This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Excerpted from the August 3, 1985 Issue

Terrorism threatens to emerge as one of the great junk subjects of our era. It has already generated numerous junk seminars, endless junk TV shows, about half a dozen junk tanks and countless junk speeches and junk books. Plus which, it has evolved a whole breed of cretinous monomaniacs—junk experts—who fill the screens and the Op-Ed pages with their junk lucubrations. Herewith, then, my two cents’ worth of junk reflections.

“Terrorism” was a buzzword of the Reaganites from the start. I remember attending a debate in 1981 in which the reactionary side was taken by a man named Constantine Menges. The fact that Menges now directs terrorist operations against Nicaragua from the safety of the National Security Council is both here and there. Asked by Alexander Cockburn to give a definition of “terrorism,” he thought for a bit and defined terrorism as “the use of violence for political ends.”

The fatuity of this encapsulation, which would include everybody except absolute pacifists within its terms, is at least a faint improvement on the definition advanced by Menges’s new employers. They define terrorism as “the use by some people of violence for some political ends.” This merely adds hypocrisy to tautology.

One can define a terrorist as someone who possesses the following qualities. His chief targets must be civilians and noncombatants (not always the same thing), and there must be a political reason why they are his prey. His cause must be a hopeless one. He must be without a realizable manifesto, program or objective. In other words, violence must be his end as well as his means.

Does anybody fit this bizarre profile? Yes, just as many who are supposed to fit it do not. All states and all armies employ terror, but they do not, except in rare cases, depend solely on its use. Many nationalist movements, such as the Irgun, the I.R.A., the P.L.O. and others, have also employed violence against noncombatants in the course of operations, but cannot be reduced to the definition of “terrorist” tout court.

Following this logic, one can define the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany and the Japanese Red Army as terrorist. The declared intention of these groups was to provoke the state into taking fascist measures, the better to bring about the revolution. Interestingly, all three were made up of young people whose parents had lived under or been complicit with Axis regimes. And there was an echo of Third Period Stalinism in their politics too—the Stalinists in Germany and elsewhere who had said, in the greatest political betrayal of this century, “After Hitler, us.”

It was against this kind of thinking and this method that the early Marxists wrote their sternest polemics. The Narodniks, the anarchists of “propaganda by deed” and the practitioners of assassination and provocation were condemned, not so much morally (no state or party has the moral right to condemn the use of violence) as because they engendered secrecy, conspiracy, sadism and despair. They also invited, as they often meant to, appalling state reprisals on open, democratic associations of working people.

The older and better name for terrorism is nihilism. The nihilist cannot be placated or satisfied. Like the Party of God, he wants nothing less than the impossible or the unthinkable. This is what distinguishes him from the revolutionary. And this is what he has in common with the rulers of our world, who subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all. Those who contemplate the thermonuclear extinction of the species “for political ends” have nothing to learn from the nihilist tradition.

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) first wrote for The Nation, about Cyprus, in 1978; in a supposedly temporary arrangement with the New Statesman, he came to the United States, and The Nation, in 1981. He never went back, soon becoming the magazine’s Washington correspondent and “Minority Report” columnist, which he continued writing until the fall of 2002.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher points skyward as she receives standing ovation at Conservative Party Conference on October 13, 1989. (REUTERS/Stringer/UK)
 
This article originally appeared in the December 17, 1990 edition of The Nation.

"I make up my mind about people in the first 10 seconds, and I very rarely change it." So The New York Times quoted Margaret Thatcher as saying on the day of her resignation. I would be happy to think that the statement was truthful, since within minutes of first being introduced to me, Thatcher lashed me across the buttocks with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper.

It happened in the course of an exchange of views about Rhodesia in the late fall of 1977, when she was still leader of the opposition and was pandering to the racists in her party and the electorate. Influenced perhaps by the fact that we were meeting in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords, I made the mistake of bowing as if to acknowledge some point of hers, and she took swift advantage of my posture by shrieking, "Bow lower!" and plying the document above mentioned. Like the British electorate, now shaking itself after more than a decade of Thatcherite pouvoir, I often look back wistfully upon that spanking in the hope of decoding its significance.

Within one year of being elected Prime Minister, in 1979, Thatcher had reversed herself and overseen the transition of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. This achievement of hers, often overlooked, came after half a dozen Labor Foreign Secretaries had simply abdicated in the face of the white settler revolt. Nor was that the only instance of her breaking the rules of the stale, centrist, stagnant British consensus. By the Anglo-Irish agreement at Hillsborough she gave up Britain's absurd claim to exclusive sovereignty over Northern Ireland. And after her first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev she became the first capitalist politician to declare that he was for real and meant business. It is absolutely safe to say that no Labor Prime Minister would have had the nerve to do either of those two things.

So as I stood in the courtyard of the Louis Quinze embassy on the Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré on November 20 and saw her absorb the news that she had failed with her own party, I felt an unbidden emotion of regret. There seemed no disgrace in rejection at the hands of the Tory parliamentary caucus—as ripe a collection of opportunists and bond salesmen as you could meet in a day's march. I found myself hoping that she would make a fight of it, if only to expose the real disgrace, which is that under British "rules" such a caucus can, on a secret ballot, change the government in an afternoon.

It is easy to summarize the foulness of the Thatcher years: the combination of Malthus and Ayn Rand that went to make up her social philosophy; the police mentality that she evinced when faced with dissent; the awful toadying to Reagan and now Bush; the indulgence shown to apartheid; the coarse, racist betrayal of Hong Kong; the destruction of local democracy and autonomous popular institutions. Yet every Tory in the House had voted gleefully for all of those things, and one of them, her newly anointed clone, John Major, has disagreed with Thatcher only from the right. While on the ostensible issue of principle, a common European system, Labor's conversion has been too late and too shallow to be convincing.

Christopher Hill, perhaps England's greatest living historian, pointed out to me in the summer of 1988 that Thatcher had quarreled with the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, the Inns of Court, the University of Oxford and the Chiefs of Staff—every ancestral prop of the British state. Detestable though she was, she was a radical and not a reactionary. She has not been removed for any of her offenses against democracy or decency. Rather, she has been deposed by those who worship only opinion polls and their own skins and who yearn for a quiet life and business as usual—living gallantly off the fat of the land.

"An end to conviction politics," smugly wrote Peter Jenkins, Fleet Street's most devoted practitioner of consensus journalism. Let us hope not. "Thatcherism" has made possible a movement for a serious, law-based constitutional republic in Britain and has hacked away at the encrusted institutions and attitudes that stood in its path. Thatcher has herself shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo and the majority rather than by adapting to them. If the British left, which she froze into immobility like Medusa, could bring itself to learn from this, then we might not have to look upon her like again.

I may not be the only member of the male sex who wishes that he was built like a brick outhouse and could simultaneously dilate in copper-plate oral and written sentences on subjects such as Francisco Goya and Leonardo da Vinci. To be able to reverse these roles or idioms might also be nice: I once asked Robert Hughes how he was doing and was told that he was busy reworking The Shock of the New in order to take account of recent postmodernism: “It’s only like trying to shift a ton of shit with a shoehorn.”

We have been almost as lucky with our Australian cultural and literary exiles as with our Irish ones, perhaps for the reason that many of them, their forebears originally transported from Ireland to Australia, still wouldn’t stay put. Hughes has written very pungently in the past–as in The Fatal Shore–about the “convict stain” that marred and marked the country of his birth. The effect of this local complex, if I had to summarize it, was almost wholly paradoxical. A young Australian, growing up in a deeply Tory nation after World War II, would feel the urge to depart not in spite of his affection for the classical tradition but because of it. Conservatism down under, that’s to say, represented not high culture but philistinism. Anyone found haunting an art gallery or a library would be suspected, like a crab climbing out of a barrel, of being a snob and an elitist and a deserter, whose own people were not good enough for him. (The same knight’s-move torture is captured in another Hughes anecdote that I treasure: His mates at the University of Sydney became so concerned by his fondness for female company that they formed up and huskily asked him straight out if he was a homosexual.)

The resulting Antipodean diaspora has given us Peter Porter, Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Richard Neville, Bruce Beresford and others, many of whom began to feel partly reconciled to their “old country” (and more radicalized by their connection to it) after the election and subsequent removal of Gough Whitlam’s Labour government in the early 1970s. At last, a prime minister who could actually be glimpsed at the Sydney Opera House! At last, a prime minister who did not regard Australia as a mere “ditto” to British or American foreign policy. In exile terms, this cultural metamorphosis was quite well represented by a beefy and hearty critic for Time magazine, who could be seen enthusiastically discoursing about painting–and making it accessible to the “masses” while holding his own in the atelier–yet could be glimpsed on weekends at Shelter Island, on one occasion slugging a landed shark to death with a baseball bat (if rumor is not a lying jade) and on another tossing his shotgun into the harbor lest its presence coincide with a fit of the blues. Drinks were served, or so it was convincingly said. Restaurants were certainly reviewed, as well. Women were often kind, as they can be to those, however chaotic, who appreciate them.

Thus Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, rightly begins at the moment when a life of appetite and gusto might have been aborted: with a catastrophic car accident in Western Australia after a hot day of tussling with the sort of fish who can fight back. To say that Hughes was lucky to survive the wreck of the vehicle would be banal. There must have been moments, as he surveyed the mangling of his physical frame, when he wondered if he had been fortunate at all. (His improbable survival is just where the brick shit-house factor came in handy; that, and the timely action taken by an Aborigine named Joe Fishhook, whom we have to thank for these ensuing pages.) It’s been said that there’s nothing like the exhilaration provided by a near miss, and I have once or twice found this to be true: The lingering result of a near-death experience that nearly crushes you body and soul is obviously not so cheering. So call this a memoir that is soberly written by a dead man on leave.

Australian style in its native form is hyperbolic and enthusiastic and populist. Hughes’s self-deprecation and understatement, by contrast, are almost exaggerated. Of the several layered pentimentos contained within the story, one can only hope to select a few, and I choose his Catholicism, his “Sixties” and his unslakable thirst for color and action upon canvas. I do this partly because I used to wonder why Hughes got Andy Warhol–product of the same triptych–so wrong. In his dislike for Interview magazine and its affectless admiration for the Shah and Nancy Reagan, Hughes denounced Warhol in intemperate tones that, to his credit, he later came to reconsider. Now all his other regrets are on display, in a self-interrogation much more penetrating than anything Interview ever printed.

Everybody has read at least one recollection of the mixed bag of thrills and horrors that attends a Catholic boarding-school education. These chapters have tended to be written by those who survived the experience rather than by those who were physically and psychically crippled (at least until the recent freshet of agony and misery from those who were raped and tortured in infancy). Hughes certainly writes with the confidence of one who thinks it has done him no lasting harm. A whipping here, a mad lecture on sex there, a few laughs at the expense of priests who identified Marxism with the Antichrist, and of course an old Father O’Connell who had a feeling for devotional art and accidentally communicated this to the growing boy. On the whole, perhaps, school was a bit of a holiday from a slightly distraught home life, where both of Hughes’s parents died without giving him the chance to murmur farewell.

One knows right away, however, that at the very first opportunity this boy is going to leave town, leave the country, set off for the bright lights first of London and then of Europe, pay for an abortion, vent his scorn on cold war politics and dogmatic faith, and tumble into a world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. And this is why I stress Hughes’s addiction to understatement. He describes the utter boredom and pointlessness of much of the crash-pad-and-hash life into which he plunged, and it is only his attempt to make light of the experience that shoves it into a piercingly sharp relief. Many people had narrow escapes from the Sixties, when relationships could be dropped and picked up as quickly as callow opinions or tabs of acid, but it was Hughes’s bad luck to form a kind of matrimony with a true drifter and dilettante (and evident sack-artist) who once gave him the very pox that she had caught from Jimi Hendrix. That could be a funny story at some remove: What makes it unfunny is her preference for hard drugs and needles over their only son, Danton Vidal Hughes. This boy later committed suicide. Hughes mentions the death almost as gruffly–and as briefly–as did Kipling in noting the passing of “my boy Jack” in Something of Myself.

It is only toward the very end of the memoir that Hughes utters the line that furnishes the title. “By now,” he says, “I realized that my main impulse for writing a book was to force myself to find out about things I didn’t know.” This could be said by or about almost any author–“the educator must be educated,” as Marx put it, and no serious person is not self-taught–but it would be as true to say of Hughes that he came to find out things that he knew already. He may have discarded (and with contempt at that) the wicked doctrines of Catholicism, but he knew at once how to appreciate Matthias Grünewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim. His insight into Goya is well-known to us from a previous book. If you like Grünewald and Goya you will also recognize Otto Dix–several times mentioned in passing–as the real thing as soon as you meet him. And if these painters become your gold standard, and Barcelona and Florence are where you feel at home, and if you learned to distrust cant and meretriciousness and the fever for novelty when you were in your 20s, well then–you will one day try to evict popinjays like Julian Schnabel and Damien Hirst from the perch on which the pseudos have placed them.

At one point Hughes describes his beloved Catalonia as being, in temper, simultaneously revolutionary and conservative. He might have had himself–or indeed his favorite cartoonist Robert Crumb–in mind. Thus, from his religious boyhood Hughes retained what was aesthetically valuable, and from his Sixties youth he repudiated what was morally and intellectually vapid. In a vastly funny section, he describes how near a miss the latter transcendence was: When Time first called to recruit him from London, he was still so stoned and so paranoid that he thought it was a probe from the CIA. (He still exhibits a trace or two of this, making a listless and mushy analogy between Vietnam and Iraq.) But once the confusion had been overcome, there followed a season of pleasure for lovers of art, and a season of hell for the phonies who prostituted it. No critic could have asked for a better run. (And how odd that one should feel any nostalgia for the Time of those days.)

Here’s something I didn’t know until I read Things I Didn’t Know. Leonardo da Vinci was so full of self-loathing and self-doubt that, whenever he tested a new quill, he would scrawl the same unhappy inquiry: “Dimmi, dimmi se mai fu fatta cosa alcuna” (Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done). Is this encouraging or discouraging? I suspect that Hughes–who admits to an unfinished work on Leonardo as a reproach to all his finished ones–would prefer to say that it was a very good question, and be glad still to be around to ask it.

The election season is always hellish for people who fancy that they live by political principles, because at such a time “politics” becomes, even more than usually, a matter of show business and superficial calculation. Ever since 1980, when I bet the liberals of New York that Reagan would win easily (and didn’t have to buy my own lunch for months afterward), I have sympathized with the “prisoners’ dilemma” that faces liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term “lesser evil” was evolved to deal with this very trap. Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don’t really believe? Is it time for that deep-breath third-party vote, or even angry abstention, of the sort that has tortured some Nation readers ever since they just couldn’t take Humphrey over Nixon? This magazine prints columnists who regularly describe the terms of the captivity with more emotion than I can now summon.

But absent from this triangular calculation is the irony of history. Do you know anybody who really, deeply wishes that Carter had been re-elected, or that Dukakis had won? Implicit but unstated, in the desire of the prisoner to escape, is the banal, unexciting assumption of our two-party oligopoly: Sometimes it’s objectively not so bad that the “other” party actually wins. Thus I ought to begin by stating my reasons to hope for a Kerry/Edwards victory.

Given my underlying stipulation, which is that this is a single-issue election and that that is a good and necessary thing, I have no formal quarrel with the Kerry/Edwards platform. It ostensibly calls for military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad. It does not shade the moral distinction that has to be made between “our” imperfect civilization and those who want to turn Islamic society into a medieval but still-lethal dust bowl. (Not even by MoveOn.org are we being told, of the racist janjaweed death squads in Sudan, that they are the expression of pitiable, deep-seated Muslim grievances.) The Kerry camp also rightly excoriates the President and his Cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.

I can’t wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq’s oil industry. I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words, about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and “at home” (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn’t broken out “at home”). I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi’s existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America’s part. I notice that, given the ambivalent evidence about Saddam’s weaponry, Kerry had the fortitude and common sense to make the presumption of guilt rather than innocence. I assume that he has already discerned the difference between criticizing the absence of postwar planning and criticizing the presence of an anti-Saddam plan to begin with. I look forward, in other words, to the assumption of his responsibility.

Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration. If the worst that is said of him is true–that he is an idiotic and psychically damaged Sabbath-fanatic, with nothing between his large Texan ears–then these things were presumably just as true when he ran against Al Gore, and against nation-building and foreign intervention. It is Bush’s conversion from isolationism that impresses me, just as it is the parallel lapse into isolationism on Kerry’s part that makes me skeptical. You don’t like “smirking”? What about the endless smirks and smarmy hints about the Administration’s difficulties, whether genuine or self-imposed? The all-knowing, stupid smirks about the “secular” Saddam, or the innocuousness of prewar Iraq? The sneers about the astonishing success of our forces in Afghanistan, who are now hypocritically praised by many who opposed their initial deployment? This is to say nothing of the paranoid innuendoes I don’t have to name that are now part of pseudo-“radical” rumor-mongering and defamation. Whichever candidate wins, I shall live to see these smirks banished, at least.

I can visualize a Kerry victory, in other words (and can claim to have written one of the earliest essays calling attention to the merits of John Edwards). What slightly disturbs me about most liberals is their hypertense refusal to admit the corollary. “Anybody But Bush”–and this from those who decry simple-mindedness–is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it’s nihilism at best. If it isn’t treason to the country–let us by all means not go there–it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.

One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen. I am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House. An irony of history, in the positive sense, is when Republicans are willing to risk a dangerous confrontation with an untenable and indefensible status quo. I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause. In Kabul recently, I interviewed Dr. Masuda Jalal, a brave Afghan physician who was now able to run for the presidency. I asked her about her support for the intervention in Iraq. “For us,” she said, “the battle against terrorism and against dictatorship are the same thing.” I dare you to snicker at simple-mindedness like that.

I could obviously take refuge in saying that I was a Blair supporter rather than a Bush endorser, and I am in fact a member of a small international regime-change “left” that originates in solidarity with our embattled brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq, brave people who have received zero support from the American “antiwar” movement. I won’t even consider any reconsideration, at least until Islamist websites start posting items that ask themselves, and not us: Can we go on taking such casualties? Have our tactics been too hideous and too stupid? Only then can anything like a negotiation begin. (Something somewhat analogous may be true, and I say it with agony, about the Israel-Palestine dispute, which stands a very slightly better chance of a decent settlement if an almost uncritically pro-Israeli Democrat is not elected.)

The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect, has been able to say, repeatedly and even repetitively, the essential thing: that we are involved in this war without apology and without remorse. He should go further, and admit the evident possibility of defeat–which might concentrate a few minds–while abjuring any notion of capitulation. Senator Kerry is also capable of saying this, but not without cheapening it or qualifying it, so that, in the Nation prisoners’ dilemma, he is offering you the worst of both worlds. Myself, I have made my own escape from your self-imposed quandary. Believe me when I say that once you have done it, there’s no going back. I have met a few other ex-hostages, and they all agree that the relief is unbelievable. I shall be meeting some of you again, I promise, and the fraternal paw will still be extended.

Washington, DC

My dear Katha,

First, I should thank you for writing to me as if you thought it mattered what I said [“Subject to Debate,” November 25], and for telephoning me a few weeks ago in the same spirit, and also for eschewing the accusations–scumbag, sellout, toady, moral degenerate, etc.–which, true as some of them may well be of me, have scant bearing on the future of Iraq, or on the war against theocratic nihilists. I have always esteemed your work as well, and I like to think that our differences of principle have long been deep as well as narrow. (I had always meant to challenge your stubborn indignation at the discriminatory availability of Viagra on prescription, which carried the sad implication that erections give delight only to the male…)

Onward, then, and upward. You are too true to language to allow yourself any absolute misrepresentation of what I say. So I am going to attribute your small but consistent mistakes to your politics. I did not say, in my Washington Post article, that the “antiwar” movement was composed of Ramsey Clark’s zombies. I said that while many, if not most, leftists knew how to clear their throats with a denunciation of Saddam Hussein, not all of them really meant it. You now state, very honorably, that the Ramsey Clark sect (code-named ANSWER) did all the major spadework for a demonstration in Washington. You add that “99 percent of the people who go to those demonstrations don’t even know ANSWER exists.” And, rubbing in your own astonishingly clear point, you add that “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken with who do not recognize…the DC event they attended.” I could have tried to put it better, but I doubt I should have succeeded.

Now, Katha, you and I both attended many rallies in favor of the victory of the Vietcong. Were we duped? Were we led astray by sheep-faced “pacifist” clerics or shifty-eyed Stalinists? No. (Or perhaps I should speak for myself here.) We knew what we were doing, and we wished mainly that Vietnam, which constituted no threat to anybody, had been reunified and independent by 1945. The objection to Washington’s imperialist war was not that it would go badly, or turn into a “quagmire.” For shame! The point was to take the side of the revolution.

Examine your own prose and see how querulous and conservative it has become since. Acting as the interpreter for those who, according to you, have attended demonstrations the message of which they don’t really understand, you ventriloquize their fears as follows: There might be many casualties on both sides; there might be an Israeli blow and a Baathist counterblow; there might be fuel to the Islamist flame; the whole region might become a “bloodbath.” You spare us nothing, though I am glad to see that you don’t bang on about “our” past support for Hussein, as if this would make a renewed neutralism or complicity suddenly OK. In other words, you voice the same misgivings if not dreads that are present in the minds of those who hope for “regime change.” The difficulties don’t need to be argued. They plainly argue for themselves. Where I live, in Washington, they are also the same objections, in so many words, that are proposed by three factions of the hard right: the Scowcroft-Eagleburger reactionaries, the majority of the CIA and the Pat Buchananite isolationists. These are the voices to which the President might actually lend an ear. Do you wish that he would? Then the Saudi oligarchy and the Turkish elite and their American proxies would have canceled “regime change.” Fine revolutionary you turn out to be.

(It seems like a distraction to bring up the Israel-Palestine dispute, or to bring it up in the way that you do, since this is (a) an old story that has left every US administration morally bankrupt, (b) it is a matter of principle by itself and on its own terms and (c) it is in bad enough condition without being made a hostage to Saddam’s whims, as is unintendedly implied by those who propose “linkage” between the two. We’ll still be dealing with Palestine after Saddam, believe me.)

Perhaps, then, I could put in a word for historical materialism? The Saddam Hussein regime is so exorbitant and tyrannical, in point of its own enslaved subjects and its neighbors, that its doom is as near-inevitable as anything can be. In other words, we will have to face a post-Saddam convulsion in any case, including all or most of the dire consequences you outline, and probably some extra ones that cannot be foreseen. I have been doing some work with the Iraqi and Kurdish resistance in the past few years, and these people have already experienced things that no scaremonger could have invented. All I’ll say is that I feel truer to my left self, in helping them, than I could if I was carrying a dumb placard, confusing “Iraq” with “Saddam,” in a parade organized by those who explicitly admire the latter, as well as Kim Jong Il and Slobodan Milosevic (and later sheepishly claiming that I’d joined the wrong picket line).

Since it’s you I am talking to, I won’t pretend to confuse your headlines with your opinions. You know quite well that I attacked my own publishers in the same book that was headed with the silly word “contrarian,” and you know also that my respect for pacifists–or for their absurd consistency–needn’t prevent me from attacking them at the same time. You also know that, in teasing me for donning an Orwell costume, you can hope to hurt my reputation without at all touching his. (My reputation being what it is, you can really hope to gratify only those who aim for the opposite effect.) My immediate question is this. Are you so sure that a covert sympathy for despotism and theocracy, or perhaps a glib and cultivated indifference to the menace, is a fringe rather than a mainstream problem in what used to be our family?

Just watching the sluggish stream sliding by in the past few months, I have seen the editor of CounterPunch, one of our fellow columnists, reprint a vicious and paranoid and subliterate screed, explicitly associating Jew power with the destruction of the World Trade Center. I have read Gore Vidal’s dark suggestion that September 11 was prearranged, and Norman Mailer’s view that the dead of that day are no more significant than traffic accidents and Noam Chomsky’s repeated assertion that Al Qaeda at its worst is no better than American foreign policy on a good day. I think I have just named some of the political and cultural centerpieces of the Nation worldview. If you can spare a whole column for me, perhaps you will find some room for a critique of these offenders as well? Or at least to try to explain to one or two of them, and to yourself, how they sign Ramsey Clark’s petitions without quite knowing what they are doing? This is a serious time.

I’ll end where you began. Why would this disagreement necessitate my departure from The Nation? It’s a matter of the viscera in some ways, as I told you on the telephone the other day. At public forums in the past several months, debating with Oliver Stone in one case and with Michael Moore in another, and with several others in between, I have heard witless applause for fatuous debating points and for fatal casuistry, and have realized that I am hearing the magazine’s propaganda and attitude being played back to me. It may now seem trite to say that September 11 and other confrontations “changed everything.” For me, it didn’t so much change everything as reinforce something. I am against aggressive totalitarian states and I am resolutely opposed to religious fanaticism. I am also sickened by any attempt to call these hideous things by other names. Most especially in its horrible elicitation of readers’ letters on the anniversary of September 11, The Nation joined the amoral side. It’s the customers I want to demoralize, not just the poor editors. I say that they stand for neutralism where no such thing is possible or desirable, and I say the hell with it. I feel much better as a result–though I admit the occasional twinge–and so will you when you take the small but simple step that leaves cynicism and euphemism behind.

Fraternally,

CHRISTOPHER

POLLITT REPLIES

New York City

Dear Christopher,

Well, your Viagra jibe isn’t quite as insinuating as the letter from Nation reader Duff Johnson, who urged me to stick to writing “about the travails of prostitution,” but since you raise the topic, let me assure you that I am familiar with female sexuality and think you should have all the Viagra you want. What I actually said was that the rush by insurance companies and government agencies to subsidize the cost of Viagra, for men, the minute it went on the market contrasted with their decades of resistance to covering contraception, which is life-saving (and pleasure-enhancing) for women. I think even you should be able to see the double standard.

