Killing Sanctions in Iraq Killing Sanctions in Iraq
Killing Sanctions in Iraq Killing Sanctions in Iraq New Haven, Conn. David Cortright's "A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions" [Dec. 3] was a slick attempt to defend...
Jan 3, 2002 / David Cortright and Our Readers
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Readers respond to Jesse Jackson Jr.'s "For a Voting Rights Amendment."
Dec 13, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
'ASSAULT ON THE CONSTITUTION' Alexandria, Va. I could not agree more with "National Security State" by David Cole [Dec 17]. As a twice-wounded Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, I am horrified by the "security" measures hastily taken by this Administration. We have not seen such a blatant assault on the Constitution since we incarcerated Japanese-Americans in World War II. Perhaps the Attorney General should issue orders to mail letters to males aged 50 to 70 with Italian surnames asking them to "voluntarily" come in and talk about what they might know about organized crime. The real threat to the freedom of the citizens of the United States does not come from the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. The greatest threat to our freedoms comes from George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. TIMOTHY J. MCKINNEY JR. BOXERS' BILL OF RIGHTS Westhampton Beach, N.Y. I agree with many of your letter writers ["Boxing Days" Dec. 17]. Jack Newfield, as usual, has hit the nail cleanly on the head. The beautiful and brutal sport of boxing can't be abolished, because every time it has been--nineteenth-century England or early twentieth-century New York--it has mushroomed in illegal form, like speakeasies in the 1920s. What it begs for is reform, an honest and aggressive trade union for the only professional athlete with no protection, no pension. Newfield's Bill of Rights for Boxers should be our fistic Ten Commandments. May the powers that be (and the powers that shouldn't be) heed his prayers. Power to the fighters. BUDD SCHULBERG 'CIVILIZATIONAL' CONFLICT? Reno, Nev. Thanks to Edward Said for some rare clarity ["The Clash of Ignorance," Oct. 22]. Yes, we need to destroy those bastards--in self-defense, not because of any far-flung notions like a "clash of civilizations." Hitler & Co. were Western (Christian) analogues of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, to the nth power. Now that was a bastard offspring if ever there was one. What civilization did they represent? The guiding principle? (Mass) psychosis happens. It's in the genes. DOUG LOWENTHAL New York City Samuel Huntington, in his The Clash of Civilizations, did not suggest that the Islamic world was "evil" or "bankrupt." He did not suggest that it did not have a rich cultural, scientific or technical heritage. He emphasized how recent the West's ascendancy has been. The point that Huntington was making was that the twentieth-century obsession with ideology (democracy, fascism, communism) was no longer the rallying point of peoples but rather their ethnicity, religion, language grouping and cultural heritage. And in a world of competing interests, the West and Islam (facing common borders, incompatible ideologies and shared enmities) would come into conflict. This would happen with or without Osama bin Laden. This is not about terrorism--or fundamentalism. It's about a broader move for competition between cultures, made all the more prescient with the decline in the relative strength of the West. Edward Said chooses to ignore Huntington's thesis and offers up political correctness in response, thereby failing to challenge Huntington on a theoretical basis. MANISH THAKUR Seattle Edward Said portrays the September 11 attackers as an isolated band of fanatical criminals with no significant relationship to the broader Islamic world. Said's claims clearly do not hold water. He says, "Why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo?" The falsity of such parallels is immediately evident. Attempts by authorities to restrict or eliminate those cults did not result in demonstrations across half the globe of tens of thousands of sympathizers and supporters. The pro-bin Laden demonstrations we have seen from Gaza to Pakistan to Indonesia do not bode well for his claims. This is not to say that the vast majority of Muslims are not tolerant practitioners of their faith; it is merely to say that bin Laden and his camp are not a tiny isolated friendless minority; if they are an aberration, they are a vast one. ZEV HANDEL Palo Alto, Calif. Let me add a footnote to Edward Said's excellent article. While Said is certainly correct in his description of Huntington's "civilizational" argument against Islam, the remedy Huntington seeks for the United States targets another large group internally--not only ethnic and diasporic groups but a number of political protesters as well. Indeed, Huntington finds that "the central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay" [emphasis added]. He names the causes of this "decay": "Western culture is challenged by groups within Western culture. