and chief bottle-washer at Salon.com, had a momentary tryst with sanity post-Sept. 11, but he’s shaken it off and resumed his old Bush-bashing, censorious, and rapist-apologizing tricks. He’s on a rampage about the SOTU (Salon.com News | Axis of stupidity):
The fact that Bush and Frum — a conservative intellectual who should know better — were not widely ridiculed for this addled terminology is one more depressing comment on our slack-jawed media and political opposition. One of the strangest responses to Bush’s rhetoric came in Wednesday’s New York Times, from the normally sound-minded columnist Thomas Friedman, who while thoroughly rejecting the intellectual merits of the axis-of-evil worldview, nonetheless embraced its wacky spirit because it’s necessary to be “as crazy as some of our enemies.” And Al Gore, suddenly back from the Land of Nod, typically played it both ways in a New York speech on Tuesday, praising Bush for zeroing in on the odd trio of evil, but then covering his liberal base by deploring that other dark triangle, poverty, disease and oppression. It’s time to stop all this dancing around and call Bush’s speech what it is: a flight of idiocy.
Talbot’s so busy trying to convince himself of his own brilliance in this tirade he scarcely notices the first observation that would come to the mind of anyone just slightly less arrogant than Charlie Manson: “if all the people I respect are saying one thing, and I’m saying another, who’s likely to be right?”
Talbot invests great importance in his knowledge of global trivia, such as the historical relationships of Axis of Evil countries Iran and Iraq; he knows which varieties of Islam they practice, how long they fought with each other, where the Kurds live, their capitol cities and principal exports, and which has the larger quantity of “Democratic yearnings.” And he supposes that this trivia endows him with insight Bush and his armies of advisors lack, a very bad assumption but a central one to the enterprise of self-congratulation that’s the centerpiece of Talbot’s project.
Bush’s speeches — or the speeches written for Bush — do nothing to expand America’s knowledge of the world we live in. There is no nuance or complexity in the president’s political language, and perhaps in his mind, and of course the world is filled with it.
Isn’t that just the saddest thing ever written about an American president? Talbot’s watched too many episodes of “The West Wing” and believes presidents are college professors on sabbatical who are supposed to educate us instead of leaders charged with ensuring the safety of millions of people.
Bush sees the world in the black-and-white terms of the born-again fundamentalist that he is. He has vowed to root out evil wherever it is in the world (why not original sin too while he’s at it?)…
Only an idiot would be opposed to evil, or at all concerned about America’s enemies. It’s better, after all, to understand them and the rightness of their cause than to remove them from power as President Bush did the Taliban.
Nor is it to deny that, in the case of Saddam Hussein, America faces a dictator who is not only evil, but potentially threatening to our security as well, because of Saddam’s undying embrace of doomsday weapons and his record of using them, as well as his intermittent courtship of terrorists.
OK, Talbot, you can call our enemies evil, because you are virtuous and nuanced (how else could you have burned millions of investor dollars on a second-rate web site?) but the simple-minded, born again president can’t. I got it.
Talbot plays the old “We created our enemies” card on President Bush 41, trite as that canard is by now:
When Bush senior moved into the White House, he continued to support Saddam, ignoring his barbaric human rights violations and repelling congressional efforts to impose sanctions on his regime.
Talbot, my dear, if it were true that the United States put Saddam in power, wouldn’t that increase our responsibility for correcting our mistake by removing him? Of course it would, which is why the people you respect don’t play this trick.
The funniest part of this pathetic piece of character assassination is Talbot’s shopping list, the 12 “hard questions” he wants Bush to answer before he can play Jeopardy with Clinton’s man on the web:
1) Why is Saddam more dangerous today than he was 11 years ago when President Bush’s father decided to leave him in power?
Nobody said he is; the decision to leave him in power at the end of the Gulf War was a Coalition-inspired mistake.
2) The postwar sanctions and inspections imposed on Saddam did not completely stop him from continuing his doomsday weapons projects, but they did seriously hinder him. Most world leaders advocate escalating the pressure on Saddam to permit U.N. inspectors, who were thrown out in 1998, back into Iraq. Administration officials agree with this but have also announced that this step is doomed to fail so they are already pushing for Step 2, a military invasion. Why would Saddam comply with weapons inspections if the U.S. is already determined to attack him? Shouldn’t Step 1 be given more of a chance to succeed?
Enough is enough, genius.
3) Despite the administration’s strenuous efforts, no compelling evidence has been found to tie Saddam into the Sept. 11 attacks or last fall’s anthrax terrorism. Why, then, is Iraq being targeted in the war on terrorism?
Were you born yesterday? Saddam is threat, and he’s proved that over and over again.
4) Except for his war on Iran, which was fully supported by the West, and his invasion of Kuwait, which he initially thought was sanctioned by the U.S., Saddam’s atrocities have been confined to his own people. Why should we believe that Saddam, after being soundly defeated in the Gulf War, still has expansionist aims?
Duh, because all the evidence points to that conclusion, maybe? Surprising that Talbot, who knows what Saddam is thinking, doesn’t know this.
5) Saddam is, if nothing else, a survivor in the cunning mode of Stalin. Why would he risk the instant destruction of his regime by attacking the U.S. or Israel with nuclear or biochemical weapons? And with the West on high alert to terrorist threats, would he risk passing on these doomsday weapons to networks like al-Qaida?