As you well know, the sectarian left has had a hand in a great many noble causes, including the ones you still espouse. You told me a few years ago that you “signed everything that came across your desk” to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal from the death chamber. As you surely knew or should have known, Mumia was and is the cause célèbre of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its popular front organization, Refuse and Resist. Most if not all of those petitions and sign-on advertisements came from them. Did that make you their dupe, and the unwitting defender of the killers of Tiananmen Square? When you spoke at anti-Clinton rallies organized by freerepublic.com, did you care that this motley collection of racists, gun nuts, militiamen and conspiracy theorists opposed Clinton from the far, far loony right? I’m not saying that one should never think twice about who calls a demonstration or organizes an open letter, but, as you must have considered when you threw in your lot with the antichoice movement, which is completely dominated by your archenemies, the Christian right and the Catholic Church, sometimes you just have to get on with the work that needs to be done. How happy would you be today had you boycotted the l963 March on Washington because–oh no!–communists were prominent in the civil rights movement?

The reason most antiwar protesters don’t know about Ramsey Clark is not that they are stupid, as you imply. (You yourself have occasionally confused the WWP and RCP, and conflated each with its front organization, which is hardly fair to the members of the latter.) It’s that Ramsey Clark is not all that important, except as a convenient stick to beat the antiwar movement with. You set the equation up so that there is no way to oppose invading Iraq except to be a coward or a covert admirer of dictatorship and theocracy. Well, I don’t think it’s cowardly to be extremely wary of war, especially “pre-emptive” war. And I don’t think you have to love Saddam Hussein to be skeptical about the rosy scenarios being put forward on behalf of “regime change.” Even Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident who strongly favors invasion, admitted in a recent interview in the Boston Globe that there is only a “5 percent chance” that the aftermath will be what you’d like to see: a democratic, peaceful Iraq that respects human rights, as opposed to a US military dictatorship, an Iraqi military junta, civil war or other very bad outcome. Makiya acknowledges, too, that in order for his scenario to have a chance of success, America would have to keep troops in Iraq for years and spend untold billions. How likely is it that our government will, or even can, make that kind of commitment?

As Nation readers know only too well, I am always complaining about the magazine. It isn’t perfect. Still, why single out as representative of our politics Alexander Cockburn, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer (who, a search of our archives reveals, has never appeared in our pages) and not, oh, I don’t know, Tony Kushner, Patricia Williams, Marc Cooper or Ellen Willis? Given your recent stint on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, not to mention appearances over the years in a flock of right-wing publications, I’d think you’d want to be careful about promoting the idea of guilt by association. In any case, the real issue isn’t about writers or magazines–it’s about guns and power. You’ve placed yourself quite forthrightly on the side of Bush, Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz, whose plans to remake the entire Arab world long predate 9/11, and who seem completely unembarrassed by their own shifting rationales for invading Iraq. (Not even they, however, claim it has anything to do with opposing religious fanaticism. That is your own delusion.) These are your new friends, an Administration that supports with mad vigor everything you excoriated in Clinton–capital punishment, the drug war, punitive welfare reform, privatizing the public realm, letting corporations run wild–while pandering to the Christian right, blasting the environment, withdrawing from international agreements from Kyoto to Cairo and remodeling the federal judiciary to resemble a meeting of the John Birch Society. I think I’ll stay right here.

Peace,

KATHA

I suppose I can just about bear to watch the “inspections” pantomime a second time. But what I cannot bear is the sight of French and Russian diplomats posing and smirking with Naji Sabry, Iraq’s foreign minister, or with Tariq Aziz. I used to know Naji and I know that two of his brothers, Mohammed and Shukri, were imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein–in Mohammed’s case, tortured to death. The son of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to twenty-two years of imprisonment last year; he has since been released and rearrested and released again, partly no doubt to show who is in charge. Another former friend of mine, Mazen Zahawi, was Saddam Hussein’s interpreter until shortly after the Gulf War, when he was foully murdered and then denounced as a homosexual. I have known many regimes where stories of murder and disappearance are the common talk among the opposition; the Iraqi despotism is salient in that such horrors are also routine among its functionaries. Saddam Hussein likes to use as envoys the men he has morally destroyed; men who are sick with fear and humiliation, and whose families are hostages.

I don’t particularly care, even in a small way, to be a hostage of Saddam Hussein myself. There is not the least doubt that he has acquired some of the means of genocide and hopes to collect some more; there is also not the least doubt that he is a sadistic megalomaniac. Some believe that he is a rational and self-interested actor who understands “containment,” but I think that is distinctly debatable: Given a green light by Washington on two occasions–once for the assault on Iran and once for the annexation of Kuwait–he went crazy both times and, knowing that it meant disaster for Iraq and for its neighbors, tried to steal much more than he had been offered.

On the matter of his support for international nihilism, I have already written my memoir of Abu Nidal, the murderous saboteur of the Palestinian cause [“Minority Report,” September 16]. I have also interviewed the senior Czech official who investigated the case of Mohamed Atta’s visit to Prague. This same official had served a deportation order on Ahmed Al-Ani, the Iraqi secret policeman who, working under diplomatic cover, was caught red-handed in a plan to blow up Radio Free Iraq, which transmits from Czech soil. It was, I was told (and this by someone very skeptical of Plan Bush), “70 percent likely” that Atta came to Prague to meet Al-Ani. Seventy percent is not conclusive, but nor is it really tolerable. Meanwhile, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan holds several prisoners from the Ansar al-Islam gang, who for some reason have been trying to destroy the autonomous Kurdish regime in northern Iraq. These people have suggestive links both to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It will perhaps surprise nobody that despite Kurdish offers of cooperation, our intrepid CIA has shown no interest in questioning these prisoners. (Incidentally, when is anyone at the CIA or the FBI going to be fired?) People keep bleating that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamentalist. But he did rejoice in the attacks on New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and he does believe that every little bit helps.

I am much more decided in my mind about two further points. I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy menace. And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict, which is the civil war now burning across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Nigeria. The theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it. But there are honorable allies to be made as well, and from now on all of our cultural and political intelligence will be required in order to earn their friendship and help isolate and destroy their enemies, who are now ours–or perhaps I should say mine.

Only a fool would trust the Bush Administration to see all of this. I am appalled that by this late date no proclamation has been issued to the people of Iraq, announcing the aims and principles of the coming intervention. Nor has any indictment of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity been readied. Nothing has been done to conciliate Iran, where the mullahs are in decline. The Palestinian plight is being allowed to worsen (though the Palestinians do seem to be pressing ahead hearteningly with a “regime change” of their own). These misgivings are obviously not peripheral. But please don’t try to tell me that if Florida had gone the other way we would be in better hands, or would be taking the huge and honorable risk of “destabilizing” our former Saudi puppets.

Moreover, it’s obvious to me that the “antiwar” side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed. All evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda last fall, and now all the proof is in; but I am sent petitions on Iraq by the same people (some of them not so naïve) who still organize protests against the simultaneous cleanup and rescue of Afghanistan, and continue to circulate falsifications about it. The Senate adopted the Iraq Liberation Act without dissent under Clinton; the relevant UN resolutions are old and numerous. I don’t find the saner, Richard Falk-ish view of yet more consultation to be very persuasive, either.

This is something more than a disagreement of emphasis or tactics. When I began work for The Nation over two decades ago, Victor Navasky described the magazine as a debating ground between liberals and radicals, which was, I thought, well judged. In the past few weeks, though, I have come to realize that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. (I too am resolutely opposed to secret imprisonment and terror-hysteria, but not in the same way as I am opposed to those who initiated the aggression, and who are planning future ones.) In these circumstances it seems to me false to continue the association, which is why I have decided to make this “Minority Report” my last one.

How would people be discussing the issue of "regime change" in Iraq if the question were not being forced upon them by the Administration? In other words, is the American and European and international audience for this debate no more than just that–an audience, complete with theater critics and smart-ass reviewers? Or to put the matter in still another way, would the topic of "regime change" be dropped if the Bush White House were not telegraphing all its military intentions toward Iraq while continuing to make an eerie secret of its political ones?

I approach this question as one who has been in favor of "regime change" in Iraq for quite a long time, and who considers himself a friend of those Iraqis and Iraqi Kurds who have risked so much to bring it about. I don’t feel that I require official permission or exhortation to adopt the argument, but I do feel that it’s a relinquishment of responsibility to abandon it. Unlike the chronically enfeebled and cowardly Democratic leadership in Congress, I don’t beg like a serf for the President to "make his case" about weapons of mass destruction. Nor do I feel comfortable waiting like a mendicant for him to speak out about the Kurds, or demanding that he pronounce in a less or more scary way about Saddam Hussein’s underhanded friendship with the dark world of the international gangsters. I can make inquiries of my own, thanks all the same, and even form some conclusions.

The other day I was on some show with Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a leading member of Washington’s black-comedy troupe, who said that unless–like him–you had actually met Saddam Hussein you could have no conception of the reality of stone-cold evil. I reminded the Senator that on the occasion of his meeting with the Iraqi leadership, he had actually emerged to say that Saddam was getting an unfairly bad press, and recommended that he invite more reporters to record the achievements of the Baath Party. That was before the invasion of Kuwait, to which George Herbert Walker Bush and James Baker demonstrated an initially indulgent attitude. During the subsequent bombing of Baghdad, Senator Simpson was to the fore in denouncing Peter Arnett of CNN for being in Iraq at all, and later in circulating the allegation that Arnett had once had a brother-in-law who might have been a sympathizer of the Vietcong.

One can play this simple game, of hypocrisy and "double standards," indefinitely. I have played it myself and with better-seeded contestants than Senator Simpson. But a few nights ago I had a long conversation with my friend Dr. Barham Salih, the prime minister of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, and thus one of the very few politicians in the area who have to face an election. He recently survived an assassination attempt by a gang that he is convinced is ideologically and organizationally linked to Al Qaeda. Salih is for a single standard: a democratic Iraq with a devolved Kurdistan (he doesn’t like it when the Administration talks about Saddam Hussein gassing "his own people," because the Kurds are by no means Saddam’s property). Salih speaks of a war "for Iraq" and not "on Iraq." He doesn’t believe that the population can remove the dictator without outside help, but he also thinks the Turks are being given too much official consideration–partly because of their military alliance with Israel–in determining the outcome.

This is a serious dilemma for a serious person, who is being asked to stake his own life and the relative freedom of his people on the outcome. It’s also a dilemma for us. Is the Bush Administration’s "regime change" the same one the Iraqi and Kurdish democrats hope for? Rather than use the conservative language–of the risks of "destabilizing" the Middle East–liberals and radicals ought to be demanding that the Administration and Congress come clean about this. Meanwhile, one sees constant photo-ops of the President making nice with the Saudis, who have reasons of their own to worry about destabilization, while Kurdish leaders are met with in secret and at a much lower level.

"I am very disappointed with the left," Salih told me. In the past the Kurdish cause was a major concern of the internationalist, human rights and socialist movements, but now a slight shuffling and evasiveness seems to have descended. Some of this obviously arises from a general reluctance to be identified with President Bush, but that, one hopes, is too paltry to explain much.

The other concern is more immediate. Since it is estimated by the Pentagon hawks that a war with Saddam Hussein (not, please, "with Iraq") might well bring about the fall of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, and since we also know that there are those around General Sharon who are looking for a pretext to cleanse the Palestinians from the West Bank and expel them onto Jordanian soil, there exists the possibility that a serious moral and political disaster is in the making. Here, then, is a proposal that ought to command broad and deep support, including from the European "allies":

The government of Israel should be required to say, in public and without reservation, that it has no such plans and would never implement such a scheme. It should be informed in public by the President that this undertaking is required on penalty of regime change in case of default. This, after all, is no more than is regularly required from the Palestinians. And it is not just a matter of moral equivalence but of self-interest.

Sooner or later the Saddam Hussein regime will fall, either of its own weight or from the physical and mental collapse of its leader or from endogenous or exogenous pressure. On that day one will want to be able to look the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples in the eye and say that we thought seriously about their interests and appreciated that, because of previous interventions that were actually in Saddam’s favor, we owed them a debt. It’s this dimension that seems to me lacking in the current antiwar critique.

I have met three hijackers in my life, and I hope I do not sound crabby and disillusioned if I add that the standard of hijacking is not what it used to be. The first hijacker I knew was the first civilian on record to use civil aviation to make a political point. His name was Herminio da Palma Inácio, and he was a Portuguese resistance leader in the days of the Salazar dictatorship. During one of that regime’s rigged "plebiscites" in the early 1960s, Palma boarded a plane in Casablanca, caused its pilot and crew to alter their plans, and flew over Lisbon dropping leaflets calling for a free election. He then returned the plane to its home airport and vanished back into his clandestine world. According to some reports, he handed a red rose to every female passenger and apologized for the general inconvenience. He may not even have carried a loaded weapon. At any rate, and though he was for a while known to headline writers as "the most wanted man in Europe," his operations were known for their dash and verve (one appreciates the Casablanca touch) and for their absence of crudity or cruelty. He was a very gallant and charismatic individual. His object was to help bring an end to fascist rule on the Iberian peninsula, and to assist Portuguese-speaking Africa in gaining independence from an especially nasty form of colonial exploitation. He lived (having survived much imprisonment and torture) to witness this happy outcome. I was quite proud to see him again after the jails of Lisbon were thrown open in April 1974, and to shake his hand.

The second hijacker I’d mention is William Lee Brent, who got himself heavily involved in revolutionary politics in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, and who can be seen off to the side in many of the Black Panther photo dramas of that period. He came to the conclusion that he might well not outlive a rap that arose from a violent confrontation with the local police department, and he was also in fear of the reprisals that might come from his comrades, with whom he’d had a few suggestive disagreements. So he borrowed TWA Flight 154 from Oakland in June of 1969 and took himself off to Havana, where he still lives. Nobody was injured by his .38 revolver, the Cubans jailed him as soon as he landed, and he’s written a pretty interesting book called Long Time Gone. It was extremely selfish and irresponsible of Bill to have taken the plane, but he thought it was a matter of survival and has since revisited the matter, and his whole Cuban experience, in a serious and conscientious way.

In 1975 I was in Baghdad trying to write something about the emergence of a sternly constituted and wealthy Baathist regime, which had a militarized pan-Arab ideology and a supposedly impressive and thrusting young vice president named Saddam Hussein. One of my guides and interpreters suggested that I might like to meet Abu Nidal, who was then Iraq’s nominee as leader of the Palestinian struggle and who, on August 19 last, and also in Baghdad, abruptly became "the late."

I thought, sure (the name was not then well-known). At a villa in the city I was introduced to a very menacing individual indeed, who disconcerted me at once by asking if I’d like to train in one of his camps. I can’t remember quite how that subject changed, but we then surreally "covered" a number of topics, including my host’s admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his superiority to the cowardly compromiser Arafat and related issues.

It might all have been just another bombastic interview with yet another Palestinian pretender (a dime a dozen in those days, from Beirut to Tripoli), until he asked me whether I knew Said Hammami. Mr. Hammami was then the PLO envoy in London and had written a series of essays for the London Times, in which he’d floated the idea of mutual recognition and direct talks between Israel and the PLO. I said that I did know him. Abu Nidal then told me to warn Hammami of the consequences of his treason. With a slight sense of the macabre and the indecent, I did in fact convey this admonition when I returned. Abu Nidal’s gang murdered Said Hammami not long afterward, in a broad-daylight shooting. This crime soon became overlaid by a whole series of demented killings, including the attacks on the airports in Rome and Vienna and the assassination of several important PLO spokesmen. It was Abu Nidal’s attempted murder of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador in London, that allowed Begin and Sharon to declare an end to the truce in Lebanon and formed the pretext for the invasion of that country in 1982. (Argov, when he recovered consciousness, criticized the war that was being waged in his name.) One of the senior PLO leaders, Abu Iyad, became so convinced that Abu Nidal was a double agent that he opened all the files of the Palestinian security chiefs to the author Patrick Seale, who wrote the ultimate "hidden hand" speculation about this bizarre hypothesis.

Just two observations here. Even when talking with Abu Nidal, who was a lethal psychopath and a degraded mercenary, one was still just inside the outer boundaries of rational discourse. But with the forces of Al Qaeda, traditional propaganda terms like "hijacker" and even "terrorist" have become robbed of meaning. We are faced with a weird combination of a state-supported crime family and a bent multinational corporation, sworn to the most reactionary worldview and entirely consecrated to a campaign of annihilation, which its targets are too profane and too corrupt to be expected to understand. This is new, and many liberals as well as many conservatives are still slow to discern the novelty. Second: You hear glib talk about how change in Iraq must wait upon change in Palestine, as if the Saddam Hussein regime felt, or even represented, a sincere concern for the victims of the occupation. But for decades, Baghdad armed and supported a man who was dedicated to the murder of his fellow Palestinians, and to making any solution impossible. If Saddam has now quarreled with him, and perhaps killed him like a roach, this wouldn’t dispel that point so much as restate it in a different way.

At a reception in Washington a few weeks ago I ran into some comrades from the Iraqi National Congress, which was once accused by its enemies of being a mere pliant tool of American imperialism. They asked to be introduced to a senior Administration official at the event, and I said I’d do my best. When I produced him for my friends, he turned his back and walked away at quite an impressive speed.

Concerning the impending or perhaps imminent intervention in Iraq, we now inhabit a peculiar limbo, where the military options are known while the political and moral options are not. It is very evident that some elements within the Bush Administration are perfectly content to give Saddam Hussein ample time to prepare his defenses, but it is less clear why the same sources become so intensely secretive when asked what they have in mind for the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. Not that this is anything so new–preparation for the last Gulf War was well in hand before Secretary of State James Baker announced that its principal rationale was "jobs, jobs, jobs."

There are three simultaneous clusters of argument in play. First comes the question of justification. Is Saddam to be removed because he possesses weapons of mass destruction, or because he has used poison gas and chemical weapons in Kurdistan, or because he has had indirect contact with Al Qaeda, or because he poses a menace to his neighbors? Second comes the question of feasibility and, more or less simultaneously, of advisability. Might not a military strike against the Baathists make a bad situation worse, not just in Iraq but in the entire Middle East? Third comes the question of quo warranto: By what right would the United States appoint itself the arbiter of Iraqi and Arab affairs?

Even when disentangled, these threads are tenuous, and tenuous in their relationship to one another. Still, a supporter of intervention might argue as follows: The United States, especially after September 11, has a right or even a duty to act pre-emptively against any regime that even looks at it in the wrong way. And its opportunist handwringing "allies" in Europe and the Arab world would be secretly delighted if Washington did what they cannot do for themselves by doing away with Saddam. The Iraqi people might or might not fill the streets with joyous demonstrations at their own deliverance, but they would have been given a chance to have a democratic life, and they would be free from the sanctions and from other obstacles to civilized normality. (As a beautiful but seldom-mentioned side benefit, the influence of the revolting Saudis, in the region and in America, would be correspondingly reduced.)

An opponent might argue that the inspections offer a better chance of containing the deadly weaponry, and also of observing the rights of sovereign states. Invasion might cause much death and destruction, and exert a destabilizing effect on the region in general. It might also trigger the use of the very weapons whose removal was its ostensible justification. Moreover, the United States cannot just proclaim itself as the forcible maker and unmaker of Arab governments, and this caution would apply with redoubled force to a President who is simultaneously the patron and armorer of General Sharon.

There is an in-between argument, which can be heard among Bush officials in Washington and also among Iraqi and Kurdish exiles and oppositionists. In its Bush version, this argument says you can’t announce that you will remove a regime and then not keep your pledge. In its Iraqi dissident form, it says that you can’t subject the Iraqi people to the cruelty of sanctions for so long while leaving the despot in place. The first version is grotesque; the second version has some honor to it. (And those who simply call for lifting the sanctions are inviting Saddam Hussein to exact or rather to extract his customary percentage of every import license, and thus acquire the sinews of rearmament.)

A dirty secret is involved here. From the US point of view, the present regime in Iraq is nearly ideal. It consists of a strong Sunni Muslim but approximately secular military regime. All it needs is a new head: Saddamism without Saddam. Mesopotamia means "between two rivers," and we are, like Macbeth himself, "in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er." The United States had at least a hand in the coup that brought Saddam to power. It encouraged him in his attack on Iran and in the filthy war that followed. At the very time of his worst conduct in Kurdistan, Washington was his best friend. When he plotted to straighten the Kuwaiti frontier in his favor, he was given the greenest of lights. This is a record of continuing shame. However–and one cannot underscore this enough–these, too, were all interventions in the affairs of Iraq. And if there can be interventions one way, in favor of the regime, there is at least a potential argument that an intervention to cancel such debts would be justifiable.

The "peace" forces may riposte that this is illogical and that all interventions are equally obnoxious. However, we have before us the example of liberated Kurdistan. The Kurdish autonomous area in northern Iraq is an unintended consequence of the last bungled Gulf War. In this enclave there are the rudiments of pluralism, civil society and a free press. Some part of what we owe the Kurdish people has been repaid, and as a result of civilian and international pressure rather than any Western grand design. Could the same success be repeated across Iraq, without endangering what has been won? We cannot know for sure, because the Administration refuses to say whether it wants a military junta in Baghdad, a monarchy, a vassal–or even an Iraqi state at all. Given the open rehearsals for invasion, there can be no "security" excuse for this weird silence. Citizens should be demanding that our rulers publish a clear statement both of war aims and political objectives. The long-suffering inhabitants of Iraq deserve to hear and debate this, and we have not just a right but a duty to do so as well.

The essential case for the abolition of capital punishment has long been complete, whether it is argued as an overdue penal reform, as a shield against the arbitrary and the irreparable or as part of the case against "big government." And, perhaps paradoxically, this same case has recently gained strength from the opportunistic successes of its opponents. The crudity and the exorbitance of the Clinton pro-death program nationwide, and the vileness of the locally applied Bush regime in Texas, only succeeded in awakening more widespread misgivings about the random application of the penalty, the increased likelihood of executing the innocent and the nauseating business of killing the underage and the mentally underdeveloped.

In addition, and since the death penalty invariably involves the deliberate destruction of evidence in a criminal case (by means of the official snuffing of the chief witness), the removal of Timothy McVeigh from the scene–before the background of the Oklahoma City atrocity had been properly investigated by our quite literally unbelievable FBI, which mislaid thousands of pages of paper promised for the defense–marked the zenith and the nadir of the now-federalized human sacrifice.

In this context, where even extreme conservatives were prepared to call for at least a moratorium on "the process," the Supreme Court decision in Atkins v. Virginia, handed down on June 20, is actually more of a step backward. The majority of Justices ruled 6 to 3 that the mentally retarded should be spared the ultimate penalty. But they stated explicitly that this ruling was founded on a supposed "national consensus." And they appeared to endorse the spurious measurements of IQ as a benchmark for life-or-death decision-making.

So that is actually two steps backward. The argument about death row has been stalled, practically speaking, for several decades because of the widespread belief that death is too popular a policy to be challenged. This is wrong, as it happens, both morally and politically. It is only in lynch law (the direct ancestor and progenitor of the current system) that public opinion determines a sentence. Governors Mario Cuomo and Jerry Brown were easily re-elected, in spite of their opposition to human sacrifice, in two of the nation’s most influential states. When they lost office, it was more because they had run out of steam than because they were seen as "bleeding hearts." Indeed, many reactionary voters respected both men for taking positions that were obviously not conditioned by opinion polls. Thus this is the worst possible moment to be making an ostensibly abolitionist case that in fact rests on the shift of local and national moods.

Second: When arguing not long ago against the fans of Murray and Herrnstein’s pseudoscientific The Bell Curve, one was hard put to choose when deciding which fallacy to ridicule first. Was it their definition of "race"–itself a concept utterly negated by the tracing of the human genome–or was it their definition of "intelligence"? Oliver Cruz, executed in Texas in August 2000 for rape and murder, was variously deemed to have an IQ of 64 or 76, according to who had been testing him. (The arbitrary figure of 75, for example, is the cutoff point for determining adult responsibility in Arizona.) I would not allow the educational destination of a child to be decided by nonsense of this sort, let alone the weightier decision about whether to gas, hang, shoot, incinerate by electricity or apply a lethal injection. The "liberal" majority on the Court has now dignified this sort of degraded argument and thrown it into an arena where the unscrupulous lawyer will appear for the shifty, remorse-free, lowbrow killer, and the charlatan tester will appear as an expert for the state. Or the other way around.

One of the most potent arguments against the death penalty is concerned very precisely with its populism. The regular election of judges in states with a long tradition of capital punishment, and the consequent likelihood that judges will endorse or even apply the penalty with an eye to the polls, has been shown to be an element in the very judicial deliberations that should obviously be the most immune from vulgar pressure. (See especially an article in the 1995 Boston University Law Review by Stephen Bright and Patrick Keenan. Their title, "Judges and the Politics of Death: Deciding Between the Bill of Rights and the Next Election in Capital Cases," is eloquent enough in itself.) Donald Cabana, the former warden of the Parchman Farm penitentiary in Mississippi, put it to me more graphically–after his resignation from an impossible job–by describing it as "death by ZIP Code."

Now we have the Supreme Court giving away very much more with one hand than it has retrieved with the other. Justice Scalia seemed to me much more intelligent, as well as much more principled, when he wrote in dissent that "there is something to be said for popular abolition of the death penalty; there is nothing to be said for its incremental abolition by this Court." Again, though, one notes the compulsive use of the word "popular." (Justice Scalia was joined by Justice Thomas, who as usual said nothing worth quoting about his evenhanded support for executing the dumb or the smart without discrimination, and who has narrowly passed a racial test while to all outward appearances failing the intelligence one.)

It is as if–since I think that "abolitionism" is the only relevant and comparable term–the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had upheld the theory and practice of slavery while trying to limit the use of the lash and the shackle. The consequence is that reformers are made to look stupid and cowardly, while the original evil appears more imposing and more impregnable. There can be no "equal opportunity" death penalty. May I take this chance to recommend a new book, titled Machinery of Death: The Reality of America’s Death Penalty Regime, edited by David and Mark Dow (Routledge; www.routledge-ny.com). It is the most comprehensive collection of abolitionist essays and findings yet assembled. (Interest declared: I wrote the introduction. Further interest disowned: I did so pro bono.)