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies.... In the late twentieth century...American identity [has] come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings." Huntington does not mince words: "Rejection of the [American] Creed and of Western civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization." Two years after the The Clash of Civilizations was published, Huntington drew the connection between immigrants and progressive academics in an essay for Foreign Affairs: "The growing role of ethnic groups in shaping American foreign policy is reinforced by the waves of recent immigration and by the arguments for diversity and multiculturalism." But it is crucial to note that this 1995 piece merely develops a line of reasoning Huntington began two decades earlier, in his work for the Trilateral Commission. In the commission's 1975 publication The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Huntington remarks: "The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private.... People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves.... Each group claimed its right to participate equally--in the decision which affected itself." In short, while lauding the active participation of more and more diverse populations on the one hand, on the other hand Huntington is concerned that there may be too much of a good thing: "The vitality of democracy in the 1960s raised questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.... In the United States, the strength of democracy poses a problem for the governability of democracy.... We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy." Thus, with the growing calls to re-examine domestic civil liberties, it is useful to see how a "civilizational" conflict abroad ties into one at home, with specific ramifications for immigrants, ethnic Americans and certain progressive points of view. DAVID PALUMBO-LIU DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR FLAG IS? Chapel Hill, N.C. Perhaps the intensity of patriotic zeal in the aftermath of the September 11 attack has abated enough finally to pose the question, What was the fate of the many millions of flags printed in newspapers back in mid-September? A casual glance around store and car windows confirms that only a small fraction of them are actually on display. Have the others been stored away after a duly ceremonious and careful folding, stars on top? Or, as is more likely, have they been thrown away and, if so, has the disposal been done as 4 USC §8, stipulates "in a dignified way, preferably by burning"? It is a sad fact that all who recycled those newspapers without first removing the flag are guilty of flag desecration, and environmentalism is at last confirmed to be an anti-American plot. On the other hand, those who sent their papers to the incinerator are true patriots, the dioxin released in the flag-burning assuredly no more dangerous than the smoke that once hung over Fort McHenry. But woe to those who may have used their newsprint flag to wrap fish, since the code explicitly forbids "using the flag as a receptacle." DAN COLEMAN COFFEE & CROISSANTS An addendum to the letter, and Christopher Hitchens's reply [Dec. 10], about the introduction of coffee to Vienna in 1683: Some bakers' apprentices were working at night, preparing the next day's bread, and heard the sounds of a tunnel being dug by the Turks under the city wall. The boys alerted the army and thus an invasion was forestalled. As a reward, the baker boys were granted the exclusive privilege of baking a rich roll in the shape of the Turkish crescent. It became popular as the Kipfel. About 100 years later Maria Theresa's daughter Marie Antoinette came to France as the bride of Louis XVI. She missed her morning Kipfel and imported a Viennese baker to teach the French how to make it. The latter, of course, improved the recipe, and produced the croissant. The rest is gastronomic history. ANDREW LINN WELCOME BACK, KLAWANS Brooklyn, N.Y. There is no one like him. We have missed him. We can go to the movies again! ISABEL BYRON