Because he’s a maniac who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven? You need to watch more South Park and less West Wing.
6) If Saddam is backed into a corner militarily, however, and feels he has nothing to lose, some knowledgeable observers fear that he might launch a final, desperate doomsday weapons attack on Israel. How can this be prevented?
But you just said he’s survivor, like Oprah. Can’t make up your mind, can you?
7) Washington hawks claim that the Afghanistan strategy can be applied to Iraq, with the Iraq National Congress playing the role of the Northern Alliance. But the Iraqi opposition strikes many strategists (including some in the Pentagon) as soft from years of U.S.-subsidized exile, and woefully inexperienced on the battlefield. (The INC’s one military strike against Saddam, in 1995, ended in a disastrous rout.) Until Bush’s axis of evil speech, INC officials were kept at arm’s length from the White House, with one senior administration official dismissing them as “half-assed people who can’t get the president’s ear” and “pissants” who have never “smelled cordite,” according to a December article by the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh. Why should we have confidence that the INC can defeat Saddam’s military? Would American ground troops have to be put more in harm’s way than they were in Afghanistan?
Sorry, Talbot, but Clnton’s not the president any more, and his live-and-let-kill philosophy doesn’t govern foreign policy any more. There is a large and vigorous opposition to Saddam that goes all the way to the top of his government, and we aren’t going to have a hard time finding them.
8) The one group within the loose anti-Saddam coalition that does have plenty of battle experience — mainly from fighting one another — is the Kurds. But, according to a report in this week’s Wall Street Journal, Iraq’s Kurdish population — after years of savage repression and deprivation — has prospered in recent years, thanks to the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone in the country’s north and the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil money that has been funneled to the Kurds under the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program. As a result, they are not eager to plunge back into war and strife. Why should the Kurds take up arms against Saddam again and why should they trust the U.S. this time, when they have been betrayed more than once by Washington?
Kurds can tell the difference between Bush and Clinton, mainly. They may be illiterate, but they’re not stupid.
9) Neighboring countries fear that a war on Iraq would splinter the country and destabilize the region. Turkey fears a Kurdish republic in the north and Saudi Arabia fears a breakaway Shiite state in the south. How can the U.S. assure its allies that a post-Saddam Iraq would not be even more volatile?
Money.
10) Is the U.S. prepared to accept a democratic government in Baghdad, even if it is controlled by Shiites and tilts toward anti-American Iran?
Ask me when we get there, but didn’t you just say Iran has “democratic yearnings?” I imagine we’ll encourage them, and be happy when Iran’s New Democrats get funky with Iraq’s.
11) Given the meddlesome role that the U.S. and its principal ally Britain have historically played in Iraq — as well as Russian concerns that we are mainly interested in usurping their oil concessions in Iraq — how can we reassure the world that we are seeking peace and democracy and not simply the country’s resources?
Does it really matter what the French think? We can always give the gold medals, and they’ll happily surrender.
12) The U.S. has never demonstrated much concern for the health and human rights of the Iraqi people. Why should they believe another American-led war on their country will bring them anything more than further suffering?
Because we feel their pain, of course; what a silly question. What a silly pile of snarky, self-contradictory, and meaningless questions. Even for Talbot, this is weak.
The poor lad finishes with a flurry of “air” quotes:
The press is filled this week with Bush team tough-talk about Iraq. They’re telling the Los Angeles Times, with their typical swagger, that the Iraq problem is finally going to be “solved,” that “containment” of Saddam is no longer good enough, that the White House is ready to “push beyond the limitations imposed by international sentiment, Arab public opinion and even the original U.N. resolutions that opened the way for Operation Desert Storm 11 years ago.” Dick Cheney is going to lay the plan on them when he visits our Middle East allies next month. And if they or the Euros don’t like it, tough tamales. “At some point,” one administration hard guy informed the New York Times this week, “the Europeans with butterflies in their stomach … will see that they have a bipolar choice: they can get with the plan or get off.”
The United States has been “solving” the Iraq problem pretty much on its own for the past 50 years, with less than satisfactory results. Perhaps what’s needed this time is less swagger and more diplomacy — and yes, though it’s anathema in chest-thumping Washington these days, a worldly sense of the limits of American power. With its vastly superior military prowess, the U.S. could certainly go it alone in Iraq and other battle zones around the world. But do we want to be this exposed and solitary a player on the world stage? There are indeed many sleep-disturbing threats to America today — but one of them is the triumphal hubris that has taken hold of our leadership.
No, Talbot, the United States hasn’t been “solving” the Iraq problem for the last 50 years; we neglected it for the last 10, and that neglect got us in serious trouble, because it made every tin-horn tyrant in the Middle East think we’re a patsy. By talking tough, and acting tougher, Bush advances the first serious attempt to deal with Iraq since the start of the Gulf War. It was our membership in a limited coalition formed strictly to expel Iraq from Kuwait that prevented the president’s father from bringing down Saddam then, but the Black-and-White president with the born-again roots won’t make the mistake of tying our strategic interests to the whims of the European elite again. And you can take that to the bank.
Talbot’s article is Salon Premium Content, so I was only able to quote from it very selectively and in accordance with Fair Use guidelines.