Would it be too early to sense a sudden, uncovenanted shift against the corporate ethic, if ethic is the word? I can barely turn the page of a newspaper or magazine without striking across either some damaging admission, or at least some damage-control statement, from the boardroom classes. The "Money & Business" section of the New York Times on Sunday, June 16, carried a graphic photomontage of two well-tailored wrists, cuffed from behind. Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs made an appearance in Washington to call for drastic reform of accounting and oversight as it applies to business. Then Murdoch’s Weekly Standard fell on my desk, with a headline–"The Problem With K Street Conservatism"–surmounting its main editorial. The essay, by David Brooks, made some candid admissions about the differences between sheer, crass corporatism and the breezier kind of libertarian, market-oriented politics with which the right consoles itself on its better days.

Two of these differences might be termed strategic. The corporate world doesn’t care about an energy policy that might abolish dependence on Saudi oil. (Brooks spoke, in terms that must have cost him something, of the missed chance for "a large plan that would one day rid us" of such dependence.) And the corporate masters are indifferent, in their demand for steel tariffs, both to the purities of free-enterprise ideology and to the effect that such crudeness has on US diplomacy with Europe.

Behind this, I suspect, lies an even deeper unease about the relationship between the war against Al Qaeda and the lutte de classe. Historically and morally, wars that involve a general social mobilization are at least supposed to involve some notion of equality of sacrifice. This must apply at least as much to any war in which civilians are the main targets of the foe. The headline on the handcuff article read "Bush Doctrine: Lock ‘Em Up," a not quite accurate summary of the Administration’s policy on corporate malfeasance. Clearly, though, the White House doesn’t want to be caught running a fat cat’s war, while the citizens scrabble for crumbs. The number of those average citizens who now hold stock or have private retirement schemes–itself supposedly a proof of the very success of the privatized world–only makes the failure and squalor of Merrill Lynch and other outfits more salient.

In the second week of June I went to see Ralph Nader make a pitch in front of the Wednesday Morning Group, a regular conclave of conservative Republicans who gather every week to discuss the now rather problematic struggle against Big Government. This is not especially a corporate-sponsored collective, so he was to some extent pushing at an open door. But he undoubtedly scored some strong points by asking about the obscene payoffs awarded to fired or failed executives, and the "hush money" that is heaped on such people without any consultation with the shareholders. (I was there to make my own pitch about the failure of the Justice Department to act on the FBI’s recommendation for the indictment of Pinochet, of which more in a moment.) Even during the cold war, income differentials in America were a great deal "flatter" than they are now, and the aspiration for mobility was, despite the hype about the "dream," somewhat more realistic.

More to the point in some ways, Nader also spoke of the cultural values of the corporate elite, and of the way in which they seek to entrap children by spreading the net of addiction to junk food and brainless entertainment. By the end, there were those ready to applaud "values" as defined socially as against "value" as defined by the world of Disney. In the room were some who had worked with Nader against "corporate welfare" during the last Administration.

And this, too, points to a question that Nader did not ask. Why does the widespread revulsion from capitalist crime and social inequality not translate into a revival of support for the Democratic Party? I cannot think offhand, nor could I think later upon reflection, of a single Democrat who could have held that audience for such a denunciation or critique. And this is not just because, as the conservative columnists say, the people are more confident in market solutions, and more suspicious of intervention or regulation, than they used to be. It is because the Democrats are more beholden to the moneyed interests than ever before. Analysis of political donations by ZIP code in the last election cycle showed that while the averagely wealthy are solid in their allegiance to the GOP, a big slice of the ultrarich have become identified with the Democratic National Committee as exemplified by Terry McAuliffe and his kind. It’s probably quite apt, therefore, that the book to hit the stands during this odd period should be Wealth and Democracy, by Kevin Phillips–a warning against a second "Gilded Age," to be sure, but written by someone who has always been able to anatomize populism and class envy from a Republican point of view. If the Bush people are clever, which some of them are, they will be able to make corporate delinquency into a law-and-order issue, and thus keep the Democrats in a permanent state of panic on two fronts.

* * *

Concerning Pinochet: The Supreme Court in Chile has now accepted a request from the Argentine authorities to begin the process of stripping General Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity as a "Senator for Life." This complies with an Argentine judge who wants to question Pinochet about the murder of the former dictator’s predecessor as head of the Chilean Army. Gen. Carlos Prats was slain in Buenos Aires in 1974. Governments and magistrates in Spain, France, Argentina and elsewhere are now close on Pinochet’s trail for the murder of their citizens. Only the United States refuses to pursue an indictment against him, which has long been readied by prosecutors and the FBI, for the murder of an American citizen on American soil in 1976. In what respect, then, can the Attorney General claim to be defending us from state-supported foreign terrorists?

On October 30, 2000, I clipped an article by Natan Sharansky from the Wall Street Journal, thinking it might one day come in handy. Sharansky may not exactly be identified with the peace camp in Israeli politics (he was a minister under Ehud Barak, and he is now a minister under Ariel Sharon), but in his days as a Soviet Jewish refusenik he was trained in the school of Andrei Sakharov, and he does have a conception of the relationship between human rights and diplomacy, or perhaps I should say he has a conception of a relationship between these two things. The key paragraph is this one:

The pervasive assumption among nearly all of Oslo’s proponents was that the undemocratic nature of Yasser Arafat’s regime, far from being an obstacle to peace, was actually a strategic asset. Repeatedly told that Arafat was the only man who could "deliver," we were also informed that he would be even more effective than Israel in fighting terror. Yitzhak Rabin used reasoning that chillingly summed up the government’s approach. Mr. Arafat would deal with terrorists, he said, "without a Supreme Court, without human rights organizations and without all kinds of bleeding-heart liberals." In light of such an understanding of our "peace partner," do we have anyone to blame but ourselves for what Mr. Arafat’s authoritarianism has brought upon us?

It occurred to me to revisit this article after a recent conversation I had with a leading Palestinian human rights campaigner. This man has been imprisoned by Arafat several times for advocating an end to censorship and for criticizing the lack of democracy in "the Authority." (On one occasion, when Arafat’s police could think of no other charge, they accused him of peddling hashish. The "war on drugs" in action.) He told me that the worst moment of all was when Vice President Al Gore made an official visit to the region in order to present Arafat with a tranche of money earmarked for the setting up of special courts for Palestinians–known colloquially as "midnight courts," for reasons as easily imagined as described. It would be difficult to find a more clear and contemptuous illustration of the system of "separate and unequal." And, of course, these tribunals were not used for the suppression of violence but for the suppression of dissent.

One reason for believing in the authenticity of the recently "captured documents" from Ramallah, presented by Israel to the CIA, is that they do not all confirm Ariel Sharon’s propaganda. They show Arafat giving in to the suicide-assassin factions, rather than inciting them; this tends to confirm what we already know about his endless and futile balancing act. They also show an awareness on Arafat’s part that there exists a Saudi-financed bid to depose such secularists and leftists as remain in the leadership of the PLO, and to replace them with zealous Islamists who, if not Wahhabi themselves, are content to be in Wahhabi pay.

There is, I believe, a connection between these observations. In attacking those who made excuses for suicide-murders a few weeks ago (excuses that incidentally undermine those Palestinians who are genuinely opposed to such deeds), I said that such atrocities would increase rather than decrease if the prospect of a two-state agreement became more immediate. A reader has now accused me [see "Letters," June 10] of echoing Sharon’s rhetoric by making this point. Perhaps I was not being plain enough. The Islamist elements that sponsor suicide attacks in Israel itself are (a) opposed to any Jewish presence in Palestine and (b) in favor of a theocratic state for Palestinians. A two-state solution is bound to favor, in the long run, those Palestinians who believe in coexistence, who tend to be the same as those who believe in political democracy and civil society. (You can do the same thought-experiment the other way around: Any move to dismantle settlements or to abandon the fantasy of Eretz Israel will very probably arouse a rejectionist or OAS-type violence among some of the armed zealots, who are also those who want to impose Orthodox laws on all Jews.)

Thus there is a good case for considering a mutual-recognition policy, and a policy of democratic reform, as being two aspects of the same thing. It is a certainty that those Palestinians who call for a civil-society solution and for more transparency within Palestinian institutions will also run the risk of being accused of "treachery" on the national question. This is not, as that Gore visit shows, a question Americans can avoid. The Bush Administration’s reliance on the worst of the Clinton-Oslo legacy–namely, the collusion of secretive police forces under the chairmanship of George Tenet–is the least-criticized aspect of the current nightmare, and should be much more steadily opposed than it is.

* * *

Perhaps I gave the wrong title to my critique of Blinded by the Right ["The Real David Brock," May 27]. A few days later the East Bay Express published a lengthy exposé titled "The Unreal David Brock." Written by Will Harper, this article interviewed nineteen of Brock’s former contemporaries at Berkeley and also checked the files of all the student papers he said he had written for. It turns out that none of the claims he makes about his university days are true. This isn’t a small matter, because Berkeley was the supposed scene of Brock’s first–but not last–conversion experience. See, if you will, www.eastbayexpress.com. A few days after this, the Los Angeles Times reported a reunion between Bill Clinton and his former aides, in the course of which he advised them to read the Brock book and discover "what unhappy people their counterparts on the right are." And a few days after that, the Washington Post reported that Brock had to finish his book after committing himself to an institution. It seems he thought people were after him. Actually, and indeed sadly, the reverse would seem to be the case. Nobody wants poor David at all. I should say that the market has now fallen out of his bottom.

For Senator Clinton to flourish a copy of the New York Post–the paper that has called her pretty much everything from Satanic to Sapphist–merely because it had the pungent headline "Bush Knew" is not yet her height of opportunism. (The height so far was reached last fall, when she said she could understand the rage and hatred behind the attacks on the World Trade Center because, after all, she had been attacked herself in her time.) But the failure of her husband’s regime to take Al Qaeda seriously is the clue to the same failure on the part of the Bush gang.

Clinton’s only "serious" move against Osama bin Laden came in 1998, with his wag-the-dog missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. Those attacks, which followed the blowing up of two US embassies in Africa, had (as well as appalling consequences for the economy and society of Sudan) Inspector Clouseau-like consequences for the "war on terror." The supposed nerve-gas facility in Khartoum proved to be a pharmaceutical plant, while the cruise missiles fired at Afghanistan managed to kill some Pakistani intelligence officers who were training Al Qaeda forces to infiltrate Kashmir. In that moment, a whole nexus between Islamabad, the Taliban and bin Laden was accidentally exposed. And the political establishment in this country decided to look away.

The failure to protect our society from well-organized and long-planned atrocities last September is no doubt replete with further Clouseau-like moments on the part of the bureaucracy. One might have thought it hard to improve on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which finally granted the relevant visas to Atta and his comrades, and thoughtfully mailed them to the relevant flying school, exactly six months after the applicants had flown with savage joy into the Twin Towers. Still, the FBI and the CIA have been doing their best to match this record. And the Federal Aviation Administration will provide future students of institutional cretinism with astonishing seams of material. But the true failure is and was a political one.

The bin Laden/Mullah Omar crime family was trained in Afghanistan by the Pakistani secret police and paid for by Saudi Arabian money. The American "national security" class looked (and looks) upon the Pakistani secret police and the Saudi Arabian royal family as friends and allies. The most glaring example of this collusion was to be seen on September 11 last [see "Minority Report," January 21], when the FBI helped Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, fly several members of the bin Laden clan out of the country with no questions asked.

If you remember, dear reader, you yourself were unable to fly anywhere that day. Which brings me to the second point that is being occluded by this sham argument over who knew what and when. Without a moment of serious debate, the very institutions that had so signally failed to protect us, and which had been so friendly with the regimes that incubated the assault, were given near-absolute power over American citizens and residents. Several of the nineteen suicide-murderers were already on a "watch list" for terrorism, but scornfully bought their own tickets in their own names. The general awareness that there was a hijacking risk had not led to the securing of cockpits. But now look at the vigilance and energy with which law-abiding passengers are treated like criminals as well as fools, and deprived of their in-flight cutlery and their nail-scissors. (The FAA has made sure of one thing. The next suicide-murderer who manages to get on a plane will find that his victims have been thoroughly and efficiently disarmed. No improvised resistance will be possible, unless experts in unarmed combat happen to be among the passengers. And I hesitate to mention even that, in case some bright spark in authority decides to disqualify such people from flying at all in their "weaponized" condition.)

Neither within our borders nor outside them are we protected by security forces who are trained to recognize an enemy. Pakistan–friend and client and purchaser of sophisticated weaponry–obviously OK. Saudi Arabia–ditto. In order to attract unwelcome attention last year, the murderers-in-training would have had to come from a recognized "rogue state." Then they could have earned the sort of unsleeping invigilation that has recently brought Marilyn Meiser, a 75-year-old retired Wisconsin schoolteacher, a fine of $1,000 for taking a bicycling holiday in Cuba.

The worst of it is that this high-level collusion still goes on. The Saudi royal family has refused to share any police information on the fifteen of its citizens who immolated themselves and others. It openly acts as the theocratic and financial and military patron of the Islamic Jihad group, which has done such awful damage both to Israeli civilians and to the credit of the Palestinian revolution. But Bush continues to fawn on this disgusting dynasty, while for the oil executives who make up his inner circle the same dynasty fulfills the useful function of being the only Arabs they know or care about.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan it is difficult to argue that General Musharraf has exactly earned the enormous stipend given to him, his army and his police. Frustrated British and American officers in Afghanistan, combing the hills for the gangsters, have recently become convinced that their targets have relocated across the Pakistani border. Independent reportage supports this interpretation, which does not require much by way of an imaginative leap.

In a ridiculous recent book titled The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Tariq Ali begins by saying that "there exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about who ordered the hits on New York and Washington," and then goes on to state, exactly and incontrovertibly enough, that with these hits, "the subjects of the Empire had struck back." Wrong. Wrong twice. As wrong as could be. These attacks came from the servants and satraps of the Empire, and the Empire’s managers are culpable for a little bit more than their failure to foresee them.

When incurable liberals like Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman begin using the name Whittaker Chambers as a term of approbation, we are entitled to say that there has been what the Germans call a Tendenzwende, or shift in the zeitgeist. The odd thing is that they have both chosen to compare Chambers’s Witness, a serious and dramatic memoir by any standards, to a flimsy and self-worshiping book titled Blinded by the Right, by David Brock. Meyer Schapiro, one of the moral heroes of the democratic left, once said that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling a lie. That might well be phrasing it too strongly, but I have now been provoked by curiosity into reading Brock, and I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.

The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer–that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him–was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock’s new story–that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy–is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.

On page 128, Brock does what many defectors do, and claims that it was his party, not he, that had changed. The tone of the 1992 Republican convention was the alleged tipping point, with its antigay, anti-1960s, Christian Coalition themes. On page 121 Brock makes the demented assertion that the GOP had "virtually launched an antigay pogrom," before sobbing, "there was far less ideological affinity between the GOP and me than when I had first come to Washington. The party had left me and many other libertarian-leaning conservatives back in Houston." So at least that fixes a date, in what is a very rambling and egocentric narrative. And the date makes it easy to demonstrate that Brock is a phony. His early hero Reagan made alliances with Jerry Falwell, fulminated against the 1960s, refused to mention the term "AIDS" in public and encouraged Jeane Kirkpatrick’s veiled attack on the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. As a longtime Bay Area denizen, Brock would have had a hard time missing that last reference, or any of the others. So he’s plainly still lying about his past. He’s also lying about his future: the "Troopergate" allegations appeared under his name a good while later than 1992, and sometime well after that he was billed as a featured speaker by the Christian Coalition.

Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person? Brock masks his deep-seated mendacity from others and (perhaps) from himself by a simple if contemptible device of rhetoric. He switches between passive and active. Thus of one conservative smear-op, he tells us that "I allowed myself to get mixed up" in it. His masochism even permits him to say, at a reactionary award ceremony in far-off St. Louis, at which he somehow found himself, that "I was miserable. Yet this was how I made my living and it was who I had become. The conservatives had bought my brain." And paid well over the odds for it, I should say. Never mind, he always cheers up by letting himself be drawn in to another bad business. And here we get the same paltry narcissism in its opposite form: "I was a full-scale combatant, I had war-wounds to show for it, and I needed the thrill of another round of battle."

He finds it difficult to refer to himself–when he isn’t crippled by self-loathing–without using the words "icon" and "poster boy." There are actually very few revelations in the book, unless you are surprised to learn that a cabal of right-wingers tried to frame the Clintons for killing Vince Foster. (Brock now prefers the even more far-out view that Foster was murdered by the Wall Street Journal.) Referring to the anti-Semitism of a famous conservative, he cites what might be a joke in poor taste and says it was "one of her gentler remarks." What, couldn’t he have cited a more damning one? There are countless silly mistakes, including the date of Theodore and Barbara Olson’s wedding, and many innuendoes, such as the (unsupported) suggestion that it is Richard Mellon Scaife who has committed not one but two murders. In his coarse attack on Juanita Broaddrick, whose allegation of rape was supported by several contemporaneous witnesses and has not yet been denied by Clinton himself, Brock does not even do the elementary work of stating the case he is trying to rebut. Instead, he inserts a completely gratuitous slander against a decent woman, all of whose independent assertions have survived meticulous fact-checking. The defamation game is still all that this creep knows. Etiquette requires that I mention a very rude description of myself, concentrating on the grossly physical, which includes the assertion that I am unwashed as well as unkempt. Those who know me will confirm that while I may not be tidy, I am so clean you could eat your dinner off me. Perhaps I did not want to put Mr. Brock to the labor of proving this. At any rate, I am relieved to find I am not his type. However, I forgive him this sophomoric passage because its empty hatred was so obviously feigned after the event, and because it describes me as five years younger than I am.

Still, I wanted to take an extra shower after trudging through this dismally written, pick-nose, spiteful and furtive little book. It glitters with malice and the more cowardly kind of "disclosure"; it’s a dank, filthy tissue turned inside out. And it is all written allegedly as a defense of the Clintons’ right to privacy! As someone who despised Clinton from the very first, I remember resenting the damage done by hysterical and fabricated right-wing attacks, which bought him time and sympathy. Anyone really interested in this period should grab the paperback version of Michael Isikoff’s Uncovering Clinton, a verifiable story told by a serious journalist, who began by disbelieving the rumors and discovered by honest exertion that many of them, and some that had not even been suspected, were true.

Nothing is more to be despised, in a time of crisis, than the affectation of "evenhandedness." But there are two very nasty delusions and euphemisms gaining ground at present. The first of these is that suicide bombing is a response to despair, and the second is that Sharon’s policy is a riposte to suicide bombing.

On my very first visit to the unholy land, in September 1976, I went to pay a call on Uri Avnery in his Tel Aviv apartment. I still have the notes of my conversation with this brave writer and human-rights campaigner–one of the most staunch and intelligent veterans of the peace camp–and I blew the dust off the notebook a few days ago. Here it all was: the warnings and the predictions. The Gush Emunim settlers, religious rightists who had just begun to colonize the West Bank in earnest, were hoping to create a permanent occupation. A certain General Sharon was already turning up at their meetings and looking for a political opening. Meanwhile, Yasir Arafat was refusing to repudiate the Palestinian "covenant," which more or less called for the expulsion of all Jews who arrived in Palestine after the 1917 Balfour Declaration. There were "rejectionists" on both sides, but Begin and Sharon were still on the fringes, and it was conceivable that peace would consist of two states, with both sides renouncing their maximum irredentist positions and–this had a special importance–being willing to confront their own fanatics. Avnery mentioned his friendship with Said Hammami, a Palestinian internationalist then representing the PLO in London and ready to discuss mutual recognition. I knew and admired Hammami myself; he was murdered by the Abu Nidal gang not long afterward.

One weeps to think of what might still have been accomplished then if the United States had been willing to act on a two-state solution. Yet Washington took the same line on Palestinian statehood that St. Augustine took on chastity: It was something to be desired eventually, but not quite yet. It still does, dumbly and unbelievably, take that same line, as if the West Bank was the one place in the world where a superpower’s writ does not run.

None of this recognition of our own responsibility can be wasted on rationalizations of the suicide bombers and the Palestinian organizations that sponsor them. The self-murder of preprogrammed individuals who have the massacre of civilians as their aim is not just disgusting in itself. It expresses very clearly the absolutism of the ideology that exalts it; a depraved religious mentality combined with a rigidly exclusive ethnonationalism. If it took only "despair" there would or could be millions of Palestinians doing it, and doing it furthermore (since the "risk" is hardly greater) at least against "military targets." But the immolation of an old people’s Passover dinner, in the territories that are supposedly recognized as Israeli, requires more than a blank lack of discrimination. It requires planning.

"Condemnations" of such deeds are worthless, and more than worthless, in fact contemptible, when they have to be exacted. Edward Said to his credit long ago expressed a secular wish for a Palestinian Mandela, instead of the Papa Doc figure who now leads a hideously misgoverned people. Well, Nelson Mandela was in jail when the practice of "necklacing" the supposed collaborators infected the townships of South Africa. But Desmond Tutu, short and vulnerable as he was, waded into a mob and forced a halt to a public burning. No doubt that crowd had felt despair and frustration also. But there was no question which side the leadership was on.

A simple thought experiment shows that if there were any sign of a two-state solution, suicide murders would increase and not decrease. In case you have forgotten, these obscene tactics were first employed when the Rabin-Peres government was in power and when there was much more negotiating "space" than there is now. Netanyahu quite probably owes his election to those events, and something tells me that his rival and successor, General Sharon, does not tear his hair with grief when he learns of the random slaughter of Jews.

Here again, it is wise to look at the original political programs. The forces of Islamic Jihad say that non-Muslims are vile interlopers in a consecrated land. Their tactics therefore express their primitive ideology. Sharon and Netanyahu believe that god reserved this same territory for the Jews, and Sharon has specialized for decades in punitive wars against those impudent enough to complain at their original expulsion or subordination. He has taken this campaign of revenge against the victims all the way to Jordan, to the Sinai, to Gaza, to Lebanon and most recently to Jenin. He has welcomed to his Cabinet Effi Eitam, an open advocate of ethnic cleansing, and he has appointed a minister of internal security, Uzi Landau, who says that Israel should treat the Palestinians as Saddam Hussein dealt with the Kurds. (Funny how those who say the wrong thing are often saying what they mean.) Not one US government voice has been raised against the statements of Eitam or Landau. Not one US government voice has been raised against the Saudi financing of the suicide militias. Referring this trade-off to the international scene, it’s now a race to see whether Saddam saves Sharon, or Sharon saves Saddam.

Facile equivalences are to be avoided. One in particular is the stupid equation by peaceniks between Sharon in Jenin and the international coalition in Kabul, which easily made distinctions between killers and noncombatants and which still does. But if the American conservatives choose to make the same mistake by identifying in reverse order, then they replicate the reciprocity between Sharonism, which is an insult to the Jews, and jihadism, which is a disgrace to the Arabs. (Perhaps a pious Christian supervision of this ghastly "process" of symbiosis is all that we needed.) September 11, more than anything, marked the opening of a culture war between those who believe that god favors thuggish, tribal human designs, and those who don’t believe in god and who oppose thuggery and tribalism on principle. That ought to be the really historic and dialectical sense in which it "changed everything."

London

I really must come to England more often. The last time I was here, in mid-February, Princess Margaret gave up the ghost. And now, even as I step off the wondrous train that connects Paris to London, the flags are hauled halfway down to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, last Empress of India. This was supposed to be a Jubilee year, marking half a century of the present sovereign’s rule. But it has been a series of black-draped obsequies so far. And I plan to come back in early June…

A sycophantic American media (for which there is even less excuse than a sycophantically royalist English one) has already bombarded you with the palace spin on the old girl’s life. Amazing sprightliness into advanced old age; always a kind word and a wave for the commoners; great pluck during the Blitz; devotion to duty; a symbol of historic continuity…. This is all utter rubbish. Take only the most celebrated of the myths: the one about her stoicism during the Nazi bombardment of London. It is true that the royal family decided not to leave the capital during the war, and it is also true that a few bombs did strike Buckingham Palace. But no account of this period is complete unless one recalls the long, steady support of King George and his late wife for the Chamberlain-Halifax policy of appeasement. They did not go as far in pro-Hitler sympathy as did the disgraced Edward VIII and his famous consort, Wallis Simpson, but they did their best.

When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, having betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he knew that he could expect a strong attack on his shameful treaty from the Labour and Liberal benches in the House of Commons. He therefore had himself driven straight from the airport to Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen presented him to a cheering throng from their balcony. I possess a photograph of this disgusting event. The Queen Mother looks, as people always say, "radiant." The late John Grigg, who was known as Lord Altrincham and a distinguished Tory and court historian, described this as "the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the [twentieth] century." And so it was: The Munich agreement received a royal warrant and baptism before Parliament had even debated it. Other Establishment historians, such as Philip Ziegler, have revealed that the Queen was an enthusiastic supporter of her husband’s policy of backing Chamberlain and, when that administration collapsed, of pushing for the even more reactionary Lord Halifax to replace him. The hostility of the monarchy to Churchill was well-known at the time, and he could never have hoped to gain the succession without the Labour and Liberal votes that had been pre-empted and annulled, by monarchical intervention, a short time before.

Much more recently, guests would stagger away from lunches and dinners with the Queen Mother, appalled by what they had heard of her "table talk." She always stuck up for Ian Smith’s white-settler racist rebellion in what was then Rhodesia. She could invariably find a kind word for P.W. Botha’s apartheid regime in South Africa. Her most loyal courtier and chronicler, a man with the absurd title of Lord Wyatt of Weeford, confessed that he was sometimes quite taken aback by her observations about Jews and her fondness for feeble-minded pursuits such as astrology and the paranormal. Since she never deigned to give an interview in the entire course of her life, so the credulous and the loyal were never exposed directly to her prejudices, but there is quite enough on the record to make it outrageous for the press to have been so reticent and deferential.

As for her sprightliness and longevity, she may have had good genes, but since she never in her life had to open a door, pull a curtain or lift anything heavier than a gold fork, and since she never went anywhere without an enormous staff of personal attendants, she certainly managed to minimize the sort of stress that can carry off even the toughest grandma in a less fortunate family. She was also, I must add, a good advertisement for the medicinal properties of booze. Borne along on a wave of gin and champagne (and apparently convinced to the end of her days that Dubonnet was not an alcoholic drink), it is small wonder that she managed a wave or a smile as she went giggling past. Her daughter once broke with custom and asked for an extra glass of wine at one of their two-Queen lunches. "Are you sure, dear?" replied the old lady. "Do remember that you have to reign all afternoon."

