Bush gone off the deep end

Paul Krugman sees Bush as Captain Queeg. But unfortunately this isn’t fiction, and there’s more than one ship at risk.

Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush’s quart of strawberries?
Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies. There’s a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush’s policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn’t want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think — including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon — don’t just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America’s leadership has lost touch with reality.

for Germans, the end of a kind of self-censorship

In an article frustratingly inadequate for the subject, at least on account of its brevity (although it takes 64 inches of NYTimes typespace, including two excellent historical photographs), Richard Bernstein reports on a new German phenomenon.
After sixty years of virtual neglect in Germany, the story of what its civilians suffered at the hands of the Allies during World War II has now become a common subject of discussion at all levels of society, inspiring serious treatment in literature, theatre, film and television.

Ms. John, who witnessed the nighttime firebombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force on Feb. 13, 1945 — an attack that killed about 35,000 people and destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe — was doing what many Germans have been doing lately: talking about their own suffering in World War II.
For the last few months in fact, television has been showing endless documentaries and discussions of the air war waged by Britain and the United States against Germany in World War II. While this is not exactly a new subject in Germany, there are at least two ways in which the discussion is different from the past.
First, the emphasis in today’s articles and discussions is on what Jörg Friedrich, author of a best-selling book on the Allied bombing campaign, calls “Leideform,” the form of suffering inflicted on the German civilian population.
In other words, a taboo, by which Germans have remained guiltily silent, at least in public, about their experience of the horrors of war, has been suddenly and rather mysteriously broken.
Second, the new awareness of the Allied bombings and the devastation they wrought has become an important element in German opposition to the expected American war on Iraq. What people like Ms. Lang and Ms. John, both antiwar activists in Dresden, have been saying is something like this: We have direct knowledge of the gruesome effects of war and we don’t want anybody else to experience what we have experienced.

For an account of the literary side of this development, see, “War and Remembrance.” a review by Hugh Eakin in the current The Nation of two new books dealing with the questions of guilt and “guilt about having too much guilt.” Unfortunately the essay is only available in the print edition.

calling a plague a plague

A surprisingly mild-tongued Larry Kramer calls a plague a plague in the NYTimes today.

Why does no one have the courage to say loudly and unequivocally that 50 million people around the world are going to die in a matter of days or months or at the most a few years unless they are treated immediately with the life-saving drugs that are now available? I have arrived at this figure after conversations with many experts.
. . . .
When I first heard about what would become known as AIDS there were 41 cases of some strange occurrence. Almost 25 years later we have failed to mount a thoughtful, concerted effort to stop what is now this plague. We have failed to keep up any pressure. We have failed to outrage each other enough so that people in authority would have no choice but to do something.
For almost 25 years we had our chance to do something. Year after year, we blew it. AIDS tells us about the worst of America and the world. It tells us that people don’t care about others. It shows us over and over and over again that people can be allowed to die. It should break everyone’s heart. Why doesn’t it?

making the world safe for all kinds of terror

Via Electrolite, a serious look by Michael Lind at what the Bushites have done to global security.

The grand strategy of the Bush administration rests on three axioms: American global hegemony; preventive war; and the so-called “war on terror.” All three axioms are fallacies that inevitably produce counterproductive and misguided policies. What the great French diplomat Talleyrand said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien applies with equal force to Bush’s grand strategy: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.”

no kristallnacht yet, but we are warned

An alert from Adam Greenfield, via Kottke.org, that the U.S. may face a brain drain not unlike that which accompanied the Nazi consolidation of power in the 30’s. Ironically, 65 years ago, in spite of its own nativist immigration policies, it was the U.S. which was benefitting from repression.

America hasn’t had its Kristallnacht – yet – but even so the buzz around New Zealand in a few circles of my acquaintance is enough to put one in mind of the brain drain Germany bought itself in the mid- to late 1930’s. And as Florida might have it, if I were a smart politician just about anywhere on the planet – one interested in economic vitality and quality of life – I might be egging the Ashcrofts on. All those smart Americans will be looking to settle somewhere that supports and encourages them in who they are, and they’ll bring their truest assets, their creative minds, right along with ’em.

Ridge: Iraq war will increase terrorist danger

This is not a news story. It’s not even an interesting feature story. We all know this already and it’s definitely not entertaining. In fact, I’m convinced the only reason the White House and the NYTimes got together today on this one was to give me an excuse to post this item.