Dec 13, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Boxing Days San Francisco Jack Newfield knows as much about boxing--and injustice--as any writer at work today. His article "The Shame of Boxing" [Nov. 12] captures the tragedy of this sport as few writers can. Anyone who cares about boxing knows that it can no longer be enjoyed without a drastic overhaul that puts fighters first. And anyone who cares about people must recognize that it is cruel to subject fighters to corruption, exploitation, manipulation and the real prospect of poverty, dementia and death. RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON Chalmette, La. As a lifelong, die-hard fan of the "sweet science" and someone who deeply cares about the sport, I found myself giving Jack Newfield a standing ovation at my computer after reading his great article. It should be mandatory reading for all state officials in the sport. Bravo. FELIX CASTRO Brooklyn, N.Y. Less than two months after the biggest terrorist attack ever, is The Nation not finding enough news so that it has to resort to a feature on...boxing?! (I admit I didn't read it, because I have no interest in it.) It seems irrelevant, given the urgent situation in the world now. MARISA BLACKWELL Los Angeles Thank you for Jack Newfield's article, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was surprised to see an article about boxing in a progressive publication that wasn't a screed about how boxing is violent and therefore should be banned. As a boxing fan I agreed with all Newfield's prescriptions for fixing what's wrong with the sport, and I'd like to add one of my own: for fighters to wear helmets, as is done in Olympic boxing. DIANA WAGGONER Denver Boxing has no place in a civilized society. The only way to improve it is to ban it, immediately. STEVE READ Portland, Ore. I am totally impressed with one of the best- written and most thorough articles I've read on boxing. I cover men's and women's boxing, and Jack Newfield is right on. SUE T.L. FOX WBAN Network www.womenboxing.com www.womenboxingrecords.com www.boxeofemenino.com New York City For nine years, when I was working for radio station WMEX in Boston, I broadcast many boxing bouts--some with nationally known fighters as well as club fighters. I also spent a lot of time backstage, getting to recognize "connected" managers and promoters. The Mob was pervasive. Over the years, I saw a number of club fighters become cognitively disabled (punch-drunk). As with capital punishment, any "reforms" of the industry will be cover-ups of the fundamental brutality of a "sport" in which the participants are intended to maim each other--the more seriously, the better. During my years at ringside, often when there actually was a boxing bout--skill rather than assault--the crowd would derisively sing in waltz rhythm. As usual, Jack has done a first-rate job of muckraking, but there is no way to disguise that boxing is planned savagery. In a civilized society, it should be outlawed. Unless, of course, we are much less civilized than we claim to be. NAT HENTOFF Nashville, Tenn. Jack Newfield has demonstrated once more why professional boxing remains the most relentlessly corrupt and racially exploitative business enterprise in the United States. The most recent law from Congress, named for Muhammad Ali, won't bring the velvet out of the sewer. It won't begin to deal with the depth of sleaze that rips off fighters and fans. John McCain's commitment is admirable, but without a new, searching Congressional investigation with extensive public hearings, including confronting the meat-merchant promoters and managers, proponents of a national commission will never build support from the public or Senator McCain's Congressional peers. When we think of state-sanctioned death, capital punishment comes immediately to mind, and we are horrified at the thought of televising an execution. At the same time, the public is entertained twice or more a week with matches where state-sanctioned death is a sad possibility. There's another option. Because of the deaths and brain damage, the American Medical Association has called for a ban on boxing. Every credible health organization in the world has done the same. Newfield will argue that a ban won't work, that it would drive the filth underground or to other countries. Even a moratorium--a temporary ban until there's a national commission to clean it up--has no chance in today's environment. I congratulate The Nation for giving Jack Newfield's cause resonance. His has been a lone voice. And once every few months--in the faint hope that I will love it again--I feel the magnetic pull of the once "sweet science" and pay HBO or Showtime to prove that I hate it still. JOHN SEIGENTHALER SR. Chicago A trivial point, perhaps, and yet... Jack Newfield, in his great, definitive piece on the rottenness of the boxing game, has cited sixteen top writers on the subject. For some reason, he failed to mention the nonpareil: Nelson Algren. Two of those Jack named, Pete Hamill and Budd Schulberg, have often referred to Algren as the best of the lot. Whether it be in his short stories or his novels, his lyric style as well as his bite into the core of the rotten apple has always knocked me out. When will this guy ever be recognized as the keenest observer around? The constant ignoring of this man drives me nuts. STUDS