Fifteen years ago it was disclosed that the Queen Mother had had two unacknowledged nieces, named Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon. Both were born mildly retarded, both were covertly committed to a mental institution and both were falsely reported to have died. The Queen Mother grew up in Glamis Castle, but even the Macbeth family might have raised an eyebrow at this callousness. The thing is, though, that you can’t have royalty and monarchy without "breeding." And "breeding," as well as applying to pedigree in people, dogs and racehorses, has an unfortunate connection to eugenics. The theory of breeding (and culling) a master family is no different in principle from the theory of incubating a master race. It is both sinister and absurd. All the late Queen’s children and grandchildren made disastrous marriages, producing a plethora of spoiled and talentless progeny whose dreary antics provide fodder for the tabloids. All the indications are that Prince William has already made it abundantly clear that he does not want to succeed to the throne, or waste his life waiting for it as his wretched father has had to do. So as I saw the gun carriage rumble by, and surveyed the droves of people who stayed away from all the ceremonies of leave-taking, and noticed that the lines of mourners were sober rather than sad, as if really saying goodbye this time, I thought yet again that the British are growing up, and ceasing to demand the ritual of human sacrifice that the fetish of monarchy demands of them.

Was it lack of space or was it lack of time that made Katha Pollitt so bland and lenient about the current state of religious leadership in our country and our culture ["God Changes Everything," April 1]? She mentioned the obvious degeneration of the Roman Catholic Church into a protection racket for child rapists, true. She also instanced the way in which Judaism has become prostituted to the uses of messianic colonialism in Palestine. But this is merely to tinker with the problem. What about Billy Graham, who has been Protestant father-confessor to every President from Eisenhower to Clinton, and who has achieved the status of America’s mainstream cleric?

H.R. Haldeman’s diaries of the Watergate years, published in 1994, gave an account of a conversation between Nixon and Graham that included some heated talk about "Satanic Jews," and what to do about them. This elegant exchange followed a "prayer breakfast" that the two men had graced in February 1972. There was a brief flap about this when the Haldeman diaries were first published, but it soon died away. Now we have the tapes, first made public in an excellent piece by James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, and despite their many deletions they show Graham to be an avid bigot as well as a cheap liar.

Nixon initiates the conversation but Graham can’t wait to join in. Jewish control over the media is assumed, of course, and Graham says, "This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain." "You believe that?" asks Nixon and, when the preacher-man says, "Yes, sir," responds, "Oh, boy, so do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it." (This seems to me to take care, at long last, of the excuse peddled by Nixon’s defenders that he liked to talk dirty about Jews only in order to seem tough to his gruesome subordinates.) Yet it is, admittedly, Graham who makes most of the running. The key excerpt is this: "But I have to lean a little bit, you know. I go and keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at the New York Times, and people of that sort. And all–not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country."

In other words, Graham can put up with the "swarming" because he, too, is for a crazed notion of a holy state in Palestine. This passage didn’t get as much emphasis as it should have in the reports of the meeting, which Graham at first pathetically claimed not to remember. His memory came back in the form of a fawning apology, but he was never subjected to the Farrakhan-Jackson treatment. After all, in the National Cathedral after September 11 he was allowed in the presence of our country’s elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be there–a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of bin Laden. So there you have it: The country’s senior Protestant is a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant; the leaders of official Jewry are cringingly yoked with him for the purpose of a disastrous crusade and meanwhile the cardinals are running a rape fiesta for twitchy "celibates." All official attention turns, meanwhile, upon the weird beliefs to be found in the Koran, which may be partly because the Attorney General himself is a tuneless, clueless, evangelical Confederate dunce.

The struggle against theocratic fascism should, therefore, be inseparable from the struggle for a truly secular state. This need not mean an atheist state; the religious impulse itself seems to be partly innate at our present stage of evolution. But it need not necessarily take the extremely backward form that it assumes in our society, nor need its recognition eventuate in the present sickly "multiculturalism," whereby all forms of religious stupidity are granted equal "respect" while challenges to, say, scientific teaching are greeted with nervous tolerance.

Little, Brown has chosen the perfect moment to publish The Ornament of the World, by Maria Rosa Menocal. It is a history of medieval "Al-Andalus," or Andalusia: a culture where there was extensive cooperation and even symbiosis among Muslims, Jews and Christians, and where civilization touched a point hardly surpassed since fifth-century Athens. Indeed, that comparison itself is not inapt. It was the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries who sponsored the translation of the whole corpus of Greek philosophy into Arabic, thus preserving it from the ban on philosophy that had been imposed by the first Christian emperors. It was the Arab-Andalusian scholar Averroës, known also as Ibn Rushd, who later, in the twelfth century, made his commentaries on Aristotle available to the Latin-speaking world, where they were yet again banned by the Church fathers before finally being recovered by Europe. So it is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call "Western" culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment.

The migration of Arabic-speaking intellectuals to the southern Spanish cities of Córdoba and Granada, and the magnetic pull exerted on Jewish scholars, was also to have revolutionary effects on the study of medicine–with early Greek texts again revived through translation–and upon the writing of poetry. Menocal has a wonderful chapter on the love poems of the era and on Ibn Hazm’s The Neck Ring of the Dove, a handbook on romance and a memoir of old Córdoba. We tend to forget that Maimonides, another great figure of this culture, wrote almost all his major works–with the exception of the Mishneh Torah–in Arabic. Nothing could be more remote from the bleak and arid doctrines of the Taliban.

However, it was not Muslim but Christian intolerance that put an end to Andalusia. By 1492 their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella had completed the reimposition of orthodoxy and begun the expulsion of the Jews and Moors. It was to the Muslim world that the Jews then looked for safety. This book partly restores to us a world we have lost, a world for which our current monotheistic leaderships do not even feel nostalgia.

London

The church bells were pealing for Princess Margaret Rose (as she was known when she was a pretty and vivacious child) as I arrived on a bright, cold Sunday morning. Breaking with the habit of a lifetime, I decided to attend divine service at one of the more upscale Anglican churches, and see if I could test the temperature of the nation. The pews were almost empty as the choir struck up the opening hymn, and the prayers for the departed one–which augmented the Church of England’s mandatory weekly prayer for the Royal Family–were muttered only by a few of the sparse and elderly congregation. The newspapers had done her proud, splashing big pictures and running long obituaries, but the question was: Had Fleet Street overestimated demand for royal obsequies?

The queue to sign the book of condolence at her personal palace was almost humiliatingly small, and the attempt to create a mound of floral tributes outside the railings was positively pathetic. (She might not have minded this: She detested the show of crowd emotion that followed the death of the Spencer girl, and indeed took a very frigid view in general of the "People’s Princess" and her doings.) All through the week I was in town, I met people younger than myself, many of them workers in the media, who had not known that there was any such person as Princess Margaret. This surprised me more than perhaps it should have done (I never tire of G.K. Chesterton’s definition of journalism–that it involves the press telling the reader that Lord Jones is dead, when the reader never knew that Lord Jones had been alive), but it also reinforced something that is otherwise very much noticeable: the deroyalization of British life. The most recent symptom of this was a portrait commissioned for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, which falls in the summer. Painted, or perhaps I should say executed, by Lucian Freud–what could they have been thinking?–it shows a sour-faced, prune-like old lady with a rather vacant look.

When I was a lad, everyone had heard of Princess Margaret, all right. You stood a fair chance, if you went to a nightclub in London, of actually tripping over her. More than one young squireen of the town, indeed, could boast of doing more than that. I myself cannoned into her at a cocktail party, without sufficient warning. She was standing there agreeably enough, with a baby’s bath of gin in one hand and a lancelike cigarette-holder in another. "Evening, ma’am," I ventured, forgetting that with royalty you are supposed to wait to be addressed. "Know anything about China?" she screeched in reply. Whether it was porcelain or Peking that she intended, I was equally at a loss. Her complexion even then–this was the late 1970s–had acquired a sort of smoked-salmon tinge, which slathers of rouge, alternating with tanning holidays on the privately held Caribbean island of Mustique, did little to soften.

Somewhat frustrated in her pointless role as spare princess to her plainer older sister, she had a tendency to insist on the most appalling of the courtly etiquettes. For instance, protocol demands that when royalty is present, nobody may leave any social gathering, formal or informal, without permission. A hostess known to me, heavily pregnant and quite exhausted, inquired falteringly rather late in the evening whether she might withdraw. "No," said Princess Margaret, exhaling sullenly and with a glittering look of exerted privilege. The Windsor cause suffered a defection or two that night, and I’ve since heard of several other people who endured the same petty humiliation.

For all that, I am still ready to feel sorry for her. She was made into a human sacrifice by her sister about half a century ago, and forced to abandon the man she loved because he had been married before. It was announced by Buckingham Palace and by the Archbishop of Canterbury that such a match would scandalize the nation, when of course it would have done nothing of the sort. The sheer coldness of this, and the awful strained and affected sense of a painful duty being discharged by the Queen, became for me a working definition of official hypocrisy (as well as of the absurdity of a hereditary head of the church, which in turn is nothing to the absurdity of a hereditary head of state, let alone a hereditary chief of the armed forces). Princess Margaret had a small private revenge here: She designed the license plate of her official limousine so that the numbers represented the date on which she had first fucked the unacceptable Group Captain Peter Townsend. But after that, she declined into a fog of faux gaiety; of endless tedium alleviated by white-trash boyfriends, spongers, snobs and poseurs. The image of the disco princess, in hock to social climbers and gossip columnists and showbiz values, but doing her bit for charity on the side, predated the supposed Diana "phenomenon" by almost a generation. British embassies throughout the world would suffer paroxysms of dread at the thought of an official "royal visit" from the Margaret factor. The consulate in Chicago is still reeling from the time when she commented on the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by saying bluntly: "Irish pigs." Nobody quite believed the cover story that this was a misquotation for "Irish jigs." Ah, the magic of monarchy…

I was in London to do an onstage conversation with the great Francis Wheen, biographer of Marx, feared muckraker and deputy editor of the indispensable antibullshit magazine Private Eye. When I turned up for the event, he had brought a white piano onto the proscenium. Since I cannot play a note and am in scant demand as a singer, I eyed it nervously. But as we closed the event, Francis stepped to the keyboard and did an imperishable dead-pan of Elton John’s terrible song "Goodbye England’s Rose"–the most cringe-making ditty since "MacArthur Park." (Perhaps you yourself have noticed how often roses fade with the sunset as the rain sets in.) Slowly, I joined in the chorus for "Goodbye Margaret Rose." We had a pretty full West End house if I say so myself, and one can never be sure who will be offended. Nobody was. I used to wonder if I would ever outlive the House of Windsor. Now I feel that, in the most essential ways, I already have.

Those who ritually slaughtered Daniel Pearl, said the President in a prepared statement, "need to know that their crimes only hurt their cause." Pearl’s publisher at the Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann, added that the murder "was an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny’s kidnappers claimed to believe in." The New York Times, in an editorial published on the same day as these oddly phrased denunciations, could not stop reiterating the same theme. Pearl’s murder was "ultimately self-defeating for those responsible." The killers "gained nothing by their unspeakable act." Not only this, but in case you missed the point the first couple of times, "the kidnappers have only undermined their cause by their acts."

As an Establishment party line, this stinks in a number of ways. A group of unscrupulous theocratic gangsters kidnaps a young reporter and announces on the first day that it will maltreat him (in a supposed riposte to the handling of Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo Bay). It then holds him in filthy captivity, ignores appeals from his pregnant wife–who even offers to exchange herself for him–and then slashes his throat on camera. The rest of the lovingly made video shows his subsequent decapitation. It is further clear, from the audio "portion" and from statements made by the gang (who were obviously having themselves quite a good time with their hostage), that they awarded themselves extra points for doing this to a Jew. But, when the thunder of condemnation is heard, it turns out that the perpetrators have somehow failed to live up to their professed standards!

What can possibly explain this sudden outbreak of creepy euphemism? Just like the bin Ladenites who are their partners and their inspiration, the Pakistani fundamentalists maintain a strict symmetry between ends and means. They aim for a stagnant and dictatorial society ruled by a mediocre "holy" text, and they have no concept of an unbeliever as a civilian. (Those who have been making lists of civilian casualties in the recent war have, I hope, raised their tally by one–this time one inflicted with elaborate premeditation.) What the Islamic fascists do, and what they believe, and what they intend, are three aspects of the same one-dimensional thing. It is ludicrous to accuse them of being untrue to themselves or their cause.

The usual rush to "understand" Pervez Musharraf’s difficulties seems to supply a partial explanation for this moral feebleness. Once again, the gallant general has exerted himself and expended political capital to confront his apparently inexhaustible supply of lawless underlings and subordinates. We forget that in the first days of the Pearl abduction, as in the days just after the assault on the Parliament in New Delhi, Musharraf and his spokesmen openly put the blame for both outrages on sinister Indian circles. We also forget that the professionalism of the kidnappers, and their ability to escape detection, has suggested to more than one investigator the possibility of a role played by Pakistan’s secret police Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). I did not see this obvious contingency mentioned openly until an excellent report in the Washington Post of February 23.

Here’s how the ratchet has operated so far: Musharraf was the patron of the Taliban until he was paid a fortune to stop. He was the protector of Al Qaeda until he was paid another fortune to stop that, too. His nuclear program was found to be harboring several senior bin Ladenites until his entire foreign debt was handsomely rescheduled. Then it was found that his army was using Al Qaeda fighters as a proxy in Kashmir, at which stage he won golden opinions and further praise for asking them, in a "shocked" mode, to cease and desist. Most recently, the ISI was discovered to have flown some 2,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda members out of Afghanistan around the time of the fall of Kandahar and Kabul. On this occasion the Pentagon appears to have told Musharraf that if he stopped providing such a safe haven, he would not be publicly criticized for having done so. In this client-state relationship, who is the tail and who the dog? And why should the lucky general wish to dry up a pool of fanatics that ultimately serves as his repeat meal ticket?

Along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan belongs on any list of those states that harbor and spread the forces and the ideology of bin Laden. This, among many other reasons, is why the "axis of evil" speech was a discreditable and dishonest effort. It changed the subject away from the real struggle and back toward the tired old concept of "rogue states." At least with that familiar routine, the spokesmen for the Administration knew where they were. Challenged on the unwise decision to include Iran, for example, they could rattle off Iranian support for militant forces in Lebanon and among the Palestinians. But only a fool still believes that there are not, indeed, "root causes" (and very deep and traceable ones) of the Palestinian conflict. Perhaps one might dare to spell out some of the differences. The Palestinian people live under an illegal occupation, and international law gives them the right to resist it. The Pakistani oligarchy imposed an appalling occupation on Afghanistan. The Palestinians have a sheaf of UN resolutions, proclaiming their right to a homeland, that outnumber those passed on any other topic by the world body. The Pakistanis are gross violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. One could go on. But the Bush Administration speaks to Arafat as if he had a state and were an aggressor, and to Musharraf as if he were leader of an oppressed and dispossessed minority.

A few months ago, conservative journals and Republican spokesmen were very alert to the least hint of faintness or equivocation about "terrorism." They didn’t mind striking some "collateral" targets, like Katha Pollitt or Susan Sontag. But now, honeyed phrases are employed by our bosses, and are being insinuated into the mainstream, to spare the feelings of anti-Semitic, sadistic and nihilist forces who must marvel at our restraint. This doesn’t alter the case for the just war, but it does remind one always to look to the language.

On East Capitol Street a few years ago, I was in a taxi when a car pulled suddenly and dangerously across our bow. My driver was white, with a hunter’s cap and earmuffs and an indefinable rosy hue about his neck. The offending motorist was black. Both vehicles had to stop sharply. My driver did not, to my relief, say what I thought he might have been about to say. I uttered a neutral expletive or two. The black man got out of his car, face alight with rage, and walked over. "I think," he said, "that you just said something." I thought I knew what it was that he fancied I had said. Again, the driver was a real trooper. "Hey man," he said, "he didn’t say anything nasty." Unconvinced by this, our near-miss new acquaintance called me a "cracker" and a "honkie" and some other things, got back into his car and roared away.

If he had hoped to hurt my feelings by uttering these "slurs," he only succeeded in a fashion he didn’t really intend (i.e., by challenging my antiracist credentials, of which he was pardonably unaware). And he seemed to sense the inadequacy of the repertoire at his disposal, whereas all three of us knew that there was a word, available only to two of us, that could have completely spoiled the other’s day. I don’t know and can’t really imagine what it is like to be in such an unequal position.

Perhaps it is partly this inequality, and the history that underlies and reinforces it, that makes Randall Kennedy want to detoxify the word. In his new book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, he takes encouragement from the fact that many black people flaunt the term among themselves, and he seeks to extend the repeal of the taboo. Kennedy, a distinguished African-American teacher of law (and a Nation editorial board member), studies the many cases where the word has ended up in the dock, so to speak, and been adjudicated as an act of violence or incitement. "How should nigger be defined?" he inquires. "Is it a part of the American cultural inheritance that warrants preservation? Why does nigger generate such powerful reactions? Is it a more hurtful racial epithet than insults such as kike, wop, wetback, mick, chink, and gook?"

Well, in answer to the second question, yes it is. It is not just a term of hatred (whereas all or most of the others are terms of mere dislike or contempt) but a grim, sneering reminder and an attempt to put certain people "in their place." As to the rather oddly phrased question, I don’t know whether it "warrants preservation," but it is certainly "a part of the American cultural inheritance" that doesn’t deserve to be airbrushed or prettified.

Dick Gregory wrote a book with the same name some years ago, telling his mother that every time she heard the word from now on, she could tell herself that people were advertising her son’s work. But that’s a different type of detoxification. Many words now in uncontroversial use–such as "Tory," "Impressionist"and "suffragette"–were originally coined as terms of abuse and then adopted "ironically" by their targets. (Just to stay with color, much the same was true of the term "red.") When rappers say "nigga" they are aiming for the same effect. Professor Kennedy’s legal perspective sometimes inhibits him from enforcing a difference–the only really important one–between ironic and literal usage.

For example, recently there was a huge and needless fuss in the mayor’s office in Washington when some budgetary official used the word "niggardly" to describe an item of expenditure and had to resign. There’s a never-ending campaign to ban Huckleberry Finn from schools because Huck uses the only word available in his vernacular to describe his friend Jim. (This campaign is organized by Dr. John Wallace, a black teacher in Chicago. I debated with him once at the Mark Twain House in Hartford and was agreeably surprised, when we went for a drink afterward, to discover that he was a fairly extreme religious conservative.) These are instances of misapplied, even authoritarian, "sensitivity." But would we have emancipated ourselves from "all that" if the word "nigger" became, in general, a backslapping, denatured term of genial mockery? Assuming this achievement to be either desirable or feasible, it would come at a huge cost.

In his poem "For the Union Dead," Robert Lowell speaks of Colonel Shaw, and his death at the head of the first "Negro" regiment ("Two months after marching through Boston,/half the regiment was dead"):

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

How would one teach that poem to a future generation that had come to regard the word as a piece of raillery? George Orwell’s essay against imperialism, "Not Counting Niggers," depends for its effect upon the shock and bite of the epithet, and of the foulness of the thought that it expresses. The whole moral weight of Huck Finn lies in his decision to risk damnation on behalf of someone he can only, and in his innocence, "name" in one way. In other words, "nigger" must remain both employable and unemployable, and always intelligible as to context. It should never become just another element in some "gorgeous mosaic" of banal "diversity."

"As nigger is more widely disseminated and its complexity is more widely appreciated," Randall Kennedy concludes, "censuring its use–even its use as an insult–will become more difficult. Still, despite these costs, there is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N-word from a negative to a positive appellation." This strikes me as the reverse of the "transgressive" achievement for which its author may decently hope. What is needed is not more complexity but more irony. To maintain that the word may indeed be employed but must never be used literally is neither to ban it nor to rob it of its meaning. It is, rather, to pay it our respects, as indeed we should.

In a few weeks, East Timor will be able to celebrate both its independence as a country and its status as a democracy. Elections will have produced a government able to seek and receive international recognition. An undetermined number of Timorese, herded by the Indonesian Army into the western part of the island during the last spasms of cruelty before Jakarta formally abandoned its claim to the territory, will not be able to celebrate. And the entire process is gruesomely overshadowed by the murder of at least a quarter of a million Timorese during the illegal Indonesian occupation. The new nation will need friends, and help of all kinds, and everybody should consider contributing something (send checks to Global Exchange/East Timor Relief, PO Box 420832, San Francisco, CA 94142).

The elections and the independence ceremony were supposed to take place twenty-seven years ago, when the Portuguese colonial power surrendered its authority. But the Indonesian military dictatorship had another idea, which was to engulf its tiny neighbor by force. General Suharto and his deputies made it fairly obvious that they wanted the territory but not the people. They came horribly close to succeeding in this foul design. Ever since, there has been an argument over the precise extent of US complicity with the 1975 aggression. It was known that President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were in Jakarta on December 6 of that year, the day before Indonesian air, land and naval forces launched the assault. Scholars and journalists have solemnly debated whether there was a "green light" from Washington.

Kissinger, who does not find room to mention East Timor even in the index of his three-volume memoir, has more than once stated that the invasion came to him as a surprise, and that he barely knew of the existence of the Timorese question. He was obviously lying. But the breathtaking extent of his mendacity has only just become fully apparent, with the declassification of a secret State Department telegram. The document, which has been made public by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, contains a verbatim record of the conversation among Suharto, Ford and Kissinger. "We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action," Suharto opened bluntly. "We will understand and will not press you on the issue," Ford responded. "We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have." Kissinger was even more emphatic, but had an awareness of the possible "spin" problems back home. "It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly," he instructed the despot. "We would be able to influence the reaction if whatever happens, happens after we return…. If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home." Micromanaging things for Suharto, he added: "The President will be back on Monday at 2 pm Jakarta time. We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned." As ever, deniability supersedes accountability.

There came then the awkward question of weaponry. Indonesia’s armed forces, which had never yet lost a battle against civilians, were equipped with US-supplied matériel. But the Foreign Assistance Act forbade the use of such armaments except in self-defense. "It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation," Kissinger mused. (At a later meeting back at the State Department on December 18, the minutes of which have also been declassified, he was blunt about knowingly violating the statute. For a transcript of the minutes, see Mark Hertsgaard, "The Secret Life of Henry Kissinger," October 29, 1990.)

An even more sinister note was struck later in the conversation, when Kissinger asked Suharto if he expected "a long guerrilla war." The dictator replied that there "will probably be a small guerrilla war," while making no promise about its duration. Bear in mind that Kissinger has already urged speed and dispatch upon Suharto. Adam Malik, Indonesia’s foreign minister at the time, later conceded in public that between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians were killed in the first eighteen months of the occupation. These civilians were killed with American weapons, which Kissinger contrived to supply over Congressional protests, and their murders were covered up by American diplomacy, and the rapid rate of their murder was something that had been urged in so many words by an American Secretary of State. How is one to live with the shame of this? How is one to tolerate the continued easy and profiteering existence of such a man, who had no sooner left office than he went into business partnership with the same genocidal dictatorship he had helped arm and encourage? Read with any care, this State Department telegram shows a knowing conspiracy–there isn’t another legal term for it–to break international law, US law and (it could well be argued) the Genocide Convention. Ford may have been an abject moron, but Kissinger was a professional: He knew perfectly well that a colony of a NATO country could not be invaded and occupied except in flat defiance of every international covenant and principle. He also knew that US law explicitly forbade the use of US weapons for such a purpose.

The disclosure of the new and unarguable documents merited a few inches in the Washington Post and got me a whole minute on the BBC World Service. So there you have it. Henry Kissinger the mass murderer (and pal of Ted Koppel). Henry Kissinger the errand boy for dictatorship (and confidant of Charlie Rose). Henry Kissinger the profiteer from genocide (and orator at Kay Graham’s funeral). Henry Kissinger the man who told Suharto to hurry up and get on with it (and chum of Harold Evans and Tina Brown). Henry Kissinger, the man who has hired Bill Clinton’s disgraced Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty, to be a partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates. What can one say about countries and cultures so corrupt and depraved that they will give succor, and even acclaim, to those who murder without conscience?

One of the old school of the British colonial service, a man with the irresistible name of Sir Penderel Moon, wrote a book about the end of empire and titled it Divide and Quit. At whose expense was this extremely dry joke? Look around the global scene today, and you will find the landscape pitted with the shards of that very policy. In Israel/Palestine and in Kashmir, and in both to an astonishing extent, the contours of the fighting are what they were when the Union Jack was hauled down in 1947. In Northern Ireland, despite the lapse of a much longer period of time, the battle lines follow the original map of postcolonial amputation and the problem–how to confect a plausible swath of Ireland with the minimum number of Catholics and the maximum number of Protestants and yet call it British–is still with us. The British decision to carve off Kuwait from the soil of Iraq had obvious repercussions. So does the British separation of the Malvinas/Falklands archipelago from mainland Argentina. Neither NATO nor the European Union has been able to exert sufficient unifying power to undo the consequences of British divide-and-rule in Cyprus, which is another of those apparently peripheral problems that threaten to detonate or implode at any moment.

It was Sir Anthony Eden who proposed to President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles the division of Vietnam into two states in 1954. Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary, hoping thereby to preserve a white cantonment, floated the idea of partitioning South Africa just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. It was he and his successor, Lord Owen, who proposed the calamitous partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the confirmation of ethnic cleansing. It goes on, in other words. And so far, almost every one of these partitions has led either to another partition or to another war or both. I spent some part of last fall on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Kashmir, and was amazed all over again by how much damage my forefathers did by their hasty and opportunistic retreat. One has to bear in mind that partition involves a series of subpartitions and minor mutilations. Thus, in order to create "two" states out of what had been British-ruled India, the last-ditch colonialists had also to partition the ancient states of Punjab and Sind in the west, and Bengal and Assam in the east. (This, incidentally, is why one should always say "Northern Ireland" rather than "Ulster." Ulster is a nine-county province of Ireland. Only six of these counties had a sufficient loyalist population to be hived off in 1921, so Ulster, as well as Ireland, had to be dismembered.)

