always agree with me? Nah...

Krugman "Fisked" Alongside Mahathir

This is just a beautiful job of taking apart both Mahathir's comments and NYT columnist Paul Krugman's apologetics for him. Pointing out Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan as a counterexample to Mahathir is a nice and welcome touch -- but pointing out how the ethnic Chinese have been treated by the Muslims under Mahathir is really what they don't want you to know. Why? Because that would add evidence that all the problems the Muslims have aren't strictly America's fault... (Hat tip InstaPundit.)

Iraq From The Ground Level

Great post today from the "Healing Iraq" blog. Short and a must read -- not all roses but clearly more complex than the headlines you keep reading...

Department of Redundancy Department

At some point hateful bigots become self-parodies. I suppose I could learn to laugh at this if they didn't have such a strong tendency to instantiate their words -- usually sooner rather than later. Here's the Malaysian Prime Minister again (Hat tip to Drudge):

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad says his comments about Jews during a speech at an Islamic summit last week, which prompted harsh criticism in the West, had been taken out of context.

``In my speech I condemned all violence, even the suicide bombings, and I told the Muslims it's about time we stopped all these things and paused to think and do something that is much more productive. That was the whole tone of my speech, but they picked up one sentence where I said that the Jews control the world,'' he told Bangkok Post in an exclusive interview yesterday, which covered aspects of his 22 years as leader of Malaysia, as well as his straight-forward views on terrorism, democracy and US policy.

Dr Mahathir added, however, that ``the reaction of the world shows that they [Jews] do control the world''.

[Emphasis added.] Go back and read the speech again -- he does make good points -- if you want to call them that -- that Muslims need to modernize if they want to take on us nasty Jews. Well, if I was one. Umm, maybe if I take off my tinfoil hat it will lessen their control over me. Come to think of it, the top of Mahathir's head does seem a bit shiny in that picture...

Are You A Member?

I found OpinionJournal's take on Gregg Easterbrook's firing from ESPN for anti-semitic comments to be the most insightful:

Those who've commented on the Easterbrook kerfuffle fall, roughly, into two camps: those, like Foxman, who believe his original posting was an expression of classic anti-Semitism, and those who don't know what to make of it. An example of the latter is blogger Josh Marshall: "What Easterbrook said was weird and something a hair's breadth short of ugly. . . . Try as I might to explain to myself how Easterbrook could have unwittingly walked into such an unfortunate formulation, I still find it a bit difficult. What was he thinking? I go back and forth. I'm not sure."

Well, allow us to explain. Easterbrook's essay was an expression not of anti-Semitism but of a lesser, though still insidious, form of prejudice. Call it liberal condescension. This sentence from his apology reveals all: "How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun?"

"Members of a group": This is the language of liberal identity politics. And note that this is a philo-Semitic prejudice, not an anti-Semitic one. Easterbrook's premise is that the suffering of the Jewish people ennobles Jewish individuals--or should--even if those individuals have not themselves suffered. Thus he presumes to hold Jews to a higher moral standard by virtue of their Jewishness--though in fact all he's doing is asking them to agree with his highly debatable opinion (does it really make any sense to liken stylized Hollywood violence to the Holocaust?).

Ideologically, Easterbrook's earnest criticism of Jewish studio executives is of a piece with Maureen Dowd's racist rant against Clarence Thomas. Because Thomas is black, Dowd, like other liberals, expects him to conform to liberal orthodoxy and thus treats his conservatism as a far greater offense than that of, say, Antonin Scalia. This kind of prejudice may not lead to pogroms and lynchings, but it's divisive and often ugly all the same.

[Emphasis added.]

Why Is It Again..

That we allow this?:

Prince Bandar once told associates that he is very careful to look after U.S. government officials when they return to private life. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar has observed, according to a source cited in The Washington Post, "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office". Practically every deal with the Saudis eventually becomes hard to trace, lost in some desert sandstorm back near the wellheads where the money sprang from in the first place. Many of Washington's lobbyists, PR firms, and lawyers live off Saudi money. Just about every Washington think tank has taken it. So have the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children's National Medical Center, and every presidential library built in the past thirty years.

[Emphasis added.] Sorry folks, but when you go read the article (as you absolutely must) you will find both Demos and Repubs on the graft list. But let's just spend all our time carping about Cheney shall we? Ugghhh -- the simplisme...

This is an Atlantic Monthly excerpt from Robert Baer's new book "Sleeping With The Devil". AND IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE "Classics" LINKS OVER ON THE RIGHT.

The Beltway Sniper, The Saudis and L'Affaire Plame?

You will have missed some truly awesome emotions and head slaps if you didn't follow the last links through to Mark Steyn's piece. Here are some choice slices:

Infiltration-wise, that's also pretty good. The CIA say sorry, folks, the best we can do with all the gazillions of dollars we get is monitor phone calls from outer space. But the other side has no difficulty getting their boys inside America's most secure military base and principal terrorist detention center.

The Pentagon, of course, is taking this subversion of its chaplaincy program seriously. It's currently reviewing all its chaplains. By "all," I mean not just all the Muslim chaplains, but also all the Catholic, Episcopalian, Jewish ones. After all, it might just be another one of those coincidences that the chaplain detained for spying is Muslim and that the organizations that certified him are Muslim. Best to investigate the Catholics just to be on the safe side.