TERKEL Alamosa, Colo. Jack Newfield mentions Bob Dylan's indictment of boxing in "Who Killed Davey Moore?" by saying "he has the manager, the referee and the crowd all defensively rejecting responsibility for the calamity." The song also includes a verse about the sportswriter's responsibility for the calamity. Did this strike a little too close to home? JOEL KAUFMAN San Luis Obispo, Calif. I disagree with Jack Newfield's claim that boxing takes such poor care of the fighters because they are black and Latino. Boxing was always rotten at the core. In the days when Jews, Irishmen and other white fighters dominated, the fighters usually got screwed much as they do today. Newfield also implies that white guys never could really fight. Tell that to the likes of Jerry Quarry, Carmen Basilio, Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey. TOM OGREN Davis, Calif. I was sure Jack Newfield would recommend abolishing professional boxing. A contest in which the object is to inflict enough injury to an opponent's brain that he falls to the canvas and cannot get up for at least ten seconds is not a sport any more than cockfighting is a sport. No reforms can get around that. As for the old cliché that boxing provides a ticket out of the ghetto, Floyd Patterson observed long ago that for everyone who escapes by boxing a hundred others are doomed to stay because they developed no other skills. We got rid of dueling and we can get rid of boxing. SHERMAN STEIN Los Angeles The International Brotherhood of Prizefighters is in the process of completing our 2001 fighter registry. We are also looking to break ground on our seventeen-story boxing glove, which will house the IBOP Hall of Fame. We are also implementing various pension plans and medical/life insurance plans for fighters. All sorts of things the boxing community has only talked about. Well, it is finally going to happen. ANTHONY TORRES International Brotherhood of Prizefighters Scottsdale, Ariz. I hold an Arizona manager's license, and I've been involved in professional boxing for more than fifty years in virtually every position, which qualifies me as--at the very least--knowledgeable about the sport. I would rank Jack Newfield's "The Shame of Boxing" as one of the most incisive, well-thought-out, honest pieces ever done. He has cast light on so many problem areas that I am moved to nominate him as the first national boxing commissioner--should that post ever be created. STEVE EISNER Honolulu Newfield sure knows his stuff. In Chicago, I fought in smokers as an amateur, billed as a hero of the "Famous Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion," a Golden Gloves runner-up, 1946. I learned to fight as a kid in Eastside Los Angeles, Boyle Heights. We learned racist attitudes early--"Jew boys" can't fight, and never hit a "colored" fighter in the head, hit 'em in the stomach. I was taken aback when given the same advice by my handlers in Chicago. In close decisions I won over black fighters and lost to whites. I had to knock the white boys out to win. To beat the black fighters, all I had to do was remain standing at bell, no matter how groggy. Worse, I was once told to take it easy on a white prospect. Didn't knock him out, and lost. I figured then and there that I was just another bum. I quit. Newfield is right, only a union can clean out the Augean stable. "Stables"! We're animals--all of us in boxing and out in the real world too. Good thing I turned down Nichols, a black man, a nice guy not a Don King, who wanted me to join his stable. Worked in the steel mills, but they were worse. By the way, Newfield left out of his list of boxing greats Henry Armstrong, who held three championships at the same time, feather-, light-and welterweight, and fought the middleweight champ Ceferino Garcia to a draw. He left off his list of writers who touched on boxing James Jones (From Here to Eternity). God, what that Kentucky-born soldier in Farewell to Arms went through. Like me, he quit boxing for the rotten army officers and steel bosses. Like me, he got blacklisted. Unlike me, he didn't stick with the miners' union. Too bad, because the UMW got rid of the gangsters. Marx said, We're not a bunch of oxen. We're Spartacists, we're fighters. DON MATSUDA Santa Barbara, Calif. Readers may be interested in Sartre's discussion, in his posthumous (and unfinished) Critique of Dialectical Reason, of several of the themes broached by Newfield. Sartre writes, "Every boxing match incarnates the whole of boxing as an incarnation of all fundamental violence." Sartre's reflections on boxing were, in a sense, beholden to his larger philosophical agenda (e.g., rendering intelligible "struggle" as an incarnation of capitalist scarcity), yet they provide cogent reasons in support of Newfield's perceptive proposition that boxing is "more about Marx's concept of surplus value than notions of literary symbolism." Sartre seems to suggest that boxing is a concomitant of capitalism and will thus persevere as long as the latter, giving credence to Newfield's assessment of the impotence of calls to abolish the sport. Perhaps the many--I hesitate to use the words--reformist steps will someday lead to a vista atop the mountain in which both the elimination of boxing and capitalism are on the horizon. PATRICK S. O'DONNELL