Pakistan, in its turn, is the demonstration case of a failed partition. Between 1947 and 1971, its territory included the eastern part of Bengal, which was separated from the rest of the country by the distance of the whole subcontinent. This "East Wing-West Wing" state was doomed from its inception. The fact that the two wings had the Muslim religion in common was not enough to outweigh the fact of Bengali resentment at the repression of their language and culture. That is why "East Pakistan" is now Bangladesh, having undergone a terrifying genocidal war, prosecuted by its Islamic co-religionists.

Pakistan is now in the process of falling apart even more drastically, as Pashtuns and others decide that nationality and language are more decisive than faith. But–and this is the origin of the current confrontation with India–the original sectarian and discredited reasoning is still being applied to Kashmir. (The territory has a majority-Muslim population; therefore it should be part of Pakistan.) Every nostrum that failed in 1947 is being applied with redoubled force, using the militants of bin Ladenism as proxy warriors for a confessional state. Never mind the methods for now–though they are the methods you would expect. It is the objective itself that is really dangerous.

On the Kashmiri "Line of Control" between Pakistan and India, on October 20 last, I went to a military briefing given by Brig. Mohammed Yaqub. I’ve since seen his face on the television many times, as he points his swagger stick at a blackboard, so he seems still to be giving out the official line. He began, on the day I saw him, with a fantastically dishonest account of the 1947 partition. In that year, all the provinces of the British Raj were supposed to decide, by a certain deadline, whether they "opted" for Pakistan or India. There was no referendum or plebiscite, because the vast majority of Indians did not want partition in the first place. Local rulers could decide which way they would go. The Maharaja of Muslim Kashmir opted for India.

The princely state of Hyderabad might in theory have done the reverse, in which case an enclave in the middle of India could in practice have become part of Pakistan. In fact, such damage was limited, and today the Muslim population of India is about the same as that of the whole of Pakistan. But let us be quite clear: The demand that religion should determine nationality would, if applied, destroy the whole subcontinent and make it a prey to warring faiths, as well as to wars within faiths. The present Indian government may be Hindu nationalist in temper, but no responsible successor regime could or should be asked to accede to such a fanatical demand. (An independent Kashmir can be whispered about, and a repartitioned Kashmir is already whispered about, but a Pakistani irredentist movement assisted by Al Qaeda is completely unacceptable.)

For decades, the United States has been the armorer and patron of Pakistan, a state that is at least as dangerous to its neighbors and as callous to its citizens as, say, Iraq. (The Pakistani takeover of Afghanistan, via its Taliban surrogate, has troubled our sleep far more than the fate of Kuwait.) One of the many positive results of the war in Afghanistan has been the way in which a reconsideration of one of Washington’s oldest cold war prejudices has been forced upon our political and military elite. A democratic and secularist India is a much better friend (and better bet) than a dictatorial and theocratic rump. In cleaning up (again) after British colonialism, one should be rigorous in avoiding the original mistake of splitting the difference.

HITCHENS–LOWER THAN A LIBERAL

Penn Valley, Pa.

Christopher Hitchens is "complacent" at my suggestion that he has moved to the "vital center, maybe further to the right, with termination point still to be determined" ["Minority Report," Dec. 17, 2001]. Actually, I understated the case. He now brags that back in 1979 he didn’t vote for Labour against Margaret Thatcher, whose "intellectual and moral courage" and "revolutionary" policies he admires (Reason, Nov. 2001). He also supported her war against the Argentine fascists. Hitchens likes wars, against fascists, and it seems that anybody the United States or NATO-bloc powers take on are fascists.

So Hitchens has actually sunk below the class we may call "liberals," using the word in its best and traditional sense. As L.T. Hobhouse pointed out in his 1911 classic, Liberalism, "It is of the essence of liberalism, to oppose the use of force, the basis of all tyranny." He also spoke of the necessity of withstanding "the tyranny of armaments." Hitchens is enthused about the use of force–one of his accolades to Bush’s war is titled "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" (The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2001), and in another he argued that the "danger" was that Bush was not acting with sufficient violence (The Guardian, Sept. 26, 2001). And Hitchens hasn’t shown the slightest concern over the fact that his war is encouraging militarization and is feeding back on civil liberties and domestic programs at home.

Hitchens tells us now that Bush’s war is doing wonderful things, not only for civilization but for Afghanistan as well–bombing it "out of the Stone Age"–with "no serious loss of civilian life" and "an almost pedantic policy of avoiding ‘collateral damage.’" Marc Herold has calculated, on the basis of news reports alone, that more than 3,500 Afghan civilians have been killed by US bombs, more than in the Trade Center bombings, which Hitchens considered an extremely serious loss of human life. Hitchens ignores the effect of the war–and deliberate Bush actions denying food supplies–on a starving population, which has frightened all those working in food relief. Erwin van’t Land, of Doctors Without Borders, stated in late November that "the situation deteriorated during the past two months of bombing, as large parts of the Afghan population dependent on international aid for survival [some 3.5 million people] did not receive it."

But Hitchens knows better, just as he knows that the kind and gentle Bush Administration is "pedantically" avoiding civilian casualties. Hitchens also knew back at the time of the Kosovo war that NATO–and his much beloved leader Bill Clinton–were driven to war by humane considerations, warring only "when the sheer exorbitance of the crimes in Kosovo became impossible to ignore" (The Nation, June 14, 1999).

In a November 27 talk at the University of Chicago, Hitchens explained that "Bush’s war is our war," meaning the left’s war. At this point in his political journey, we may have a long wait to find an imperialist war that Christopher Hitchens will not find to be a left’s and just war.

EDWARD S. HERMAN

Edward Herman has requested space on our website for a longer version of this letter, below.

HITCHENS REPLIES

Washington, D.C.

I’m happy to let readers decide for themselves about my ideological character. But I don’t mind having it said that I favor physical force against fascism, and even relish it. And I think Hobhouse is a dubious source for determining that liberalism equals pacifism. Whether Herman is a pacifist or not I neither know nor care: that he isn’t an ally in battles against fascism is already notorious.

Shortly after September 11 he wrote that the attack on the World Trade Center was reminiscent of the methods employed by NATO to get Milosevic out of Kosovo. Now his dismal search for moral equivalence leads him to find serendipity in the apparent symmetry of casualty figures. Well it now looks as if–supposing his Afghan civilian numbers to be correct–there have been more people killed in Afghanistan than in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania combined. So perhaps his crass utilitarianism will lead him to announce that the coalition’s counterstroke against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is not merely as bad as, but actually worse than, the September 11 aggression.

I, however, will continue to presume that it is obvious that those murdered in America on that day were not "collateral damage." Their murders were the direct object of the "operation." By contrast, we have had repeated and confirmed reports of frustration on the part of American targeters in Afghanistan, frequently denied permission to open fire because of legal constraints imposed by the Pentagon. This is actually a tribute to the work of the antiwar movement over the years; it seems paltry in more than one way to be sneering at it.

Since every member of Al Qaeda has to be counted as a potential suicide bomber, and since their Taliban protectors had created vast hunger and misery in Afghanistan, the true humanitarian cost of finding and killing them cannot be reckoned in Herman’s simple arithmetic. Nor can his outdated and arcane citations alter the fact that aid of all kinds is now reaching those who most need it. The necessary condition for that was always a short and hard-fought war. Unless of course, for "humanitarian" reasons, one was prepared to leave the Taliban/Al Qaeda regime in place. I would not direct such a slur against Herman, even though I can’t help noticing that General Galtieri, trainer of the contras, might still be in possession of both Argentina and the Malvinas if Herman’s counsel had been heeded. The chances of that, however, have grown slimmer over the years and are now approaching the nonexistent.

Finally, when I spoke in Chicago I said that the war against Islamic fascism had been going on for some time before the Bush family joined in, that it involved and involves a confrontation with the oligarchies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and that it was therefore more a question of whether he should be allowed to join our (not "my") war. Herman misses the point and the joke, and I would put this down to his customary sloppiness if it wasn’t that, in his other misrepresentations of my published views on Ashcroftism, he seems to be actuated by malice as well.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

See below for additional comments from Hitchens.

DANTO–ACCEPTS THE TAINTED DISH

Dallas

What is it about extraordinary statements that make journalists run with them without checking the facts? I’m referring to Arthur Danto’s "quote" of Karlheinz Stockhausen in "Art & the Towering Sadness" [Nov. 12, 2001]. This severed quote keeps making the rounds because it "plays" well: shocking, audacious, great copy. Danto has accepted this tainted dish passed around the journalistic dinner table.

If a journalist interviews a creative artist about his ideas on the forces of good and evil represented in his work–"What do the concepts in Licht (Stockhausen’s opera) mean to you?" "What do the main protagonists of Licht (Michael, Eve and Lucifer) mean to you?" "Are they simply historical figures of the past or do you feel that they still exist today?"–why should he be surprised when Stockhausen actually answers the questions? That yes, he does believe they exist today–for example, in the horrendous act in New York–and it could be seen as the "greatest work of art performed by Lucifer" (in other words, the absolute greatest of evils). And then why do journalists want to continue perpetuating this sham of a "story" or start throwing in even more spurious "quotes" (as in Anthony Tommasini’s New York Times article)?

I suppose I wouldn’t make it as a journalist, because I probably would’ve asked, "OK, maybe I’m hearing you incorrectly. Are you saying that this is the greatest work of art ever?" and I’d hear, "No! No! It was a horrendous act. I’m just answering your questions about its relation to the characters in my opera!" But alas, I wouldn’t be considered beneficial to my newspaper because I wouldn’t have found a way to excise the "good" parts and make it into a real story. Anyone who wants to go beyond the journalistic rhetoric and read the comments on what actually happened the day of Stockhausen’s interview can check http://stockhausen.org/the_true_story.html.

ROD STASICK

DANTO REPLIES

New York City

Here is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s reply to a question put to him regarding the attacks on the United States, as reported by Agence France-Presse and as published in the New York Times, September 19, 2001, page E3:

"What happened there–they all have to rearrange their brains now–is the greatest work of art ever.

"That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.

"I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing."

If Rod Stasick feels Stockhausen’s "severed quote" is mitigated by the amplification, he is entirely welcome to it. And if Stockhausen was merely elaborating on the relationship of the attacks to the content of his opera, why exactly did he "retract it at once, and ask that it not be reported," as the Times says he did?

The fact that Stockhausen is a creative artist hardly means that he is incapable of making an ass of himself. He has enjoyed the privilege accorded important creative artists by European reporters of being "deliciously outrageous" in interviews. He realized that he had said something disgraceful, but the good journalists of Agence France-Presse held him to his word. He was "reported to have left Hamburg"–where his concerts were canceled–"in distress." So far as I am aware, there has been no retraction of the statement, nor has suit been brought against the journalistic agencies by Stockhausen for malicious falsehood against his good name.

I am an art critic, not a journalist, and am entirely capable of getting facts wrong. My mistakes, however, rarely get past the relentless fact-checkers of The Nation. My assumption is that the fact-checkers of the New York Times are no less zealous for the truth. I am more inclined to trust the journalists who were there than a press release by an artist concerned to control the damage his reckless words did to his reputation.

ARTHUR C. DANTO

A LONGER VERSION OF HERMAN’S LETTER

Penn Valley, Pa.

Christopher Hitchens is "complacent" at my suggestion that he has moved to the "vital center, maybe further to the right, with termination point still to be determined" ("Minority Report," Dec. 17). Actually, I understated the case. Nation readers may be unaware of the fact that on BBC2 Newsnight (September 27, 2001), Hitchens simply denied that 500,000 children had died in Iraq under the sanctions regime, and he claimed that all the deaths that have occurred in Iraq since the Gulf War were solely the fault of Saddam Hussein. In the rightwing journals that are increasingly fond of his writings–his work now surpasses Clinton in its "triangulations"–he now expresses pride that back in 1979 he didn’t vote for the Labor Party candidate against Margaret Thatcher, whose "intellectual and moral courage" and "revolutionary" policies he now celebrates (Reason, Nov. 2001). He also supported her war against the Argentine fascists. Hitchens likes wars, against fascists, and it seems that anybody the United States or NATO-bloc powers take on are fascists.

So Hitchens has actually sunk below the class we may call "liberals," using the word in its best and traditional sense. As L. T. Hobhouse pointed out in his classic Liberalism (1911), "It is of the essence of liberalism, to oppose the use of force, the basis of all tyranny." He also spoke of the necessity of withstanding "the tyranny of armaments." Hitchens is enthused about the use of force- -one of his accolades to Bush’s war is entitled "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" (Guardian, Nov. 14), and in another he argued that the "danger" was that Bush was not acting with sufficient violence (Guardian, Sept. 26). And Hitchens hasn’t shown the slightest concern over the fact that his war is encouraging militarization and is feeding back on civil liberties and domestic programs at home.

Hitchens tells us now that Bush’s war is doing wonderful things, not only for the cause of civilization but for Afghanistan as well- -bombing it "out of the stone age"–with "no serious loss of human life" and "an almost pedantic policy of avoiding ‘collateral damage.’" But for some strange reason the US government has tried as hard as it can to limit information about collateral damage (see Carol Morello, "Tight Control Marks Coverage of Afghan War," Washington Post, Dec. 7), and the war is still not over and the facts are hardly all in. Furthermore, there are extensive reports, mainly in the non-US media, of the bombing of villages and convoys with civilians, the use of fragmentation bombs, and many civilian casualties from US military operations. Mark Herold’s careful study concluded that US bombs had killed at least 3,767 civilians in eight and a half weeks, which he explained as a result of the "apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into, and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan."

Herold’s total exceeds the World Trade Center toll, which Hitchens clearly considers a "serious loss of human life." And the Herold number does not include the greatly increased rate of deaths from starvation resulting from the war (and deliberate Bush actions denying supplies), which has frightened all those working in food relief. Erwin van’t Land, of Doctors Without Borders, stated in late November that "The situation deteriorated during the past two months of bombing, as large parts of the Afghan population dependent on international aid for survival [some 3.5 million people] did not receive it." And other news headlines read "First snow warns of humanitarian disaster: Relief aid hampered by weather, bandits, and infighting" (Guardian, Dec. 4).

Erik Sorenson, the president of MSNBC, said recently about our knowledge of the war, "We’ll find out in five or ten years what the real truth is." But Christopher Hitchens knows the truth now, just as he knows that the kind and gentle Bush adminstration is "pedantically" avoiding civilian casualties. Hitchens also knew back at the time of the Kosovo war that NATO–and his much beloved leader Bill Clinton–were driven to war by humane considerations, warring only "when the sheer exorbitance of the crimes in Kosovo became impossible to ignore" (Nation, June 14, 1999).

There are also compelling reports from Afghanistan that our proxy allies on the ground are not only killing large numbers of prisoners, they are also raping and killing and looting on a horrendous scale (e.g., Paul Harris, "Warlords bring new terrors," The Observer, Dec. 2, 2001). But for Hitchens any such matters like the "spotty human rights record of the Northern Alliance" are merely "the latest thing" that should not disturb our thanks at the liberation. "It remains" to reconstruct the battered country, he tells us, and Hitchens, with his faith in Bush and the NATO humanitarians does not doubt good things will happen. He seems unaware that Bush is already taking advantage of his new power position to cut back on civil outlays to his own non-elite citizens, which might suggest doubts about his willingness to aid poor and distant foreigners. Hitchens has also not paid much attention to actual post-US-intervention policy in Nicaragua, or Kosovo–in the latter case, where his war "has not solved any human problem, but only multiplied the existing problems" (according to Jiri Dienstbier, the UN rapporteur for human rights in Kosovo), and where his KLA friends were allowed to carry out "the largest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans [in percentage terms]," according to Jan Oberg, the director of the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for Peace.

Hitchens is also now playing the role of an enforcer, berating opponents of the war for not seeing this one as just, in a familiar pattern. He joins forces in this service with David Horowitz, who recently issued a lengthy smear of Noam Chomsky that he distributes at his talks at various schools ("Think Twice…Before You Bring The War Home," Campus Broadside Series). Hitchens has had at least half a dozen venomous attacks on Chomsky in the past two years, and much of his journalism and speaking engagements are devoted to this kind of derogation effort. The Guardian in London was recently forced to apologize to both playright Harold Pinter and journalist John Pilger for indefensible smears by Hitchens, and in his "Against Rationalization" (Nation, Oct. 8), he clearly delegitimizes any opposing viewpoint by making it a "rationalization" rather than a different position.

His talk at the University of Chicago on November 27 explained that "Bush’s war is our war," meaning the left’s war. At this point in his political journey, we may have a long wait to find an imperialist war that Christopher Hitchens will not find to be a left’s and just war.

EDWARD S. HERMAN

Back to Hitchens’s reply for our print edition.

FURTHER COMMENTS FROM HITCHENS

Washington, D.C.

Readers of the website may not know that I generally don’t reply to critical letters printed in the magazine. This is because I already have a whole twice-monthly page in The Nation, and think that the limited letters-space ought to be reserved for the readers. However, I do sometimes reply if I am directly slandered or misrepresented, and such is the case with what Herman says about me and the Guardian. The facts are these: while writing a column last fall I was shown a highly anti-American speech that had, I was told, been delivered by Harold Pinter the day after the September 11 attacks. I made a disobliging reference to Pinter in my piece, and then discovered before the deadline that the speech had actually been delivered the day before. So I telephoned the editors, asked them to remove the reference, and was assured that this would be done. However, a second reference lower down was mistakenly left in. So I wrote myself to apologize to Pinter, as did the editors, and wrote a letter of explanation which The Guardian duly published, along with another apology of their own. Excision of the second reference would also have removed my reference to John Pilger, to whom, for his consistently disgraceful and misleading coverage of the post-September events, I made, and make, no apology at all.

Herman can only say what he says if he was following the paper that week. But, if he was reading the Guardian with any care, he must know that what he asserts is false. Again, one can’t be sure whether this is the consequence of incompetence or ill-will. But then, with him, one never can.

What I said on BBC Newsnight was that in the protected Kurdish autonomous areas of Iraq there is neither famine nor repression, and what I said the same week in The Nation was that this rescue operation might supply a model for Afghanistan (which it since has done). I make no apology for that, either. I have little patience with those who attribute the deaths in Iraq solely to Western policy: No children of army officers or Ba’ath Party officials are among the dead, either. Of course there are alternatives, as always. Saddam Hussein could be allowed to claim credit for getting sanctions lifted, and press on with his program of preparing for mass destruction of Kurds and others, including ourselves. Or, regarding sanctions as unduly indiscriminate, it could be decided to remove him by means of a preventive war. I can only imagine how upset Herman would be if that happened: he is still (in his spare time) in deep mourning for Slobodan Milosevic. The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the principles or the seriousness that are required in such debates.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Back to other letters

That would-be martyr John Walker–the mujahid of Marin County–has done something more than give a bad name to my favorite Scotch whiskey. He has illuminated the utter unfitness of our police and intelligence chiefs for the supreme power they now wish and propose to award themselves. And he has also accidentally exposed the stupidity and nastiness of the Patriot Act. Consider: With no resources beyond his own evidently rather feeble ones he was able to join the Taliban and become a confidant of the Al Qaeda network; an accomplishment completely beyond the wit or strength of our multibillion-dollar CIA, which possessed no human asset within a thousand miles of anywhere Osama bin Laden happened to be. For this achievement, which may not even have been illegal at the time he first performed it, he now earns the right to a trial before a properly constituted civilian court. This is because, like Wadi el Hage of the Al Qaeda East African plot, he is a US citizen. Whereas I, the father of three Americans and a twenty-year holder of a legal resident’s permit, can be arrested at any time for having, say, the wrong Palestinian friend to dinner in my home. I can then be held incommunicado, denied the right to know the evidence against me and, if things should go really swimmingly, be sentenced to death in secret by a military tribunal. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 aggression against American civil society, I thought (and wrote) that it was time for me to take out the papers of citizenship, if only as an act of solidarity. Yet now I feel I should stay with my fellow immigrants. The chance of being caught up in John Ashcroft’s New Order is just too good to miss. America can have my body, and indeed my soul. But I feel I should not be asked to sacrifice my habeas corpus.

Here is how the official police-mentality syllogism currently runs. Before September 11 we asked for infinite antiterrorism budgets and spouted continuous national security rhetoric. Meanwhile, we rolled ecstatically in the same bed as the Saudi and Pakistani secret police forces, which were the paymasters and armorers of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As a direct result, a group of spoiled Saudi sadists and fanatics were able to rehearse the subversion of American civil aviation. They were then able to carry it out. Frantic calls from flight schools to the FBI, warning of odd characters using the jumbo-jet simulator, were coldly ignored. Several such characters, whose names were actually on the terrorist watch list, were able to buy their own airline tickets on September 11 without even using a false ID. Quite obviously, these facts allow only one conclusion. From now on, FBI agents should have untrammeled power over all civilians living in the United States, and all their private movements and communications.

Consider the following. On September 11, you could not fly and I could not fly. The national airspace was locked down. But twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, living in the United States, were gathered by private jet under the auspices of Prince Bandar Bin-Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. With what he gratefully describes as the cooperation of the FBI, the Prince mustered all the bin Ladens, who at the first opportunity were taken under FBI escort to Boston’s Logan Airport (departure point for two of the death squads) and then permitted to fly home with no questions asked. I do not think that any question of racial profiling would have been involved if members of the immediate bin Laden tribe had been inconvenienced to the extent of being asked a few questions. Boasting of this amazing coup on October 1, Prince Bandar told Larry King an affecting story about one of these privileged escapees:

But you know what hurt me? A young man said to me, "Prince Bandar, I always couldn’t understand why the American Japanese wanted a memorial. What’s the big deal?" He said: "Suddenly I realize: I’m a rich man, I’m in Harvard, and I have to leave my school, not because I was guilty, but because the emotions are high." That really touched me, Larry.

It really, really, touches me, too. In subsequent days the Saudi regime refused to supply information on the sixteen of its citizens who had committed the mass murder, declined the requests for a closure of bin Laden charities on its soil, refused to allow Tony Blair to visit and (in the person of its Interior Minister, Prince Nayef) described the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban as a matter of "killing innocent people." On top of this, a prince appears on prime time to borrow the rhetoric of American liberals about the historic injustice inflicted by Earl Warren and FDR on the Japanese-Americans in 1942. Yet where is the outrage? The Al Qaeda murderers, in their private notes, describe how to wield knives and box-cutters to slaughter random travelers like sacrificial sheep. Were they right? Are we a bleating herd, ready to get in line and be subjected to humiliation and deprivation at the merest bark about security?

The liberal case against Ashcroft’s authoritarian proposals is generally phrased in pristine constitutional terms. This is fine only as far as it goes, which is not very far. On his recent tour of European capitals, the Attorney General was told that Al Qaeda suspects will not be extradited to the United States if they face kangaroo or banana-republic courts. The rule of law is not so swiftly abandoned by all democratic nations. Moreover, European police have succeeded in identifying and detaining some real, named suspects, which is more than Ashcroft’s vaunted anonymous dragnet can claim to have done. This means that he is not just willing to junk the Constitution but is willing positively to endanger the citizens of this country in order to do so. For him, a crude ideology comes first. (Remember also that he is still refusing to act on a report of his own department’s criminal division, which has prepared an indictment of General Pinochet for detonating a car bomb in Washington, DC, in September 1976.) Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time. This seems to me impeachable in the profoundest sense of the term.

Toward the end of the futile British colonial war in Cyprus in the late 1950s, the great Labour leader Aneurin Bevan got up in the House of Commons and asked the Tory government directly: Did they want a base in Cyprus? Or all of Cyprus as a base? Those at the debate say it was a real historical moment, and that you could see the change of expression on the faces of the Cabinet ministers. Was it possible they could maintain a position on the island without committing themselves to an endless regime of repression over a people who neither wanted them nor recognized their legitimacy? What had once seemed an impossibly bloody dilemma was resolved in about a year.

The peace movement is always trying to do favors of this kind to intransigent authorities. And Cyprus, as it happens, was one of the territories canvassed by Theodor Herzl when he began the search for a Jewish national home (the British government finally told him there were too many Turkish Muslims in their colony). There isn't space here to rehearse all the subsequent contradictions of the Zionist enterprise. The most salient one at the moment is this: Having gone to the Arab world in search of security, and having begun a colonizing process in the Middle East just as Europe was giving it up, the Israelis now tell us every day of their insecurity and of the daily imminence of their destruction. They are now at war–bitter and intimate war–with the fourth generation of those they originally offended. So the question becomes, as it was when the Balfour Declaration was promulgated in 1917: Do they want a Jewish homeland in Palestine, or all of Palestine as a Jewish state?

If it is the former then the solution is a relatively simple one. An Israeli state of roughly 1948 dimensions can easily be brought inside the defense perimeter of the West, however defined, and have its frontiers internationally guaranteed. It's idle for Israeli hawks to protest that they can only rely on their own resources in a time of crisis. The rest of the time they insist on a constant flow of arms and aid from the outside powers upon whom they have always depended. This is not an argument they can expect to have, indefinitely, both ways (independence from the vagaries of gentile goodwill is yet another of the original Zionist aims that has turned into its own obverse).

If General Sharon were offered or promised such a solution, accompanied by the most solemn international guarantees, he would not wish to accept it. This is because, in the original inscriptions of his movement and his party, Judea and Samaria are not required for security but as the vindication of a messianic, expansionist dream. Nobody in search of Jewish safety would place Jewish settlements in Gaza at a time like this, or indeed any other time. It follows that an international commitment to Israeli security would have, as its necessary counterpart, an absolute refusal to pay a single cent for colonization or expansion. Then we would see who really wanted what, and at what risk, or price.

You can do the same thought experiment in a different way by following the alarming rhetoric swirling through Washington. Seeking to cash in on the only just war they have ever supported, Israel's more extreme partisans insist that the PLO and the other Palestinian movements are the equivalents of Al Qaeda. Never mind for now that Al Qaeda is a golem produced by our own surrogates in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The fact is that the analogy is quite without merit. Are American and British soldiers preparing to help Sharon reoccupy Gaza or re-establish the old security zone in South Lebanon? Of course not. Why not? The question answers itself, while exposing the moral frivolity of those who like to confuse the categories.