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge joined federal law enforcement officials today in warning that suicide bombings like those that have killed hundreds in Israel are inevitable in the United States and will be difficult to prevent.
His warning, in a television interview, came as Mr. Ridge and his department stepped up preparations to raise the nation’s terrorism alert level to “high risk” out of concern over the possibility of terrorist attacks linked to an invasion of Iraq.
In his interview with Fox News, Mr. Ridge said, “we have to prepare for the inevitability” of suicide bombings in the United States.

How can a war against Iraq be essential to American security, as the Bush crowd argues, if a war against Iraq will destroy American security? Is anyone in Washington thinking about this? Just ask yourself, whether you live in New York or, say, Tom Ridge’s home, Erie, Pennsylvania, do you have more to fear from Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” or the neighborhood suicide bomber?
On another note, let us all remember that, when the alert is raised to “orange” once again next week, a few days before a major national antiwar demonstration, as was done a few days before the February 15 rallies around the country, this will be only a coincidence.

silence equals death

Don’t be quiet.

JACKSONVILLE, AR — The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging officials at Jacksonville Junior High School over repeated punishment of a 14-year-old student for being openly gay. In a letter to school officials sent today, the ACLU demanded that the school stop violating the student’s rights and remove all unconstitutional disciplinary actions taken against him from his record by March 21 or face legal action.
In its letter, the ACLU said that school officials “outed” the gay student, Thomas McLaughlin, to his parents against his wishes and have since told him he must not discuss being gay while at school, forced him to read from the Bible and disciplined him for being open about his sexual orientation.
“My school forced me out of the closet when I should have been allowed to come out to my family on my own terms and when I thought it was the right time. And now the school has been trying to shove me back into it ever since,” McLaughlin said. “I’m through with being silenced, and I don’t want this happening to other gay kids at my school.”

The story. It sounds like fiction, but it groans under the burden of its truth, and it reminds us how far we still have to go before we can establish the basic rights of our sexualities, regardless of our ages. But years ago there would only be silence, and sometimes death. The story which came out of Arkansas yesterday would never have been heard. The victim would have had no defense. Today there is at least hope.
Another thought. First they outed him as a homo, then they persecuted him for being out as a homo. Oh, but it’s all not really important, since at 14 he’s only a child and he has no sexuality, right? But he’s not a child if he commits a major crime. Still, he is a child if he has sex, yet is not a child if he has a driving learner permit, is a child if he wants to drink alcohol. Any of this is still subject to change in different jurisdictions of course, and outside the U.S. there are entirely different stories. What’s the answer? I don’t think there is an answer which will satisfy every situation, every question. We might have to use our heads and begin to understand that we cannot impose our prejudices or even the huge weight of our statutes upon the truth represented by real human beings.

let’s not paint ourselves into a corner

U.N. resolution or not, this war violates international law. So argues Rahul Mahajan in an excerpt from a book on the U.S. war against Iraq.

The majority of the antiwar movement has made a mistake in emphasizing the unilateral nature of the war on Iraq and the need for United Nations approval, and we may well reap the consequences of that mistake.

Mahajan imagines the time may still come when the White House will have been able to “strong-arm and browbeat enough members of the Security Council to acquiesce” in its war, but there would still be no legitimacy for premeditated aggression.

It surely is unprecedented in world history that a country is under escalating attack; told repeatedly that it will be subjected to a full-scale war; required to disarm itself before that war; and then castigated by the “international community” for significant but partial compliance.

leaders of “coalition of the willing” exile selves

They’re in hiding in the middle of the Atlantic, because they know they wouldn’t be safe from the ridicule and fury of millions anywhere on the continent of Europe.

President Bush will travel to Portugal’s Azores islands, about 900 miles west of the European mainland, to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in a “final pursuit” of a U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq, the White House said on Friday.

can we be good Germans?

Ted Rall argues that “supporting our troops while they’re fighting an immoral and illegal war is misguided and wrong.”

We find ourselves facing the paradox of the “good German” of the ’30s. We’re ruled by an evil, non-elected warlord who ignores both domestic opposition and international condemnation. We don’t want the soldiers fighting his unjustified wars of expansion to win–but we don’t want them to lose either.
. . . .
I want our troops to return home safely. I want them to live. Like a good German watching my countrymen march into Poland and Belgium and Luxembourg and France, I don’t want them to win and I don’t want them to lose.

For visuals, see, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bring them home now