If the Democrats hadn't decided to sit out the war on terror by frolicking on Planet Bananas for the duration, they could be seriously hammering the administration on this.

...

Here's an easy way to make an effective change: Less Wahhabism is in America's interest. More Wahhabism is in the terrorists' interest. So why can't the United States introduce a policy whereby, for the duration of the war on terror, no organization directly funded by the Saudis will be eligible for any formal or informal role with any federal institution? That would also include the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute, whose "adjunct scholar" is one Joseph C. Wilson IV. Remember him? He's the fellow at the center of the Bob-Novak-published-the-name-of-my-CIA-wife scandal. The agency sent him to look into the European intelligence stories about Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium in Africa. He went to Niger, drank mint tea with government flacks, and then wrote a big whiny piece in the New York Times after the White House declined to accept his assurances there was nothing going on. He was never an intelligence specialist, he's no longer a "career diplomat," but he is, like so many other retired ambassadors, on the House of Saud's payroll. And the Saudis were vehemently opposed to war with Saddam.

Think about that. To investigate Saddam's attempted acquisition of uranium, the United States government sent a man in the pay of the Saudi government. The Saudis set up schools that turn out terrorists. They set up Islamic lobby groups that put spies in our military bases and terror recruiters in our prisons. They set up think tanks that buy up and neuter the U.S. diplomatic corps. And their ambassador's wife funnels charitable donations to the 9/11 hijackers.

But it's all just an unfortunate coincidence, isn't it? After all, the Saudis are our friends. Thank goodness.

[Emphasis added.]

Got that Coincidental Feeling Again...

This is why you need to keep an eye on InstaPundit. Links to another great Mark Steyn piece and also a story connecting John (Beltway Sniper) Muhammad to the Al Fuqra terrorist organization. I never bought the claptrap about it not being terrorism -- did you?

From the Cynicism and Contempt Department (of State)

I woke up this morning to the latest story of the State Department busily dissing the Pentagon and administration as ignoring their "Future of Iraq Project".

But what they don't want you to know is contained in this Frontline interview with Kanan Makiya -- this insider's view highlights their cynical propaganda play for what it is. READ THE WHOLE THING -- IT'S LONG BUT CONTAINS ENORMOUS INSIGHTS THAT YOU WILL NEVER LEARN IN CIVICS CLASS ABOUT HOW THE BELTWAY BUREAUCRACY REALLY WORKS. IT'S SO GOOD THAT I'VE ADDED IT TO THE "Classics" LIST OVER ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PAGE.

Check out this snippet:

You actually said to one journalist, "The enemies of a democratic Iraq lie within the State Department and the CIA."

I think that was correct. Yes -- I'm sad. It's very sad to have to say it, but the State Department and CIA have consistently thwarted the president's genuine attempt, I think, to do something very dramatic in this country. Fortunately they have not totally succeeded, and in some ways, the struggle is still on, although the situation has changed now inside Iraq. I mean, ever since the appointment of Paul Bremer, we have a very different dynamic now at work inside Iraq. ...


It is incomprehensible to most people, to understand, to believe that the State Department doesn't favor democracy.

It's not about favoring or not favoring. It believes in democracy for themselves, but it simply thinks -- I mean, people like myself get the impression from talking to State Department people that they don't think this part of the world is ready for it, or is up to it. They are in a sense too cynical; they're too embedded. They have diplomats who are too used to hobnobbing with sheiks and rulers of Saudi Arabia, and so on, to even imagine that something dramatically different is possible.


But there is no tradition of democracy ...

That is true, that is true. That is why you need imagination and you need a deep inner conviction that people, just because they are Muslims and Arabs, are not somehow obstructed from bringing about democratic societies. You need to be very firm, as people like Paul Wolfowitz are. As Arabs and Muslims, you need to believe in your heart of hearts that fundamentally it's both important and necessary to break the stereotype that just because somebody's Muslim or an Arab there is somehow an antithetical relationship to democratic values and culture, that somehow the religion or the culture is against that.

You make it sound like a form of racism.

That's how I would feel. It's certainly how I felt with many officials that I had to deal with in the U.S. government. By the way, it's even worse in Europe. It's condescension, and they treat you in the most condescending possible ways. Actually, when you see them work inside Iraq later on, you see this condescension change. You know, all of a sudden they like inculcating little NGO's. ...

[Emphasis added.]

Ah -- now that explains it!

Here's a snippet from this morning's Fox News interview with Colin Powell:

SNOW: One of your predecessors, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, was speaking this week with the French media, and she made the following comment. She said of the president, "Bush and the people working for him have a foreign policy that is not good for America, not good for the world." She says it's too much the United States versus the world. Your response?

POWELL: Well, I disagree with her. The United States pulled together a unanimous resolution in the U.N. this week. President Bush is here at the APEC meeting, having excellent meetings with his counterparts, a fine visit with our Japanese friends. You saw the images coming from Manila in the Philippines yesterday. You have seen him meet today with the prime minister of Thailand and with the president of China. All of these are solid relationships that we have.

And I disagree with Secretary Albright, who I believe is in France on a book tour. [Emphasis added.]