There used to be an old Israeli slogan employed to quell misgivings in the Diaspora: Ein breirah ("No alternative"). There is never no alternative. The choices now condense themselves into four quite vivid ones. The first is the indefinite continuation of the status quo. The second is the extension of Israeli citizenship to all inhabitants of the territories controlled or claimed by Israel. The third is a "transfer," or expulsion, of the Palestinian population. The fourth is a Palestinian state.

The first of these is, at last, universally admitted to be insufferable (and now to be insufferable not just for the Palestinians, who were its main victims until recently). The second is utopian in the saddest sense of that term. The third would be an outrage, incidentally precipitating a thousand-year war in the region. The fourth only makes sense if it means a contiguous and self-governing state with its own dignity. It is widely and erroneously believed that this has already been proposed and rejected, though in fact Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians less, by way of control over roads, water, land and security, than the ever-multiplying settlers already enjoy under Israel's protection.

There is a potential fifth alternative, about which friends of the Palestinians are obliged to say something. Quite evidently, a large number of the youngest generation, especially in the hell of Gaza, have been won to a rejectionist position, based on dead-end Islamist preaching. It's no accident that the special symbols of this movement are murder and suicide: a double negation. (A state that enshrines the antique murder-suicide citadel of Masada can presumably recognize primeval zealotry when it sees it.) But this fifth, nightmarish option is actually the bastard product of the above quadrilateral of choices, as can be seen from the insane Washington demand that Arafat remain stateless but act like a dictator, and that he accomplish today in Gaza what Israel in thirty-four years could not, even when it had the powers of martial law.

Almost without comment, it is assumed that an ethnic or religious connection to the conflict is a necessary qualification in the American debate on the subject. Only Jewish or Arab spokesmen are summoned to the studios or to the Op-Ed pages. This local cultural failing is the counterpart of a unique investment in sectarianism in the Levant–an investment that is about to collapse from diminishing returns and bring the pillars of the temple down with it. The most urgent nation-building on our agenda is therefore the overdue task of creating a homeland for the people of Palestine.

The United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age. This deserves to be recognized as an achievement, even by those who want to hasten past the moment and resume their customary tasks (worrying about the spotty human rights record of the Northern Alliance is the latest thing). The nexus that bound the Taliban to the forces of Al Qaeda and that was symbolized by the clan relationship between Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, has been destroyed. We are rid of one of the foulest regimes on earth, while one of the most vicious crime families in history has been crippled and scattered. It remains to help the Afghan exiles to return, to save the starving and to consolidate the tentative emancipation of Afghan women.

When Julius Nyerere sent his forces across the border of Uganda in 1979 he announced that Tanzania was defending itself under international law against repeated attacks from Idi Amin. If the Amin regime fell as a consequence, he continued, that was all to the good. (Idi Amin did indeed fall and has since been hiding in Jeddah, under the protection of our delightful Saudi allies. He, too, claims to be a spokesman for the oppressed Muslims of the world.)

No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense.

This is the best news for a long time. It deserves to be said, also, that the feat was accomplished with no serious loss of civilian life, and with an almost pedantic policy of avoiding "collateral damage." The hypocritical advice of the Pakistani right wing (keep it short, don't bomb, don't bomb during Ramadan, beware of the winter, leave Kabul alone) was finally ignored as the insidious pro-Taliban propaganda that it actually was. Those ultraleftists and soft liberals who repeated the same stuff–in presumable ignorance of its real source and intention–could safely be ignored then and needn't be teased too much now. The rescue of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991 taught them nothing; they were for leaving Bosnia and Kosovo to the mercy of Milosevic; they had nothing to say about the lack of an international intervention in Rwanda. The American polity is now divided between those who can recognize a new situation when they see it, and those who cannot or will not.

This brings me to the other piece of great recent news. Apparently unimpressed by those who maintained that the Al Qaeda death squads were trying to utter a cry for help about the woes of the world's poor (a dismal song I must say I haven't heard being sung so much lately), Judge Baltasar Garzón has put the Spanish wing of this gangster network into custody. We know this judge is not soft on crime, because he helped open the new era of universal jurisdiction by issuing a warrant for the arrest of General Pinochet. He has now gone one better, by telling Attorney General Ashcroft that arrest and detention work only when they are used to enforce the rule of law. No country that respects these norms will deliver prisoners to a country that does not respect them. Military tribunals that take evidence in secret and that have the power to impose the death penalty are, by definition, not up to recognized international standards. Perhaps Ashcroft learned these techniques of jurisprudence from the abattoir regimes, like those of Chile and Guatemala, that the American right has so long defended. It will be very interesting to see how this near-perfect confrontation plays out. Of course, those who were soft on the original crimes will get correspondingly less of a hearing as the debate goes on.

I learn with complacency that I have been excommunicated from the left. Edward Herman, in a recent cyber-anathema, expels me because I am "rushing toward the vital center, maybe further to the right, with termination point still to be determined." He states pityingly that I apparently "cannot understand that attacking supposed rationalizations for X may be de facto rationalizing for Y." I must say I think that last bit is a touch obvious. Herman, along with several other of my correspondents, doesn't like it when I agree with certain conservatives or (let's be fair) when they agree with me. Well, I could have replied in just those terms to Herman as long ago as the Bosnia and Kosovo wars. At that time, the majority of the American right, from Kissinger to Gingrich and Forbes, were opposed to US intervention. In the post-September 11 hostilities, Pat Buchanan and Oliver North have warned against American "imperial" tactics, and David Duke has traced the Al Qaeda motive to the pre-existing violence of Zionism. Why did I not turn these guns on Herman? Because the reasoning would be too puerile and the attempted association too reminiscent of the methods of Stalinism. I suppose, though, that these are the very elements that recommend such "arguments" to him.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:

I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan…. Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide…. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next–in the next couple of weeks…. very casually with no comment…. we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people.

Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface "Turning to the facts…") and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

'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

I so distrust the use of the word zeitgeist, with all its vague implications of Teutonic meta-theory. But on Veterans Day I had to work full time on myself in order to combat the feeling of an epochal shift, in which my own poor molecules were being realigned in some bizarre Hegelian synthesis. I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view. All my other foes, from the Christian Coalition to the Milosevic Left, were busy getting it wrong or giving it cover. Other and better people were gloomy at the prospect of confrontation. But I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

In this spirit, with scenes of jubilation breaking out all over Afghanistan as the Taliban slavemasters made a run for it, I went to a wake for the late Barbara Olson. It took the form of a posthumous book party for her excellent study of the Clinton looting and pardoning, which is serendipitously titled The Final Days. Barbara's own final day had come on the eleventh of September, when a faith-based death squad seized her plane and flew it with its captive passengers into the Pentagon. She managed to make two very composed calls to her husband, Solicitor General Theodore Olson. She was asking for advice on what to tell the pilot to do. We cannot know, but I prefer to think that there was at least a small struggle, and I am certain that if there was, she would have been part of it.

Her husband was there, as was David Boies, so we had the two chief lawyerly protagonists of the Florida recount. That morning's newspapers had published an exhaustive "virtual recount," which split the tie very slightly more in Bush's favor. I could just about bear to think about it one more time before it disappeared into the rearview mirror. (Remind me, though; why should I wish that Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman were at the helm these days?) At the end of the evening Messrs. Boies and Olson disappeared together, practically arm in arm, to attend the same charity fundraiser. Bipartisanship.

Barbara's book is brilliant and remorseless about the details of Clintonian criminality, but very wobbly ideologically. The evidence plainly shows the Clintons to have been abject tools of the less adorable wing of the plutocracy; the book persists in implying that Mrs. Clinton is a hardened Marxist, recruited to Stalinism when she interned for Bob Treuhaft, husband of Jessica Mitford, in 1972. I could never unconvince Barbara of this: I knew and loved Bob and Decca (and also knew what they thought about Stalinism, as well as about the Clintons). Just before the party began, I read of the death of Bob Treuhaft in New York. A superb eighty-nine innings in the battle for justice, and brave and lucid to the end. Such a guy.

In other words, fortitude and stoicism count for something in themselves, aside from any consideration of party or allegiance. I was mildly if briefly dispirited to read John le Carré's limp recent screed, published in various outlets as well as in this one. As soon as I saw the byline and headline I knew what I was in for: a long moan about how nothing–except the wrong thing–can ever be done. He even favored us with the most witless and fatalistic of the recent naysayings, to the effect that if we kill Osama bin Laden then others will rise to take his place. I actually think this proposition is an unsafe one: Bin Laden looks like one of a rare kind to me (and increasingly flaky in recent guest appearances). His deputies are obvious goons and would probably start knifing one another if the holy one stepped on a mine. But leave that to one side–does it never occur to anyone that tens of thousands of people would also rise up to rid the world of bin Laden all over again? One could not count on le Carré in such a pinch or indeed in any other: How well I remember him in the last confrontation with clerical bloodlust in 1989, piously informing everybody that Salman Rushdie had brought it all on himself and that a great religion had been traduced. Some people never learn, but then some people never intend to.

To return to my soiree: Near the bar I ran into Grover Norquist, one of the chief whips of the Reagan revolution. He's also the man who arranged to take the President to the Washington mosque, and he has been very active in opposing Attorney General Ashcroft's megalomaniacal plan to turn the United States into a national-security garrison. Norquist's question to me was, in effect, What happened to the liberals? In meetings in the House, the supposed "USA PATRIOT Act" had been somewhat declawed by conservatives like Bob Barr of Georgia, Darrell Issa (an Arab-American Republican from California) and Chris Cannon of Utah, ably assisted by Bobby Scott, a black Democrat from Virginia. Some of the most extreme proposals of the bill were either diluted or struck out or subjected to a four-year time limit related to the course of the war. But then the White House tried to resell the original bill to the Senate. "That's the Democrats, right?" said Norquist. "But we were assured there would be a fight up there. Instead all the liberals just rolled over." In my pocket was an article by one liberal hack journalist named Jonathan Alter, and another article by the rich thug's liberal loophole artist, Alan Dershowitz. Both men proposed that we should give torture a chance.

It gave me a vertiginous feeling, to be talking with a toughened conservative who had helped organize a struggle, in wartime, for the defense of civil and political liberties and the rights of unpopular minorities. A struggle in which the liberals had lost their nerve as well as (in the cases of Alter and Dershowitz) their decency. But it's been a good season for vertiginous sensations, and the rearview mirror has never looked better to me, as it offers the unfolding prospect of garbage cans, full of wasted history, moldering on the side of the road.

If there is one expression that ought to be discarded from the current discourse right away, it is "The Street." Its usage combines the pseudo-knowing with the pseudo-populist, and I have almost never seen it employed except as part of a revelation of extreme ignorance or extreme selectivity. Those who claim to know or understand "The Street" are pretending to be sensitive to overseas public opinion while actually making the extremely arrogant assumption that they can act as its interpreters. As a term, it is only slightly preferable to "the mob" and, as applied to South Asia or the Middle East–which it almost invariably is–carries an additional freight of racial condescension.

For example, a few weeks ago there was a sectarian mob attack on the Taj Mahal. The delegates to the conference of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist party that forms part of India's current governing coalition, went on a spree when their deliberations were completed. They cut their names with penknives on the walls of the building and stamped around on the mosaic floors in heavy boots. The message was clear: We do not like memorials that date from the Muslim conquest. I was in India at the time and on my way to Pakistan and Kashmir, and there was no doubt that this vandalism was a response to the pro-bin Laden crowd scenes elsewhere. But nobody was rash enough to describe it as a manifestation of "the Indian street," though the sad fact is that such a loose characterization would have been partly accurate. This is because "street" has become another word for Arab or Muslim. Those who rely on the image would never dream of referring to "the American street" or "the British street," though public opinion has its importance in these countries, too. Is this because they don't think whites or Christians are entitled to a street? Or is it because they know that opinion polls and other instant tests are highly volatile? A recent newspaper poll in Israel shows 50 percent of Jewish respondents favoring the expulsion of the Palestinians from the occupied territories. If something like this were actually to be attempted I hope we would not hear that it reflected the aspirations of the Semitic street. It's not one's job, in other words, to take massified or collectivized public opinion as one finds it, let alone be its ventriloquizer.

Then again, very few streets are one way. Insofar as we can measure public opinion in Iran, it seems to be very strongly anti-Taliban. Partly this is because the Taliban are guilty of horrible mistreatment of the Shiite minority in Afghanistan–the temper of the Shiite street seems to mean little or nothing to them–and partly it is because Iranian opinion tends to take the opposite view from that of its generally anti-American mullahs. But we are always being instructed, in the case of the Arab street, that public opinion is anti-American because the rulers are US clients. The Farsi street appears to offer a photographic reverse-negative of that commonplace opinion. It's all very confusing–and it also points up the inherent superficiality of the term.

So, enough with "the street." We already have too many methods of refusing to think for ourselves or make our own inquiries, and this is a particularly vulgar as well as an unusually arbitrary one.

* * *

G.K. Chesterton once said that the role of journalism was to tell the public that Lord X was dead, when the public had never known that Lord X was alive. Until the recent assassination of Rehavam Zeevi, Israel's minister of tourism, I would wager that most people had no idea that he was in Sharon's Cabinet. Thus only when Zeevi was laid to rest did we discover that Sharon had (and still has) an ethnic-cleansing party in his coalition. This has actually been a scandal for some time for anyone seriously interested in the topic, but it never achieved the status of a scandal because neither the US government nor the American press made anything of it. Barely a day passes when we do not read of admonitions to Yasir Arafat to control or punish the extremists in his ranks, and he doesn't have a state. But the Administration never said anything in public against Sharon's open alliance with the fascist-minded Moledet party, and inquiry around Washington has persuaded me that it never said anything in private, either. Since the call for mass expulsion of the Palestinians is now mounting in Israeli circles, and is also being echoed by mainly Christian extremists in the American press (Cal Thomas in the Washington Times is a prominent recent offender), there is every reason to take this threat very seriously, and to insist that Israel's leadership publicly renounce the idea and refuse all political cooperation with its advocates. It's not many years since the founding of the racist Kach party by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane caused quite a revulsion among liberals. And Kahane only made it into the Knesset as lone nut. So the calm acceptance of Zeevi as a full Cabinet member marked a distinct and dangerous coarsening, both in public opinion and in elite circles, which was all the more alarming for not having been marked, at least in the American political universe, at all.

* * *

I leave town for a few weeks and The Nation's editors publicly stab me in the front. The "correction" (November 5) to my column of October 22 was inserted without any consultation. I had proposed September 11, 1683, the day of the defeat of the Ottoman armies outside Vienna, as a possible inspiration for Al Qaeda's aggression. The Nation now says that it was the 12th. Well, as I told the fact-checkers before my departure, it was a two-day battle, with the siege lifted on the 12th. In Hilaire Belloc's volume The Great Heresies, he says that "Vienna…was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history–September 11, 1683." Not only was Belloc one of the great Catholic sectarian polemicists and historians but his awful "Crusader" style is just the sort of thing to get him noticed by resentful Islamists. So it's only a speculation, but I still believe that it is a pardonable and perhaps a fruitful one.

Although it may appear that the aftershocks of September 11 have somewhat deposed the discourse of human rights and international law and replaced it with that of law and order, there is still a great deal to fight for. If anything, in fact, the new context makes it more urgent that there be solid rules of international criminal evidence and reliable institutions of international law. The Bush Administration is opposed to the International Criminal Court that is now taking shape, which meant that when the President was asked what he intended to do about the perpetrators of the recent aggression he had to embarrass himself by resorting to his least attractive "don’t mess with Texas" mode, and babble about "wanted dead or alive" like a cartoon sheriff.

The military option has the effect of overshadowing all others, and it is of course true that the Nuremberg trials and the Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda tribunals all required a bit of a shift in the balance of power before they could occur. Nonetheless, here might have been the first opportunity in history for an American administration to say, in advance of any meditated action, that it would attempt to bring the common enemies of humanity before a properly constituted tribunal. And the chance was thrown away in advance.

The most vocal public opponent of the principles of "universal jurisdiction" is Henry Kissinger, who has a laughably self-interested chapter on the subject in his turgid new book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (a volume, incidentally, that if it had any other merit might be considered as a candidate for title of the year). This chapter was also solemnly recycled by the establishment’s house organ, Foreign Affairs. It was utterly nauseating to see Kissinger re-enthroned as a pundit in the aftermath of September 11, talking his usual "windy, militant trash," to borrow Auden’s phrase for it. I caught him talking to John McLaughlin and looking on the bright side by saying that the mass murder had strengthened something called the Western alliance. Say what you will about our Henry, he can find the joy in any nightmare.

He may also have had a personal reason to take comfort from the hideous events of that day. On September 10, he was hit with a lawsuit that was filed in federal court in Washington, DC. The suit, which is brought by members of the family of the late René Schneider, accuses him and his co-defendant former CIA chief Richard Helms, and some other members of the Nixon Administration, of "summary execution"–in other words, of murder and, by implication, international terrorism. (Gen. René Schneider, head of the Chilean General Staff in 1970, was resolutely opposed to any military intervention against the elected government of Salvador Allende. He was therefore marked for death by Kissinger and others. A fairly full account of the background to the case, and of the newly declassified documents that support and underpin it, can be found in chapters five and six of my book The Trial of Henry Kissinger.) To summarize the story briefly, Richard Nixon told Kissinger and Helms to commence the destabilization of Chile before Allende had even become President. They were instructed to employ the transition period between the 1970 election and the confirmation of the results by the Chilean Congress. They were also told not to be too choosy about methods. They selected as their proxies a militarist gang that had once tried to overthrow a Christian Democratic government from the right. Fascists, to be plain about it, and proven criminals.

The lawsuit, which will produce details of the recruiting of international death squads, the use of US diplomatic pouches to smuggle illegal arms and money, and of other terrorist techniques, made it into the Washington Post on September 11 but has gone largely unremarked since then. Let’s not complain about that for now; the point is that it is in the system. It joins several other legal initiatives against Kissinger, which now include a similar complaint filed in Chilean courts, a request from the judge in the Pinochet case for information from Kissinger about the murder of the US journalist (and sometime Nation contributor) Charles Horman, a request for Kissinger’s testimony from Judge Rodolfo Corral in Buenos Aires (this concerns Kissinger’s knowledge of the coordination of state terrorism known as Operation Condor) and a summons issued by Judge Roger Le Loire in Paris, requesting his attendance at the Palais de Justice to answer questions about several Frenchmen "missing" from the Pinochet years. In default of a working system of international criminal law, in other words, a number of initiatives are beginning to supply a framework of precedent, of which the most celebrated is obviously the arrest of Kissinger’s friend Augusto Pinochet himself.

This is good news in a dark time. It joins a number of other legal initiatives, including one for compensation in the case of Clinton’s criminal rocketing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998. The most common objection I have met with, in my campaign to get Kissinger into the dock, is that "all this was a long time ago." I think that opportunistic, ahistorical objection may now dissolve. The question of international viciousness and the use of criminal violence against civilians is now, so to speak, back on the agenda. It’s important that we make our opposition to such conduct both steady and consistent.

Incidentally, suing Kissinger can also be fun. Having refused comment on my book for some time, and having broken his silence only to say that it was "contemptible" and that the charges were "old," our Henry suddenly announced that I was a Holocaust denier. I was moved by this to send him my first-ever lawyer’s letter. His attorneys immediately replied by saying that they would not repeat the allegation and then, after some more correspondence, sent me a very grudging and graceless but nonetheless unmistakable retraction. Since some of my more extreme ill-wishers sometimes repeat Kissinger’s charge, I have amassed the whole background to it and the complete refutation, and you can visit it if you care to by directing your trusty web browser to my site at www.enteract.com/~peterk.

Just once more, and then we’ll really have to get on with more pressing business. I could subscribe myself at any time to any of the following statements:

§ An Arab child born in Nablus should have no fewer rights in his or her homeland than a Jewish child born in Flatbush.

§ The United States of America has been the patron of predatory regimes on five continents.

§ The United States of America exports violence by means of arms sales and evil clients.

You can probably fill in a few extras for yourself. However, none of the above statements means the same thing if prefaced with the words: “As Osama bin Laden and his devout followers have recently reminded us…” They wouldn’t mean the same thing politically, that is to say, and they wouldn’t mean the same thing morally. It’s disgraceful that so many people on the periphery of this magazine should need what Noam Chomsky would otherwise term instruction in the elementary.

Here are two brief thought experiments that I hope and trust will put this degrading argument to rest. Both of them, as it happens, involve the date September 11.

I have long kept September 11 as a day of mourning, because it was on that date in 1973 that Salvador Allende was murdered and Chilean democracy assassinated along with him. We know all the details now, from the way the giant corporations subsidized subversion to the way that US politicians commissioned “hit jobs” and sabotage. It took the Chilean opposition many years of patient struggle to regain their country and their democracy, and the small help I was able to offer them is one of the few things in my life of which I can be proud. There was one spirited attempt to kill Augusto Pinochet himself during this period, with which I had some sneaking sympathy, but on the whole the weaponry of terror (death squads, car bombs, the training of special killers) was in the department of horror employed by Chilean and US officials working for, or with, the dictatorship. And now Chilean dignity has been restored, and Pinochet himself is a discredited and indicted figure, spared the rigor of law only for humanitarian reasons. We may even live to see justice done to some of his backers in Washington, though the holding of breath would be inadvisable.

I don’t know any Chilean participant in this great historic struggle who would not rather have died–you’ll have to excuse the expression–than commit an outrage against humanity that was even remotely comparable to the atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. And I think I’ll leave it at that, since those who don’t see my point by now are never going to do so.

There are others who mourn September 11 because it was on that day in 1683 that the hitherto unstoppable armies of Islam were defeated by a Polish general outside the gates of Vienna. The date marks the closest that proselytizing Islam ever came to making itself a superpower by military conquest. From then on, the Muslim civilization, which once had so much to teach the Christian West, went into a protracted eclipse. I cannot of course be certain, but I think it is highly probable that this is the date that certain antimodernist forces want us to remember as painfully as they do. And if I am right, then it’s not even facile or superficial to connect the recent aggression against American civil society with any current “human rights issue.”

Why not pay attention to what the cassettes and incantations of Al Qaeda actually demand: a holy war in which there are no civilians on the other side, only infidels, and a society of total aridity in which any concept of culture or the future has been eradicated?

One ought to be clear about this: The Ottomans who besieged Vienna were not of that primeval mentality. But the Wahabbi fanatics of the present century are. Glance again at the trite statements I made at the beginning of this column. Could Osama bin Laden actually utter any of them? Certainly not. He doesn’t only oppose the entire Jewish presence in Palestine; he opposes the Jewish presence in America. He is the spoiled-brat son of one of our preferred despotisms and the proud beneficiary of the export of violence. Why, then, do so many fools consider him as the interpreter of their “concerns,” let alone seek to appoint their ignorant selves as the medium for his?

Thanks to all those who demand that I tell them what is to be done. As the situation develops, they may even ask themselves this question as if it really demanded a serious answer. We certainly owe a duty to Afghanistan’s people, whose lives were rendered impossible by the Taliban long before we felt any pain. We might even remember that the only part of Iraq where people are neither starving nor repressed is in the Kurdish area, now under international protection as a result of public pressure on Bush Senior’s vaunted “coalition.” (See especially David Hirst’s two engrossing reports from northern Iraq in the London Guardian of August 1 and 2: Hirst himself is probably the most consistently anti-imperialist journalist in the region.) But wait! That might mean that one could actually do something. Surely we are too guilt-stained for that.

Thanks also to all those who thought it was original to attack me for writing from an “armchair.” (Why is it always an armchair?) As it happens, I work in a swivel chair, in an apartment on the top floor of one of Washington’s tallest buildings. In the fall of 1993 the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism urgently advised me to change this address because of “credible” threats received after my wife and daughter and I had sheltered Salman Rushdie as a guest, and had arranged for him to be received at the cowering Clinton White House. I thought, then as now, that the government was doing no more than covering its own behind by giving half-alarmist and half-reassuring advice. In other words, I have a quarrel with theocratic fascism even when the Administration does not, and I hope at least some of my friendly correspondents are prepared to say the same.

The two related questions before the house are these. Can the attacks of September 11 be compared to an earlier outrage committed by Americans? And should they be so compared?

Noam Chomsky does not rise much above the level of half-truth in his comparison of the September 11 atrocities to Clinton’s rocketing of Sudan. Since his remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I “must be unaware,” he writes, that I “express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.” With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.

I have a very clear memory of the destruction of the Al-Shifa chemical plant in Khartoum on August 20 1998, and of the false claim made by the Administration that it had sought out and destroyed a nerve gas facility that was linked to Osama bin Laden’s shady business empire. I wrote a series of columns in The Nation, dated October 5, October 19 and November 16, 1998.The first one of these was recirculated on the web by Salon magazine. I then wrote an expanded essay for the January 1999 issue of Vanity Fair. And the chapter in my book No One Left To Lie To, titled “Clinton’s War Crimes,” is a summary and digest of all the above. I quoted Tom Carnaffin, the British engineer who had helped construct the plant. I quoted the German ambassador, Werner Daum, who had recently toured it. I interviewed one of the world’s leading authorities on inorganic chemistry, Professor R.J.P. Williams. I interviewed Milton Bearden, a retired CIA station chief. My conclusions, which were stated earlier and at greater length than by any of the journalists cited by Chomsky, were that the factory was a medical and pharmaceutical facility, unrelated in any way to the holdings of bin Laden, and that this could and should have been known in advance. In any case, I argued, the United States had no right to hit Sudanese territory without at least first requesting an inspection of the plant. In short, as I put it, several times and in several different ways, “only one person was killed in the rocketing of Sudan. But many more have died, and will die, because an impoverished country has lost its chief source of medicines and pesticides.” As I also phrased it, the President had “acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan.”