Nov 29, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
'BLOWBACK' Washington, D.C. In his October 15 article "Blowback," Chalmers Johnson reiterates the widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA had a relationship with Osama bin Laden. For the record, your readers should know that the CIA never employed, paid or maintained any relationship whatsoever with bin Laden. It is true that the US government supported the Afghan mujahedeen in its fight against Soviet forces and that bin Laden was in Afghanistan during that time frame raising money and recruiting Arab fighters to fight the Soviets in the Afghan cause. That activity does not equate with the CIA maintaining a relationship with bin Laden, and it is time for that well-worn canard to be put to rest. WILLIAM R. HARLOW Director of Public Affairs Central Intelligence Agency Baltimore Chalmers Johnson's blowback theory of terrorism against the United States rests on shaky logical grounds, as it confuses causes with rationalizations. Virtually every social movement legitimizes itself as a reaction against some real or perceived injustice. But whether the historical events representing the claimed injustice are the actual cause of the movement is a totally different issue. It would be absurd to portray the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany as a "blowback" to international Jewry, Bolshevism, Weimar's decadence or even the Treaty of Versailles. Fascism also emerged in Italy, where the purported "causes" were for the most part absent. However, both countries had similar class structures--reactionary landowners and industrialists, whose interests were threatened by labor mobilization, and who bankrolled bands of Fascist thugs to fight labor organizing. Following the same logic, the US policy in the Middle East and Central Asia is quite benign, especially when compared with our misdeeds in Latin America or the Far East. If the blowback argument were true, we should expect terrorist attacks coming from Chile, Nicaragua or Vietnam rather than from the Middle East. The blowback theory ignores internal factors responsible for the growth of Islamicist terrorism. These factors, strikingly similar to those responsible for the growth of European Fascism, include oil-rich aristocracies and military dictatorships bankrolling Islamicist fanatics to turn back social changes taking place there. The United States might have aided these efforts under the rubric of anticommunism but certainly did not create them, just as Henry Ford's birthday gifts for Hitler did not unleash Nazism. WOJTEK SOKOLOWSKI New York City Bravo for Chalmers Johnson's insightful and clearly stated article. One point I would like to have seen addressed: the possible "blowback" resulting from the toppling of the Taliban, which the US government and its motley coalition of allies is hellbent on doing, and replacing that government with another group of extremists--the Northern Alliance. Afghan women's rights groups like RAWA are sounding the alarm about the alliance, and we must listen. Not only is the Northern Alliance bound to continue the oppression of the Afghan people, but installing them in power is bound merely to repeat the blowback pattern. R. LONGWORTH JOHNSON REPLIES Cardiff, Calif. Does the CIA's director of public affairs really have as much contempt for the American people as he shows in his letter? The details he is suppressing are on the public record. The CIA supported bin Laden from at least 1984, including building in 1986 the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost, where bin Laden trained many of the 35,000 "Arab Afghans." They constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the world to become mujahedeen and fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union. Bin Laden's Khost complex was the one that Clinton hit in 1998 with cruise missiles; for once the CIA knew where the target was, since it had built it. It is true that the CIA used a formal cutout to make deliveries of money and weapons to the "freedom fighters." It did so to maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. All US money was funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which had taken the lead since 1982 in recruiting radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan, receive training and fight on the Afghan side. In