Thus I think I am indeed “unaware,” with or without Chomsky’s lofty permission, of my propensity for racist contempt. Since Chomsky reads The Nation and seems to have a clip-file on Al-Shifa, he is in a position to know my views if he cares to. I think I can say without immodesty that I wrote more, and earlier, about this scandal than any other person. I also helped the late John Scanlon in preparing the basis for a lawsuit by the owner of the factory, Saleh Idris, seeking compensation from the US government. That suit is still active.

I have to say that I didn’t get an unambiguous response from the left at the time, because there were those who were uneasy at the allegation that Clinton had “wagged the dog.” (The bombing took place as Miss Lewinsky was returning to the grand jury, and secured him a nauseating “bounce” in the opinion polls.) It was felt in some “progressive” quarters that to make too much of the atrocity was to “give ammunition” to the Republicans. I may be mistaken, but I don’t remember Noam Chomsky circulating the news of the war crime when it would have made any difference. Certainly not with the energy he does now–by way of a comparison with the massacres in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.

How exact is this comparison? Chomsky is obviously right when he says that one must count “collateral” casualties, though it isn’t possible to compute the Sudanese ones with any certainty. (And he makes a small mistake: The Sudanese regime demanded at the UN only that there be an on-site inspection of the destroyed factory–a demand that the United States resisted, to its shame.) But must one not also measure intention and motive? The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character. (The New York Yemeni community alone is “missing” some 200 members, mainly push-cart vendors in the nearby streets.) The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was. And I believe I have already pointed out that the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.

(Incidentally, the New York Times for October 2 carried a report on page B4. The World Bank now estimates that the shock suffered by the international economy as a result of September 11 will have the following effects on poorer societies. “It is estimated that 40,000 children worldwide will likely die from disease and malnutrition and 10 million people will fall below the bank’s extreme poverty line of $1 dollar a day or less as a result of slower economic growth.” No doubt Chomsky will wish to factor this in. Or will he prefer to say that the World Bank is the problem in the first place? His casuistry appears to be limitless.)

In a brilliant article in The New Yorker for October 12, 1998 (“The Missiles of August”), Seymour Hersh reconstructed the decision-making that led to the Al-Shifa raid. He found that four of the five Joint Chiefs had been kept in the dark about it, as had Louis Freeh of the FBI, who was then in Africa investigating the ghastly bombings of two neighboring US Embassies. I was myself able to find several senior people at the State Department and the CIA who had urged against the strike at the time and who could prove it, and would let their own names be used for quotation. It was as near to a purely presidential decision, replete with Strangelovian opportunism, as could be. Never mind for now whether this strengthens my case for trying Clinton–a case that Chomsky makes without realizing it. How fair is it to say that “the United States” decided in advance on all those Sudanese deaths? It might be fairer than one might like, but it still wouldn’t come up to the Al Qaeda standard.

As one who spent several weeks rebutting it, and rebutting it in real time, I can state that the case for considering Al-Shifa as a military target was not an absolutely hollow one. (One of the main Sudanese opposition groups, for example, had identified it as a bin Laden facility engaged in the manufacture of nerve gas.) In one way this makes little difference, because Clinton never demanded an inspection and because a nerve gas plant can’t be folded like a tent and moved overnight. So that what was committed was certainly an aggression. However, at least a makeshift claim of military targeting could be advanced: President Clinton and his contemptible Defense Secretary Cohen did not boast of having taught Sudanese civilians a lesson. Furthermore, the Sudanese regime had been sheltering and nurturing Osama bin Laden, had been imposing its own form of Islamic dictatorship and has in other respects a filthy record. And two embassies had just been blown up in Kenya and Dar es Salaam, with the infliction of very many hundreds of African civilian casualties, by men in bin Laden’s network. (It’s not specially pointful to this argument, but Chomsky’s touching belief in the then-imminence of regional peace strikes me as naïve.) I thus hold to my view that there is no facile “moral equivalence” between the two crimes.

But this by no means exhausts my disagreement with Chomsky. Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so? I wrote at the time (The Nation, October 5, 1998) that Osama bin Laden “hopes to bring a ‘judgmental’ monotheism of his own to bear on these United States.” Chomsky’s recent version of this is “considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region.” In my version, then as now, one confronts an enemy who wishes ill to our society, and also to his own (if impermeable religious despotism is considered an “ill”). In Chomsky’s reading, one must learn to sift through the inevitable propaganda and emotion resulting from the September 11 attacks, and lend an ear to the suppressed and distorted cry for help that comes, not from the victims, but from the perpetrators. I have already said how distasteful I find this attitude. I wonder if even Chomsky would now like to have some of his own words back? Why else should he take such care to quote himself deploring the atrocity? Nobody accused him of not doing so. It’s often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven’t been made.

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning. By all means we must meet the challenge to our understanding. I think that the forces represented by Al Qaeda and the Taliban are fairly easy to comprehend, but not very easy to coexist with. I also believe that we would do well to take them at their word. I even believe that it is true that September 11 was a hinge event. Chomsky gives me the impression of regarding it as an inconvenience. With some irritation and impatience, he manages to assimilate it to his pre-existing worldview, and then goes on as if nothing much had happened. I think it would be flattering to describe this as an exercise in clarification. And I think it also contains a serious danger of euphemism, in that it purportedly connects the mass murder of our fellows to causes (such as the emancipation of the Palestinians from occupation) which are much better considered in their own right. To propose the connection is inevitably to flatter Al Qaeda, even if only indirectly. If I seem to exaggerate, then pray consider this passage from page 39 of Chomsky’s most recent book: A New Generation Draws The Line: Kosovo, East Timor and The Standards of the West (Verso 2000):

The huge slaughter in East Timor is (at least) comparable to the terrible atrocities that can plausibly be attributed to Milosevic in the earlier wars in Yugoslavia, and responsibility is far easier to assign, with no complicating factors. If proponents of the “repetition of Bosnia” thesis intend it seriously, they should certainly have been calling for the bombing of Jakarta–indeed Washington and London–in early 1998 so as not to allow in East Timor a repetition of the crimes that Indonesia, the US, and the UK had perpetrated there for a quarter-century. And when the new generation of leaders refused to pursue this honorable course, they should have been leading citizens to do so themselves, perhaps joining the Bin Laden network. These conclusions follow straightforwardly, if we assume that the thesis is intended as something more than apologetics for state violence.

Here, the pretense of remorseless logic degenerates into flat-out irrationality. “These conclusions follow straightforwardly”? The accusations against Milosevic are “plausible”? A year ago it would have been possible to notice the same thing that strikes the eye today: Chomsky’s already train-wrecked syllogisms seem to entail the weird and sinister assumption that bin Laden is a ventriloquist for thwarted voices of international justice. (For more on this, see an excellent forthcoming essay on Chomsky’s work in The American Prospect, authored by Professor Jeffrey Isaac of the University of Indiana, to whom I am indebted.)

If there is now an international intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some “Candle In the Wind” or “Strawberry Fields” peace vigils. They did not take to the streets, or even go moist and musical, when the Administration supported the Taliban. But that was, surely, just as much an intervention? An intervention, moreover, that could not even pretend to be humane or democratic? I had the same concern about those who did not object when the United States safeguarded Milosevic, but did protest when it finally turned against him. Am I supposed not to notice that these two groups of “anti-interventionists” are in fact the same people?

Concluding, then. I have begun to think that Noam Chomsky has lost or is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war, and that enabled him to write such monumental essays as his critique of the Kahan Commission on Sabra and Shatila or his analysis of the situation in East Timor. I don’t say this out of any “more in sorrow than anger” affectation: I have written several defenses of him and he knows it. But the last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions. He sought earnestly to convince me that Vaclav Havel, by addressing a joint session of Congress in the fall of 1989, was complicit in the murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador that had occurred not very long before he landed in Washington. In vain did I point out that the timing of Havel’s visit was determined by the November collapse of the Stalinist regime in Prague, and that on his first celebratory visit to the United States he need not necessarily take the opportunity to accuse his hosts of being war criminals. Nothing would do, for Chomsky, but a strict moral equivalence between Havel’s conduct and the mentality of the most depraved Stalinist. (He’s written this elsewhere, so I break no confidence.) I then took the chance of asking him whether he still considered Ed Herman a political co-thinker. Herman had moved from opposing the bombing of Serbia to representing the Milosevic regime as a victim and as a nationalist peoples’ democracy. He has recently said, in a ludicrous attack on me, that the “methods and policies” of the Western forces in Kosovo were “very similar” to the tactics of Al Qaeda, an assertion that will not surprise those who are familiar with his style. Chomsky knew perfectly well what I was asking, and why, but chose to respond by saying that he did not regard anybody in particular as a co-thinker. I thought then that this was a shady answer; I now think that it may also have been an unintentionally prescient one. I don’t believe that any of those who have so anxiously sought his opinions in the past three weeks have felt either inspired or educated by them, because these opinions are a recipe for nothingness. And only an old admiration should prevent me from adding, nothingness at the very best.

Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to “rationalize” the aggression of September 11, or my use of the term “fascism with an Islamic face,” and I’ll select a representative example of the sort of “thinking” that I continue to receive on my screen, even now. This jewel comes from Sam Husseini, who runs the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC:

The fascists like Bid-Laden could not get volunteers to stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem like it was supposed to–and the US stopped the sanctions and the bombing on Iraq.

You’ve heard this “thought” expressed in one way or another, dear reader, have you not? I don’t think I took enough time in my last column to point out just what is so utterly rotten at the very core of it. So, just to clean up a corner or two: (1) If Husseini knows what was in the minds of the murderers, it is his solemn responsibility to inform us of the source of his information, and also to share it with the authorities. (2) If he does not know what was in their minds–as seems enormously more probable–then why does he rush to appoint himself the ventriloquist’s dummy for such a faction? Who volunteers for such a task at such a time?

Not only is it indecent to act as self-appointed interpreter for the killers, but it is rash in the highest degree. The death squads have not favored us with a posthumous manifesto of their grievances, or a statement of claim about Palestine or Iraq, but we are nonetheless able to surmise or deduce or induct a fair amount about the ideological or theological “root” of their act (Husseini doesn’t seem to demand “proof” of bin Laden’s involvement any more than the Bush Administration is willing to supply it) and if we are correct in this, then we have considerable knowledge of two things: their ideas and their actions.

First the actions. The central plan was to maximize civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied the physics and ecology of the buildings and the neighborhood, and we know that they were limited only by the flight schedules and bookings of civil aviation. They must therefore have been quite prepared to convert fully loaded planes into missiles, instead of the mercifully unpopulated aircraft that were actually commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination of luck and tactics to have at least doubled the kill-rate on the ground. They spent some time in the company of the families they had kidnapped for the purpose of mass homicide. It was clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was. And it was designed and incubated long before the mutual-masturbation of the Clinton-Arafat-Barak “process.” The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished themselves very much by an interest in the Palestinian plight. They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of shari’a law. This is known to anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject.

The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense and (on the best evidence we have available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all its symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit of the American “war-machine,” and is set in a crowded Virginia neighborhood. You could certainly call it a military target if you were that way inclined, though the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything against a guarded airbase or a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we would now doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge for globalization). The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives–poor things, to be sure, but our own. The White House is where the elected President and his family and staff are to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it down, and the attempt of the Confederacy to take Washington DC, and this has hallowed even its most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a gutted Capitol or a shattered White House. I am quite certain that in such a case Husseini and his rabble of sympathizers would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to roost. (The image of bin Laden’s men “stuffing envelopes” is the perfected essence of such brainless verbiage.) Only the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some such outcome; only those who chose who die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998.

I speak with some feeling about that latter event, because I wrote three Nation columns about it at the time, pointing out (with evidence that goes unrebutted to this day) that it was a war crime, and a war crime opposed by the majority of the military and intelligence establishment. The crime was directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys and Husseinis of the time). The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known to be a civilian target, and its “selection” was opposed by most of the Joint Chiefs and many CIA personnel for just this reason. (See, for additional corroboration, Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker essay “The Missiles of August”). To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers. (How are you doing, Sam? Noam, wazzup?)

So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the true anti-human and anti-democratic motivation. By their deeds shall we know them. What about the animating ideas? There were perhaps seven hundred observant followers of the Prophet Muhammed burned alive in New York on September 11. Nobody who had studied the target zone could have been in any doubt that some such figure was at the very least a likely one. And, since Islam makes no discrimination between the color and shade of its adherents, there was good reason to think that any planeload of civilians might include some Muslims as well. I don’t myself make this point with any more emphasis than I would give to the several hundred of my fellow Englishmen (some of them doubtless Muslims also) who perished. I stress it only because it makes my point about fascism. To the Wahhabi-indoctrinated sectarians of Al Qaeda, only the purest and most fanatical are worthy of consideration. The teachings and published proclamations of this cult have initiated us to the idea that the tolerant, the open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches of The Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt. And that’s before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and secularists, have even been factored in. As before, the deed announces and exposes its “root cause.” The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds. And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taliban and its surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and they deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think, not possible. (I say “fortunately” because I am also convinced that such coexistence is not desirable).

But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is us, really. Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed “we” did. Well, does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power? A sudden sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat. Would that not be “over-reaction”? All I want to say for now is that the under-reaction to the Taliban by three successive United States administrations is one of the great resounding disgraces of our time. There is good reason to think that a Taliban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy. But for the moment, the Bush Administration seems a hostage to the Pakistani and Saudi clients who are the sponsors and “harborers” the President claims publicly to be looking for! Yet the mainstream left, ever shuffling its feet, fears only the discomfort that might result from repudiating such an indefensible and humiliating posture. Very well then, comrades. Do not pretend that you wish to make up for America’s past crimes in the region. Here is one such crime that can be admitted and undone–the sponsorship of the Taliban could be redeemed by the demolition of its regime and the liberation of its victims. But I detect no stomach for any such project. Better, then–more decent and reticent–not to affect such concern for “our” past offenses. This is not an article about grand strategy, but it seems to me to go without saying that a sincere commitment to the secular or reformist elements in the Muslim world would automatically shift the balance of America’s up-to-now very questionable engagement. Every day, the wretched Arafat is told by Washington, as a favor to the Israelis, that he must police and repress the forces of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When did Washington last demand that Saudi Arabia cease its heavy financing of these primitive and unscrupulous organisations? We let the Algerians fight the Islamic-fascist wave without saying a word or lending a hand. And this is an effort in which civic and social organizations can become involved without official permission. We should be building such internationalism whether it serves the short-term needs of the current Administration or not: I signed an anti-Taliban statement several months ago and was appalled by the eerie silence with which the initiative was greeted in Washington. (It ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian self-determination is, as before, a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as ever. There are millions of Palestinians who do not want the future that the pious of all three monotheisms have in store for them.)

Ultimately, this is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby former clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban cease to be our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. At such a point, a moral and political crisis occurs. Do “our” past crimes and sins make it impossible to expiate the offense by determined action? Those of us who were not consulted about, and are not bound by, the previous covert compromises have a special responsibility to say a decisive “no” to this. The figure of six and a half thousand murders in New York is almost the exact equivalent to the total uncovered in the death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at Srebrenica, the demented General Ratko Mladic agreed to release all the women, all the children, all the old people and all the males above and below military age before ordering his squads to fall to work.) On that occasion, US satellites flew serenely overhead recording the scene, and Milosevic earned himself an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after appalling false starts and delays, it was found that Mr Milosevic was too much. He wasn’t just too nasty. He was also too irrational and dangerous. He didn’t even save himself by lyingly claiming, as he several times did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia. It must be said that by this, and by other lies and numberless other atrocities, Milosevic distinguished himself as an enemy of Islam. His national-socialist regime took the line on the towelheads that the Bush Administration is only accused, by fools and knaves, of taking. Yet when a stand was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky and Sam Husseini, among many others, who described the whole business as a bullying persecution of–the Serbs! I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I’m thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.

It was in Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, as the Red Army was falling apart and falling back. I badly needed a guide to get me to the Khyber Pass, and I decided that what I required was the most farouche-looking guy with the best command of English and the toughest modern automobile. Such a combination was obtainable, for a price. My new friend rather wolfishly offered me a tour of the nearby British military cemetery (a well-filled site from the Victorian era) before we began. Then he slammed a cassette into the dashboard. I braced myself for the ululations of some mullah but received instead a dose of “So Far Away.” From under the turban and behind the beard came the gruff observation, “I thought you might like Dire Straits.”

This was my induction into the now-familiar symbiosis of tribal piety and high-tech; a symbiosis consummated on September 11 with the conversion of the southern tip of the capital of the modern world into a charred and suppurating mass grave. Not that it necessarily has to be a symbol of modernism and innovation that is targeted for immolation. As recently as this year, the same ideology employed heavy artillery to destroy the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, and the co-thinkers of bin Laden in Egypt have been heard to express the view that the Pyramids and the Sphinx should be turned into shards as punishment for their profanely un-Islamic character.

Since my moment in Peshawar I have met this faction again. In one form or another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques. Just a few months ago Bosnia surrendered to the international court at The Hague the only accused war criminals detained on Muslim-Croat federation territory. The butchers had almost all been unwanted “volunteers” from the Chechen, Afghan and Kashmiri fronts; it is as an unapologetic defender of the Muslims of Bosnia (whose cause was generally unstained by the sort of atrocity committed by Catholic and Orthodox Christians) that one can and must say that bin Ladenism poisons everything that it touches.

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton’s rocketing of Khartoum–supported by most liberals–was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the “bounce in the polls” achieved by their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers Street.) But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers. The people of Gaza live under curfew and humiliation and expropriation. This is notorious. Very well: Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist assault.

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.

The new talk is all of “human intelligence”: the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush Administration handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43 million in abject gratitude for the assistance of fundamentalism in the”war on drugs.” Next up is the renewed “missile defense” fantasy recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats who seek to occupy the void “behind the President.” There is sure to be further opportunity to emphasize the failings of our supposed leaders, whose costly mantra is “national security” and who could not protect us. And yes indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey’s CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible Koran. But that’s only one way of stating the obvious, which is that this is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

Modesto, California

"Condit Country" is a bad enough slogan for this agribusiness burg, yet, not satisfied with it, the city boosters have also erected an arch across the main street. MODESTO, reads the self-regarding inscription. WATER. WEALTH. CONTENTMENT. HEALTH. The local Congressman is an embodiment of this narcissistic style, and of the sort of Babbittry that accompanies it. Condit is always there, when it comes to being photographed for a peach parade. He's always there, on the House Agriculture Committee, when it comes to bills on land and water rights. He's an irrigation ditch for the local interests. His blond family–Carolyn, Cadee and Chad–is off a cornflakes box. In common with his sometime friend and patron Governor Gray Davis, Condit will make any political sellout his own idea. Death penalty–yes. School prayer, public display of the Ten Commandments, down with flag-burners and (now that you mention it) let's reveal the names of people with AIDS.

Creeps like Condit are, however, a dime a dozen in the Democratic Party, and I was in a state of general agreement with Dan Rather when I first set foot in the district. The disappearance of Chandra Levy had no importance beyond itself; it was a tragedy only for her family. Condit may have flirted with obstruction of justice by wasting the time of the DC police, and with suborning perjury in asking Anne Marie Smith to sign a false affidavit, but this was not on the Clinton scale of abuse of power. Condit hadn't used the forces of the state or mobilized large sums of public money in his battle to insulate himself from unwelcome inquiries. What he has done has at least been done on his own dime.

Thus I reasoned, idly, until I got to the corner of 16th and H streets downtown, where Condit has his headquarters. There wasn't much in the window, except a banal poster enjoining one and all to say no to hate crimes and two other exhibits. The first of these was a missing poster for Levy, who, as is now notorious, disappeared a whole continent away in Washington and is unlikely to be lurking in the greater Modesto area. The second was a missing poster for a local girl named Dena Raley, who has vanished in what the authorities call "suspicious circumstances." I asked an experienced local if Congressman Condit has always kindly displayed the posters for missing females in his district office window. "Oh no," came the reply. "That's a new thing."

I was at once seized with a powerful feeling of disgust. Condit and his team of lawyers and publicists have been saying unctuously for some time that they so much hope Chandra Levy hasn't gone the way of all those other girls who go missing. "I pray that she has not met the same fate," as Condit himself piously phrased it in a letter to his constituents. The not-so-subtle message is that life is unfair, whaddaya gonna do and don't look at me. But to use the posters of the missing as an accessory in this fashion is to take cynicism a stage further. I actually live in a place more or less equidistant between Levy's old apartment in Dupont Circle and Condit's oddly located pad in Adams Morgan, and I can tell you that the disappearance of single females is not as everyday an occurrence as some would have you think. I can also tell you that the Washington Police Department is a laughingstock, as much among criminals as among the law-abiding. It never called Dr. Levy back after he rang to report his daughter missing in the first place, and when it says it has no suspect in the case it really, really means it. It's a police department that doesn't suspect anybody, and has for these many years employed rather more crooks than it has managed to apprehend.

The following night I watched Condit himself on TV. Considering that our craven mass media had actually allowed him to choose a lenient and unqualified interviewer, I thought that his performance was not so much disastrous from a PR point of view (the Dick Gephardt "take" on the matter) as calamitous from a moral one. How incredible that he could say, not once but several times, that in refusing to clarify the real nature of their relationship he was honoring "a specific request from the Levy family," who had done no more than tell another TV station that they were more concerned with recovering their daughter than with discovering the details. How contemptible! A man who will do this, and plainly rehearse to do it with the assistance of the degraded professions of attorney and media adviser, can be held to be capable of pretty much anything. The squalor and shadiness of his other responses–alluding to Ms. Levy repeatedly in the past tense, making out her family to be liars, answering questions he wasn't asked, resorting to the word "we" when he meant "I" ("we've taken a polygraph test," for Christ's sake) and blaming his lawyers for a draft falsification submitted to Anne Marie Smith–paled when set next to this one.

So I have changed my mind, for what it's worth. By acting in this depraved way, by managing to evoke only mild reproof from his party and by employing the techniques of spin and "privacy" and procrastination when a girl's life is in question, Condit has demonstrated something of importance about our political class. Of course I don't know if poor Chandra Levy went for an ill-advised ride on his motorbike, or somebody else's. But after I had digested the Congressman's window display, I walked over to the former Mel's drive-in, which is featured in George Lucas's Modesto classic, American Graffiti.

An ancient Chevy stood next to a battered Packard in the parking lot, Elvis was on the jukebox, girls served from rollerblades and the slogan ("Where the food is as good as the root beer") was roughly accurate. A leathered biker pushed past me as I emerged from the "Poppa Bear" restroom. On the back of his jacket he had inscribed the words: IF YOU CAN READ THIS–THE BITCH FELL OFF. It wasn't the most callous remark I heard in Modesto: I had to sit through Connie Chung to hear it surpassed.

Isabel Segunda, Vieques, Puerto Rico

In this smallest of small towns one could get the impression that there was something parochial–something "not in my backyard"–about the campaign to expel the United States Navy. But to be present on the day of the referendum was to see a kind of historical revenge being enacted, as well as the rebirth of a latent national consciousness. The mayor of Vieques, Damaso Serrano, remembers seeing a boyhood friend being shot dead for crossing the wire around the base. Other local veterans have never forgiven the expulsion of their families and the demolition of their old homes. But it is not, in general, motives of resentment that animate the voters. I did a stop-by at the headquarters of "Option Two," the movement for the immediate cessation of the Navy's presence and practices on the island. The preponderance of activists was female, from a variety of political backgrounds, concerned certainly with the recent death of a civilian on the firing range but much more preoccupied with terms like "dignity" and "recognition." One of them, a beaming veteran, told me that she'd been to Washington for the celebrations in 1976 to call for "a bicentennial without colonies."

The Option Two majority–some 68 percent, as it turns out–seem to see this more as a chance to make themselves felt in Washington again. The opposition 30 percent are likewise fond of citing broader issues. The choice, they say, is between Americanization and "Fidelization." (The Cuban exile community in Puerto Rico, with some help from Miami, was extremely active in framing the question in this way.) And this minority, bear in mind, took a firm stand in favor of keeping the Navy presence indefinitely and allowing live-fire exercises. The only option that nobody chose was the Bush Administration's too-little-too-late proposal of dummy-ammunition testing accompanied by a phased withdrawal. (The Republican and Democratic hawks in Congress don't think much of it, either.) Had the vote been islandwide, it is extremely improbable that the pro-Navy forces would have got as much as 30 percent. Vieques depends very heavily for jobs on the Navy, and the Navy had recently been extremely punctilious about remembering to pay compensation to local fishermen for time and earnings lost during exercises. Neither in San Juan nor in the largely black town of Loiza did I see more than the occasional pro-Navy bumper sticker or window display, whereas signs reading paz para vieques or no una bomba más or, more bluntly, fuera la marina (Navy Get Out!) were everywhere to be seen. (And Loiza seemed to me significant because blacks in Puerto Rico have historically supported statehood over independence.)

Indeed, the largest single bloc of Puerto Ricans of all stripes still do prefer statehood to independence. But of what value is that, when the United States itself makes it so abundantly clear that it doesn't want Puerto Rico as a state? The other alternative–an enhanced form of "commonwealth" or colonial status–is exactly what is being eroded by the Vieques confrontation and by the refusal of Congress to allow a binding vote on the island's future.

Military politics is not peripheral in Puerto Rico. The island was originally annexed in 1898 for strategic reasons. Puerto Ricans, unrepresented in Congress, have always been well represented in the uniforms of the United States armed forces, and the whole question of citizenship without statehood is closely bound up with that fact. (The antidraft movement during the Vietnam years was especially intense on the island for just that reason.) The military-industrial complex throws a lengthy shadow here, both as employer and as provider of subsidies. It has also long been a political arbiter.

The leading San Juan columnist, Juan Manuel Garcia Passalacqua, created quite a sensation recently when he published some still-secret War Department documents from the 1940s, a time when the independence movement seemed more of a threat. In 1943 the War Department told Congress that it found it "impossible to acquiesce in the premise that Puerto Rico can be given sovereignty status." Two years later, the department insisted that any bill relating to the status of the island "should be modified so as to provide [that]…the US government shall retain exclusive military jurisdiction over the island of Puerto Rico, regardless of the form of provisional or commonwealth government set up for transitional purposes." It also stipulated that "the United States may, by presidential proclamation, exercise the right to intervene in any manner necessary for the preservation of the government of Puerto Rico and for the maintenance of the government as provided by the Constitution thereof."