Peshawar, Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957), became close friends with Prince Turki bin Faisal, the head of the Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieut. Gen. Hameed Gul, head of the ISI, all of whom were joined in a common cause with the CIA to defeat the Soviet Union. It is barely conceivable that Milton Bearden, the CIA official in charge of this "covert" operation, never shook hands with Osama bin Laden, but it is simply not true that they did not have a relationship. Moreover, two genuine authorities, Abdel Moneim Said of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, and Hazhir Teimourian, the prominent BBC and London Times analyst of Iranian Kurdish ancestry, claim that bin Laden received training directly from the CIA. Wojtek Sokolowski ignores the definition, which I supplied in my article, of the CIA term "blowback": unintended consequences of covert special operations kept secret from the American people and, in most cases, from their elected representatives. I am not talking about reactions to historical events but about ill-conceived, short-term, invariably illegal US clandestine operations to overthrow foreign governments or carry out state terrorist operations against target populations. The American people may not know what was done in their name, but the people on the receiving end surely do--including the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959-60), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Chile (1973), El Salvador and Nicaragua (1980s), Iraq (1991 to the present) and very probably Greece (1967), to name only the most obvious cases. Sokolowski says that our record of misdeeds in the Middle East and Central Asia is "benign" compared with Latin America and East Asia and wonders when the "blowback" will start coming from those places. As I argued in my book Blowback, East Asia is still the place fraught with the greatest danger to the United States itself. For example, Okinawa, with its thirty-eight American military bases surrounding 1.3 million people, is America's version of the Berlin wall. When it becomes unraveled, as it surely will, it will take with it the entire American empire in East Asia. R. Longworth is right to remind us that there are cycles of blowback. The September 11 attacks and the Pentagon's current response of "bouncing the rubble" in Afghanistan are setting the stage for more rounds to come. This cycle will probably come to an end only when the United States has gone the way of the former Soviet Union. CHALMERS JOHNSON GRACE UNDER FIRE Chicago I have read political journals of all stripes for several years, and I have never seen an author respond to criticisms of his article with as much grace and honesty as Richard Falk did in the "Exchange" [Nov. 26] reviewing his "Defining a Just War" [Oct. 29]. Nor can I remember anyone else using such a forum to admit he was wrong. Try to find that in National Review. MICHAEL ROBBINS A LAST, FOND LOOK AT 'TAKINGS' East Lansing, Mich. I have been teaching property law, including the case of Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, for more than twenty-five years. Richard Epstein is wrong when he says that the case "held that a regulation...could be treated as a compensable taking if it went 'too far'" ["Exchange," Nov. 19]. That remark by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was a dictum, not a holding. The actual ruling nullified the regulation. No compensation was awarded. Moreover, in 1987 the reasoning of the Brandeis dissent was adopted in the case of Keystone Bituminous Coal Association v. DeBenedictis. Brandeis and the Keystone court treated the regulation of undermining as nuisance prevention, a justification that Epstein favors elsewhere in his letter. Despite Epstein's protestations, his view on the takings clause is "radical." The Founders knew the difference between the words "regulation" and "taking." Plutocrats wish to blur this distinction. JACK ROONEY GOOD TO THE LAST DROP Oakland, Calif. It's unfortunate that both Christopher Hitchens and his critics have missed the real significance of the deliverance of Vienna in 1683 [ "Minority Report," Oct. 22, Nov. 19]. While pillaging the vast Turkish camp outside the city walls, a soldier in the Christian army is supposed to have come upon a Turkish soldier making coffee (very cool under fire, the Turks) and forced him at sword's point to disclose the secret of the wondrous beverage. Very soon thereafter, the Christian soldier opened the first coffeehouse in Vienna--thereby setting the West on the path of true civilization. RICHARD KLEIN HITCHENS REPLIES Washington, D.C. Richard Klein (who I very much hope is the same man who authored Cigarettes Are Sublime), if anything, understates matters. In addition to cracking the coffee code, enterprising Viennese pastry cooks began to bake a fragrant buttery roll to "go with." In recognition of the many arts and sciences mastered by their beaten foe, they formed the delicacy in the shape of a Turkish crescent or "croissant." The proprietors of Sacher's Hotel and the makers of Sacher torte were only building upon this enduring and delicious cross-cultural foundation. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Nov 21, 2001 / Christopher Hitchens, Chalmers Johnson, and Our Readers
Letters Letters
BIN LADEN'S BIZARRE BATTLE San Diego, Calif. Dilip Hiro makes many perceptive observations in "Bush and bin Laden" [Oct. 8], but the article is just as notable for what he chooses to leave out. Hiro's thesis is that "for bin Laden and Al Qaeda, attacking American targets is a means, not an end, which is to bring about the overthrow of the corrupt, pro-Washington regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan through popular uprisings." If that is indeed his goal and these are his means, then bin Laden goes about his business in the most wrongheaded way. Most likely he would be effective if he targeted Arab regimes, but he chooses not to. Nor does it seem that he puts much trust in popular uprisings. And even if he did, he would probably not be satisfied merely with overthrowing the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian regimes. Hiro makes bin Laden look like a conventional Arab nationalist, but his goal is far more ambitious: the replacement not just of regimes but of all Arab nation-states with a pan-Islamic state based on an extreme version of the Sharia. The full name of bin Laden's organization, of which Hiro lists only the first three words, is World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders. In a February 23, 1998, declaration, bin Laden and his associates issued a fatwa making it the individual duty for every Muslim anywhere to kill Americans and their allies--civilians and military--in order to liberate the al-Aqsa and Mecca's mosques and have their armies depart all the lands of Islam (see www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm) Bin Laden does view as his foremost enemy the United States and is even willing to hurt Muslims in order to humiliate it. He took great pride in his May 1998 interview with John Miller (see www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html) for attacking the US servicemen who sought to restore order and distribute food in Somalia, a Muslim nation, and for bringing about the collapse of their humanitarian mission. Nor is he just complaining about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians but rants about killing Jews. His support for Islamicist terror organizations from Kashmir through Chechnya shows the breadth of his ambitions. In this old-new worldview, bin Laden is still fighting the Crusaders of yore, even if in a bizarre twist he now counts Jews among the Crusaders. Hence, the remedies Hiro suggests--withdrawal of most US troops from Saudi Arabia and addressing urgently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a worthy goal in itself--will never satisfy the bin Ladens. Even if the just solution of this conflict was reached, bin Laden could not be appeased. He would still have to be defeated. GERSHON SHAFIR HIRO REPLIES London Gershon Shafir should read my Nation piece "The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'" [Feb. 15, 1999]. It has a fuller analysis of the February 1998 fatwa (religious decree) by bin Laden, who, by the way, is not a qualified Islamic religious-legal scholar (alim) and therefore not entitled to issue a fatwa. That article also examines the basis for the presence of US troops on Saudi soil and rejects the rationale provided by the Pentagon on three counts. Regrettably, more than ten years after the liberation of Kuwait, what is missing is an official statement by Washington along the lines of, "On such and such day we signed an agreement with Riyadh whereby US troops are to be stationed in Saudi Arabia for a period of x years with the following aims..." If Shafir, or some enterprising American journalist, were to extract this information from the White House or the Pentagon, we will all be the wiser. The rationale of bin Laden and his cohorts for attacks on US targets is to highlight to the pro-American regimes in the Arab world that they are resting on a foundation that is vulnerable. But the means they have employed are loathsome and inhuman, and they should be brought to justice. Unlike Shafir, I am not privy to bin Laden's plans after he succeeds in securing the withdrawal of US troops from the Saudi kingdom. Here again, were Saudi Arabia a country where public opinion polls were allowed, we would know what sort of support or opposition there is among Saudis on the issue of US forces on their soil. Perhaps the Bush White House--that font of democracy and freedom of speech--would urgently advise the Saudi monarch to conduct such a poll so that we could all, Shafir and me included, debate the matter in an enlightened way. DILIP HIRO LAW ENFORCEMENT: 'DISMAL FAILURE' Princeton, N.J. I count myself fortunate to be the target of one of Alexander Cockburn's milder forays into his favorite domain of slash-and-burn journalism ["Beat the Devil," Nov. 12]. His mixture of dismissive invective and anecdote leads nowhere, and when he proposes as a response reliance on law enforcement via the United Nations, without giving any indication that it has the slightest prospect of success, it seems reasonable to question his seriousness. The law enforcement model has been a dismal failure even with respect to familiar forms of terrorism, but to suppose that it can address such a massive challenge to the basic security of the leading state in the world is at best diversionary. RICHARD FALK COCKBURN REPLIES Petrolia, Calif. Come on, Professor Falk, the stakes are large and my tone was appropriately judicious. Whining about an entirely imaginary "slash and burn" onslaught is no way to defend your odd rationales for Bush's "just war." In fact I gather that you've become a tad uncomfortable with a position that has required you to cheer on the B-52s as they showered cluster bombs on "Taliban villages," as one Pentagon newsnik termed them, and with what Stephen Shalom, in an excellent demolition of your arguments on ZNet (www.zmag.org/shalomjustwar.htm) has called "Falk's strange moral logic: the U.S. war in Afghanistan is 'truly just' because the UN is incapable of acting by virtue of the U.S. unwillingness to go to the UN." ALEXANDER COCKBURN NO DEBATE Boston A notice ["On the Web," Nov. 5] refers readers to the "Chomsky-Hitchens debate on the roots of the terrorist attacks" on the Nation website, one of several such misleading references. There is no such debate. I responded to specific false charges on various topics, unambiguously refusing to enter into a debate in that context. The roots of the September 11 attacks were scarcely mentioned, with no disagreement that I can perceive. NOAM CHOMSKY 'HIDING BEHIND THE SOFA' London I am surprised that Victor Navasky, in "Profiles in Cowardice" [Nov. 5], didn't mention an interview that had many of us here in Europe hiding behind the sofa in embarrassment and disgust: the Letterman/Rather interview. While not doubting the genuine emotion of Dan Rather, we were shocked at his answer to the all-important "Why?" It went something like, "These people are losers, Americans are winners, and they are jealous of our success, that's why they do these things..." What?! The American public has trusted this man to tell them how it is for years; they look to him to inform, to educate and guide them through the difficult issues. Does this man not understand the amount of influence on public opinion he has? Much of the US media, with the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality, have done the public a disservice over the past weeks. COLIN ROBINSON NO TOAST TO GHOST WORLD New York City Much as I hate to disagree with B. Ruby Rich ["Films," Sept. 3/10], I regretted the time and money I spent on Ghost World. Endowed with consumer spending power and youth, the two attributes our culture admires most, Enid and Rebecca can find no other way to entertain themselves than to pour derision, and then inflict actual harm, on those less well endowed. I agree with Rich that "if teenagers are a society's truest barometer, then Ghost World offers a rather worrisome forecast." If wishing that the filmmakers had cast a colder eye on Enid is a wish for "prefab cynicism," then number me among the cynics. But I'd rather see the movie as the best argument I've come across for community service as a high school graduation requirement. Perhaps if Enid had spent time with some AIDS babies, she might have acquired a wider focus, one that takes in problems more serious than her own boredom. But if nothing has given her this by the time she hits high school, I think we as a culture have something serious to worry about. KATE ELLIS POWER TO THE PUPPETS Brooklyn, N.Y. I am 16 and have worked with the Bread and Puppet Theater for many years. I was angered by Katha Pollitt's depiction of the theater in "Subject to Debate" [Nov. 5]. The presence of Bread and Puppet would not indicate how "depressing" an event is, nor is it grounded in the 1960s. This is evidenced by its involvement in the antinuclear movement in the 1980s and its extensive global justice work in the 1990s and 2000s. The theater has continued to grow and, in fact, the time of the theater's greatest following has been in recent years. SAM KIVELOWITZ
Nov 15, 2001 / Alexander Cockburn, Dilip Hiro, and Our Readers
Is This Really a ‘Just War’? Is This Really a ‘Just War’?
Nov 8, 2001 / Richard Falk and Our Readers