In effect this means that the "commonwealth" status quo of the past half-century has been a military device for keeping Puerto Rican politics in a state of suspended animation. Thus the slogan Fuera la Marina, even when uttered on the small island of Vieques off the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, has much more considerable implications than at first appear.

Bush, of course, probably owes his election to the creative counting of absentee military ballots in Florida. (See the New York Times of July 15.) And few Presidents have been more anxious to propitiate the military-industrial nexus. But Bush has also staked quite some part of his presidency, and of his hope for re-election, on "making nice" with Hispanic America. When asked about the Vieques protests he replied in conciliatory tones about "our friends and neighbors who don't want us," for all the world as if Puerto Rico really was a nearby independent state. But it isn't; it has neither the rights nor the duties of a sovereign state or a state of the Union. The nonviolent movement against the Navy has, as Passalacqua later put it to me, offered a safe and patriotic yet extremely subversive challenge to this condition of suspended animation. Perhaps, after all, that is a little provincial and backyardish, but then the power of the powerless is often exercised by indirect means.

In early June I sat on a panel, in front of a large and mainly Arab audience, with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Our hosts, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, had asked for a discussion of contrasting images of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The general tempo of the meeting was encouragingly nontribal; there were many criticisms of Arab regimes and societies, and one of our co-panelists, Raghida Dergham, had recently been indicted in her absence by a Lebanese military prosecutor for the offense of sharing a panel discussion with an Israeli. However, it’s safe to say that most of those attending were aching for a chance to question Friedman in person. He was accused directly at one point of writing in a lofty and condescending manner about the Palestinian people. To this he replied hotly and eloquently, saying that he had always believed that "the Jewish people will never be at home in Palestine until the Palestinian people are at home there."

That was well said, and I hadn’t at the time read his then-most-recent column, so I didn’t think to reply. But in that article he wrote that Chairman Arafat, by his endless double-dealing, had emptied the well of international sympathy for his cause. This is a very Times-ish rhetoric, of course. You have to think about it for a second. It suggests that rights, for Palestinians, are not something innate or inalienable. They are, instead, a reward for good behavior, or for getting a good press. It’s hard to get more patronizing than that. During the first intifada, in the late 1980s, the Palestinians denied themselves the recourse to arms, mounted a civil resistance, produced voices like Hanan Ashrawi and greatly stirred world opinion. For this they were offered some noncontiguous enclaves within an Israeli-controlled and Israeli-settled condominium. Better than nothing, you might say. But it’s the very deal the Israeli settlers reject in their own case, and they do not even live in Israel "proper." (They just have the support of the armed forces of Israel "proper.") So now things are not so nice and many Palestinians have turned violent and even–whatever next?–religious and fanatical. Naughty, naughty. No self-determination for you. And this from those who achieved statehood not by making nice but as a consequence of some very ruthless behavior indeed.

I am writing these lines in memoriam for my dear friend and comrade Dr. Israel Shahak, who died on July 2. His home on Bartenura Street in Jerusalem was a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed. The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation–none were ever turned away. I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because–he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can ‘visit’ them as a privileged citizen." This apparently small point of ethical etiquette contains almost the whole dimension of what is missing from our present discourse: the element of elementary dignity and genuine mutual recognition.

Shahak’s childhood was spent in Nazified Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; at the end of the war he was the only male left in his family. He reached Palestine before statehood, in 1945. In 1956 he heard David Ben-Gurion make a demagogic speech about the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, referring to this dirty war as a campaign for "the kingdom of David and Solomon." That instilled in him the germinal feelings of opposition. By the end of his life, he had produced a scholarly body of work that showed the indissoluble connection between messianic delusions and racial and political ones. He had also, during his chairmanship of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, set a personal example that would be very difficult to emulate.

He had no heroes and no dogmas and no party allegiances. If he admitted to any intellectual model, it would have been Spinoza. For Shahak, the liberation of the Jewish people was an aspect of the Enlightenment, and involved their own self-emancipation from ghetto life and from clerical control, no less than from ancient "Gentile" prejudice. It therefore naturally ensued that Jews should never traffic in superstitions or racial myths; they stood to lose the most from the toleration of such rubbish. And it went almost without saying that there could be no defensible Jewish excuse for denying the human rights of others. He was a brilliant and devoted student of the archeology of Jerusalem and Palestine: I would give anything for a videotape of the conducted tours of the city that he gave me, and of the confrontation in which he vanquished one of the propagandist guides on the heights of Masada. For him, the built and the written record made it plain that Palestine had never been the exclusive possession of any one people, let alone any one "faith."

Only the other day, I read some sanguinary proclamation from the rabbinical commander of the Shas party, Ovadia Yosef, himself much sought after by both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. It was a vulgar demand for the holy extermination of non-Jews; the vilest effusions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have been hard-pressed to match it. The man wants a dictatorial theocracy for Jews and helotry or expulsion for the Palestinians, and he sees (as Shahak did in reverse) the connection. This is not a detail; Yosef’s government receives an enormous US subsidy, and his intended victims live (and die, every day) under a Pax Americana. Men like Shahak, who force us to face these reponsibilities, are naturally rare. He was never interviewed by the New York Times, and its obituary pages have let pass the death of a great and serious man.

Stanford, California

Arriving to record a television debate at the Hoover Institution here a few months ago, I found the personnel of the preceding show still standing around and chatting. Prominent was the rather chic figure of George Shultz, former Secretary of State, who has become almost dandyish and svelte since his second marriage, to a prominent local socialite. He was reminiscing about the first time that Ballistic Missile Defense, or “Star Wars,” was being marketed to the American people. It was Ronald Reagan who set up the first Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, headed by Lieut. Gen. James Abrahamson. This officer duly arrived, accompanied by a uniformed associate, at Shultz’s office on the fifth floor at Foggy Bottom. The Secretary bade him welcome and said he had a number of questions about the new scheme, some of which had to do with its feasibility. Whereat the general turned to his assistant and asked, in a rather show-stopping manner, “Is the Secretary cleared for this conversation?”

Of course, Shultz ought to have turned the man out of his office right then and there. (He had, after all, refused to have anything to do with the Oliver North operation, another military usurpation of civilian authority. And while at Treasury in a previous administration, he had rejected Nixon’s demand for confidential tax information on political opponents.) As it was, he was recalling the moment as one of slightly sinister absurdity. But the core of the anecdote is the clue to the utter stupidity of the press coverage of the Bush “listening tour” of Europe. It is not true that the United States wants a missile defense, while “the Europeans” remain skeptical. The Turkish military, after all, has already signaled its sympathy for the scheme. So have the yes-man regimes that owe Washington a debt for the fantasy of NATO enlargement. I would expect Tony Blair to fall into line without very much demur. (It is, after all, what he’s for.) It is the people of the United States who remain substantially unpersuaded, for excellent reasons, and who have never been given an opportunity to vote for or against this gargantuan, destabilizing boondoggle.

Reagan’s original speech on the subject, which purported to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” was cleverly and explicitly designed to defuse the mass appeal of the nuclear freeze movement, which nineteen years ago this June drew a million people to Central Park. By suddenly discovering that mutual assured destruction was “immoral and unstable,” it spoke to the years of effort, on the part of countless physicists and activists, to point out precisely that.

The Bush propaganda scheme is typically narrower and more parochial. It may call for an empire of science-fiction hardware on earth and in heaven, but its selling point is essentially isolationist: “We” can have our very own shield against “them.” (Indeed, the earlier impetus given to the project under Clinton and Gore, who could and should have stopped the demented plan but didn’t, derived from poll findings showing that millions of Americans believed that the United States already had a missile-proof roof arching above its fruited plains.)

Thus, as presented and packaged, the Star Wars proposal is the apotheosis of the Bush worldview. It appeals to the provincial and the inward-looking in American culture, while simultaneously gratifying and enriching the empire-building element in the military-industrial complex. If only it could be run on oil-based products alone, it would be the picture-perfect reward for the donor-based oligarchy that underpins the regime. And, by drawing on the imagery of shields and prophylactics, it neatly conceals its only conceivable utility, which–if it worked at all–would be the development of an impregnable first-strike capacity.

Just as the MX missile, advertised as a “silo-busting” weapon, was obviously not going to be fired at empty silos, so the “shield” would be a guarantee that an aggressive launch could take place; the aggressor possessing the ability to parry any retaliatory move. There is, quite literally and obviously, no other reason for wishing to possess such a system. Once in place, it would make its own decisions, and no elected politician would ever again be cleared for any discussion of it. The militarization of the state would be complete.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once summarized the preparation for nuclear war as the willingness to commit genocide and suicide at the same time. It has never been put better. The delusion of “Star Wars” is the delusion that the “suicide” bit can be taken out of the equation. That’s why we hear the absurd term “nuclear umbrella” being circulated–possibly the greatest concentration of stupidity ever packed into any two words in apposition–while the words “suicide bomber” are reserved for small-time Levantine desperadoes, of the kind who can evade any known laser or radar.

Given the Clinton/Gore sellout on this greatest of all issues, and the extent to which the commitment to “research” has already been made, the Democrats will have to move very fast to outpace the juggernaut. I’m not holding my breath. I suppose there exists one faint hope. On advice from his daddy, the President abandoned his customary unilateralism and, against the temper of his Congressional right wing, upheld the US commitment to the United Nations. A few weeks later, again after urgent paternal representations, he reversed himself on North Korea. (The conduit in this case was Donald Gregg, former ambassador to South Korea and once Bush Senior’s fall guy for Iran/contra matters.) This isn’t much more heartening, for those of us who would like to live in a democratic republic, than reading of Prince Charles getting a dressing-down from Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. It’s not all that encouraging to think of our first line of defense being old-style, pinstripe Republicans, from George Shultz to Donald Gregg, who survived the wreckage of previous administrations, but it may be all that we’ve got.

It was, take it for all in all, a near-faultless headline: HENRY KISSINGER RATTRAPÉ AU RITZ, À PARIS, PAR LES FANTÔMES DU PLAN CONDOR. I especially liked the accidental synonymy of the verb rattraper. What a rat. And such a trap. It was in this fashion that the front page of the Paris daily Le Monde informed its readers that on Memorial Day the gendarmes had gone round to the Ritz Hotel–flagship of Mohamed Al Fayed’s fleet of properties–with a summons from Judge Roger Le Loire inviting the famous rodent to attend at the Palace of Justice the following day. In what must have been one of the most unpleasant moments of his career, noted Le Monde, the hotel manager had to translate the summons to his distinguished guest. Kissinger left the hotel, surrounded by bodyguards, and later announced that he had no desire to answer questions about Operation Condor. He then left town.

Operation Condor [see Peter Kornbluh, “Kissinger and Pinochet,” March 29, 1999, and “Chile Declassified,” August 9/16, 1999] was a coordinated effort in the 1970s by the secret police forces of seven South American dictatorships. The death squads of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia agreed to pool resources and to hunt down, torture, murder and otherwise “disappear” one another’s dissidents. They did this not just on their own soil but as far away as Rome and Washington, where assassins and car-bombs were deployed to maim Christian Democratic Senator Bernardo Leighton in 1975 and to murder the Socialist Orlando Letelier in 1976. The Pinochet regime was to the fore in this internationalization of state terror tactics, and its secret police chief, Col. Manuel Contreras, was especially inventive and energetic.

Thanks to the efforts of Representative Maurice Hinchey, who attached an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act last year, we now know that this seven-nation alliance had a senior partner. At all material times, those directing the work of US intelligence knew of Operation Condor and assisted its activities. And at all material times, the chairman of the supervising “Forty Committee,” and the key member of the Interagency Committee on Chile, was Henry Kissinger. It was on his watch that the FBI helped Pinochet to identify and arrest Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcón, a Chilean oppositionist who was first detained and tortured in Paraguay and then turned over to Contreras and “disappeared.” Contreras himself was paid a CIA stipend. Other Condor leaders were promised US cooperation in the surveillance of inconvenient exiles living in the United States.

Judge Roger Le Loire has had documents to this effect on his desk for some time and is investigating the fate of five missing French citizens in Chile during the relevant period. He has already issued an arrest warrant for General Pinochet. But he understands that the inquiry can go no further until US government figures agree to answer questions. In refusing to do this, Kissinger received the shameful support of the US Embassy in Paris and the State Department, which coldly advised the French to go through bureaucratic channels in seeking information. Judge Le Loire replied that he had already written to Washington in 1999, during the Clinton years, but had received no response.

On the Friday immediately preceding Memorial Day, another magistrate in a democratic country made an identical request. In order to discover what happened to so many people during the years of Condor terror, said Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, it would be necessary to secure a deposition from Kissinger. And on June 4 the Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia asked US authorities to question Kissinger about the disappearance of the American citizen Charles Horman, murdered by Pinochet’s agents in 1973 and subject of the Costa-Gavras movie Missing (as well as an occasional Nation correspondent). So that, in effect, we have a situation in which the Bush regime is sheltering a man who is wanted for questioning on two continents.

Partly because I have written a short book pointing this out, I have recently been interviewed by French, British and Spanish radio and TV. Indeed, if it wasn’t for that, I might not have learned of Kissinger’s local and international difficulties for some days. The Financial Times carried a solid story on the Paris episode, with some background, the day after Le Monde. But in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post–not a line. And where were Messrs. Koppel and Lehrer? They usually find the views of “Henry” to be worthy of respectful attention. I admit my own interest, but I still feel able to ask: By whose definition is Kissinger’s moment at the Ritz not news?

It is, meanwhile, practically impossible to open the New York Times without reading a solemn admonition, either from the Administration or from the paper itself. Colin Powell lectures Robert Mugabe. George Bush takes a high moral tone with Serbia. All are agreed that wanted men should be given up to international law. All are agreed that however painful the task, other societies must face their own past and shoulder their own grave responsibilities. For a long time I have found it somewhat surreal to read this righteous material, but the experience of ingesting it now becomes more emetic every day.

The seven Condor countries, groping their way back to democracy after decades of trauma, are making brave and honest attempts to find the truth and to punish the guilty. Time and again, commissions of inquiry have been frustrated because the evidence they need is in archives in Washington. And it is in those archives for the unspeakable reason that the United States was the patron and armorer of dictatorship. There is a heavy debt here. Is there not a single Congressional committee, a single principled district attorney, a single leader in our overfed and complacent “human rights community,” who will try to help cancel it? Or are we going to watch while the relatives of the murdered and tortured seek justice by lawful means, and are waved away by armed bodyguards if they even try to serve a scrap of paper on the man whose immunity befouls us all?

Over the past two years, it has become commonplace to read that the casualties among Kosovo Albanians were not sufficiently high to warrant the NATO intervention that put an end–at some remove–to the rule of Slobodan Milosevic. Without saying so explicitly, many liberal and “left” types, and many conservatives and isolationists, have implied that the Kosovars did not suffer quite enough to deserve their deliverance. The dispute revolves around two things; the alleged massacre at Racak (which may or may not have been a firefight provoked by the Kosovo Liberation Army) and the relative emptiness of certain identifiable “mass grave” sites.

As to Racak, it might be argued that Western policy-makers seized too fast on the evidence of a Bosnian-style bloodbath, but–in view of what had been overlooked or tolerated for so long in Bosnia–it would be tough to argue that a “wait and see” policy would have been morally or politically superior. Wait for what? Wait to see what? And, since most of those who cast doubt on Racak were opposed on principle in any case to any intervention, as they had been in Bosnia, the force of their objection does not really depend on the body count, or on the issue of who shot first. For those of us who supported the intervention, with whatever misgivings, it was plain enough that Milosevic wanted the territory of Kosovo without the native population, and that a plan of mass expulsion, preceded by some exemplary killings, was in train. The level of casualties would depend on the extent of resistance that the execution of the plan would encounter.

The bulk of the European and American right had announced in advance that the cleansing of Kosovo by Milosevic was not a big enough deal to justify military action; this seems to remain their view. It was also, according to former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark in his new memoir, the institutional view of the Pentagon. It would therefore have been the right’s view, whatever happened or did not happen at Racak. It would presumably also have been their view even if the United Nations had passed a resolution authorizing the operation, over the entrenched objections of Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin. (The Genocide Convention, which mandates action by signatory powers whenever the destruction of a people in whole or in part is being committed, takes precedence in the view of some.)

So we’ll never know if another Rwanda was prevented or not, since another Rwanda did not in fact take place. However, on the issue of the mass graves there is now, as a result of the implosion of the Milosevic regime, more forensic evidence to go on.

At the time of the war itself I received a letter from a Serbian student of mine, a political foe of Milosevic but by no means a NATO fan. He told me that his family in Serbia had a friend, a long-distance truck driver whom they trusted. This man had told them of entering Kosovo with his refrigerated vehicle, picking up Albanian corpses under military orders and driving them across the “Yugoslav” border as far as the formerly autonomous province of Voivodina, where they were hastily unloaded. He’d made several such runs. At the time, I decided not to publish this letter because although it appeared to be offered in good faith it also seemed somewhat weird and fanciful, and because rumors of exactly this sort do tend to circulate in times of war and censorship.

In early May of this year, the Belgrade daily newspaper Blic, now freed from the constraints of censorship, published a report about a freezer truck, loaded with Albanian cadavers and bearing Kosovo license plates, that had been pulled from the river Danube in April 1999. The location was the town of Kladovo, about 150 miles east of Belgrade. Local gravediggers told of being hastily mobilized to load the bodies onto another truck, and to keep their mouths shut. The man who found the truck, Zivojin Djordjevic, was interviewed on Belgrade Radio B92. “It was a Mercedes lorry–the name of the meat-processing company from Pec was written in Albanian on the cabin. The license plates were from Pec…. When the lorry was pulled out and the doors of the freezer opened, corpses started sliding out. There were many bodies of women, children and old people. Some women had Turkish trousers, some children and old people were naked.”

To this macabre tale, identifiable people have put their names. The director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasha Kandic, has been collecting information about comparable incidents in the period between late March and mid-June 1999, with piles of corpses removed from cemeteries or graves in Kosovo and either reburied secretly or incinerated. This is not improvised wartime atrocity propaganda; it is the careful finding of patient human rights investigators after the fact.

One cannot yet say the same about another story, which concerns the mass burning of bodies in the blast furnaces of the Trepca steel plant. The eyewitnesses here are, so far, only a driver named “Branko” and a Serbian “special forces” officer named “Dusko.” They suggest that, in that terrible spring, as many as 1,500 murdered Albanian civilians were fed into the mills and furnaces of the steel complex. It would be premature to credit such unconfirmed and lurid reports, even though investigators from the Hague tribunal have already spoken about evidence being destroyed at the nearby Trepca mines. And at first, I didn’t quite believe the freezer-truck tale either.

In the relatively new atmosphere of post-Milosevic Serbia, the armed forces have charged some 183 soldiers for crimes committed in Kosovo. This might be part of an “isolated incident” strategy, or it might be the beginning of a real investigation. If the reports now in circulation prove to be true, it would mean (given the complicity of border guards, steelworks managers, traffic cops and cemetery authorities) there was a state design both to the original murders and the secret interments. Such a discovery would help constitute the emancipation of Serbia as well as of Kosovo. But it would owe very little to those who described the belated Western intervention as an exercise in imperialism based upon false reporting. We shall see.

I scanned all the cheap effusions that followed the Bob Kerrey disclosures, looking for just one mention of just one name. Ron Ridenhour. Ron was the GI who got wind of the My Lai massacre, followed up on what he’d heard, complained to the higher-ups and, when that didn’t work, blew the whistle to the press (which took about a year to print anything). He was a friend of mine and by any known test an American hero. Except that there is a strong tendency in all cultures and all societies to hate people like Ron. By his simple and principled action, he destroyed all the excuses of those who say that war is hell and “whaddayagonnado.” He was from Texas whiteboy stock and an uneducated draftee; call him a grunt–he wouldn’t have minded. His example demolishes both those who say that only combat-hardened men can judge other veterans, and those who shiftily maintain that those who weren’t actually there have no business making judgments. Ron wasn’t at My Lai, but he’d seen quite enough to know that the rumors of what had happened were probably true, and he felt obliged to check them out, and to risk his own skin to do so.

Things evidently happened rather fast in the village of Thanh Phong on February 24, 1969. Calley’s platoon in March 1968 had taken much of a day in which to really work on the villagers of My Lai. Nonetheless, even given more leisure, Bob Kerrey would not I think have raped any of the women, cut off any ears, disemboweled any babies or tortured any of the prisoners. He never went around referring to the Vietnamese as “gooks” or “slopes” or “slants.” Whenever the subject of war came up in Washington during his tenure as a senator, he was a sane and lucid voice. And I should add that I know him somewhat and that, since I’m a lowly adjunct prof at the New School, he is actually my president.

By the end of his week before the cameras, however, I began to wish that he wasn’t. If you have had more than three decades to reflect, and some weeks of advance notice on top of that, you don’t have to rise to the Ron Ridenhour standard. But you must not disgrace it. It is, I suppose, arguable that both Gerhard Klann (a man in possession of a somehow unfortunate name) and the Vietnamese witnesses are all under a misapprehension. But neither the New York Times Magazine nor 60 Minutes II gave them any chance to compare notes or concert their story. And then Kerrey, confronted by the contradictions of his own account, said the following: “The Vietnam government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were. The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort.” This was a sad improvisation of paltry lies, adding up to a lie on the Spiro Agnew scale. (As this was going to press, Kerrey told me that he’s written to the Times to withdraw at least the “collaborating” part.)

Nobody troubled to report an even worse moment at Kerrey’s press conference, which occurred when the invaluable Amy Goodman asked him about the command responsibility for war crimes borne by the Nixon-Kissinger architects of the aggression. (He was, after all, under orders in a “free-fire zone” to treat all civilians as potential cadavers and all cadavers as part of the enemy “body count”; he did accept a citation for carrying out this standing policy.) I can appreciate that Kerrey might not have wanted to seem to shift responsibility; the Ridenhour standard makes it plain that you can’t be ordered to commit crimes against humanity. However, such a standard must not be twisted for the purposes of moral relativism. Kerrey answered Goodman’s inescapable question by focusing entirely on his own need to “get well.” He thus excused himself–and his political “superiors.”

The date of the “firefight” is almost unbearable to contemplate. February 24, 1969, is about a month after Nixon took the oath of office. It’s about two months after he asked Henry Kissinger to be his National Security Adviser. It’s about three months after the South Vietnamese military junta withdrew precipitately from the Paris peace negotiations. And it’s about four months after the Nixon campaign made a covert approach to that same junta in order to incite it to do so, and to take out an illegal and treasonous mortgage on another four years of war, as well as to subvert an American election. (For still more evidence of this historic crime, see most recently Robert Mann’s A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent Into Vietnam, published by Basic Books.) One must of course sympathize with Kerrey’s pain. Only a few weeks after Thanh Phong, Kerrey lost a healthy limb to Nixon’s sick design. But even the most tentative judgment requires that we give moral priority to the more than 20,000 US servicemen who died after the sabotage of the Paris talks, and to the uncountable number of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who were immolated as a result of the same despicable policy.

We should also abandon easy nonjudgmental relativism and give moral priority to men like Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta. These three were flying over My Lai in their helicopter on March 16, 1968, and saw Charlie Company butchering the inhabitants with no “enemy” in sight. Thompson not only grounded his chopper between the remaining civilians and his fellow Americans, he drew his weapon and told the murderers to back off. This was no impulsive gesture; he took some civilians away with him and then returned. Andreotta (who was killed three weeks later) found a small child in one of the corpse-choked ditches and managed to save him. Exactly thirty years after the atrocity, Thompson, Colburn and–posthumously–Andreotta were awarded the Soldier’s Medal in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It’s the highest award you can get for an action that doesn’t involve engaging “the enemy.” There was no mention of their awkward bravery in the recent coverage, either, though as far as was possible, these three men lived up to one of our current dopey mantras, which is to “leave no child behind.”

If Kerrey wishes he could say the same, rather than have left a pile of children behind him, then he has missed several opportunities to do so. His official statement was entirely about himself. It did not in fact come clean about what happened. And it did not contain one word of contrition for the action, or of sympathy for the victims. It was also internally inconsistent in other ways. The war, he said, hadn’t become unpopular until 1969. Whatever this was supposed to mean, it didn’t explain his accepting a Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on May 14, 1970, in a ceremony that he now claims he knew was a tawdry and stagy bid for public opinion, and in the immediate aftermath of the assault on Cambodia and the killings of lawful protesters at Kent State and Jackson State.

Talking of universities, I was ashamed and disgusted to read the statement put out by the authorities at the New School. Here it is in full: “The Board of Trustees of New School University gives its unqualified support to Bob Kerrey. It is hard for most of us to imagine the horrors of war. War is hell. Traumatic events take place and their terrible effects may last a lifetime. We should all recognize the agony that Bob has gone through and must continue to deal with. We should also recognize that Bob’s heroism and integrity have been demonstrated on many occasions. The Board of Trustees stands solidly behind him.”

I try to teach English to humorous and intelligent graduates at this place. I could and will use this pathetic text–signed by John Tishman and Philip Scaturro, respectively chairman of the board and chancellor–as a case study in subliterate euphemism. (“What about Bob?” Leave no cliché behind!) But it is worse than it looks. Notice the insistence that only Kerrey’s feelings count. And notice the insinuation that wartime actions are above moral distinction or discrimination. The New School, founded by some antimilitarist defectors from the then-conformist Columbia University at the end of the First World War, became the host campus for dozens of anti-Nazi refugee scholars in the succeeding decades. It gave podiums to Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt, in lecture rooms where the nature of political evil was thoroughly discussed. It still runs democracy programs from Kosovo to South Africa. Its student body is multinational and always has been. A word or two about the slaughtered Vietnamese might not have been out of place. But this graceless little handout didn’t even refer to them. Unrepudiated, the statement is a direct insult to everybody at the school and a surreptitious invitation to a creepy kind of secondhand complicity in murder.

I’ve no wish to hurt Kerrey’s feelings unduly, but it ill becomes him to act as if he’s facing a firing squad while he’s being made the object of apparently limitless empathy. The truth of the matter is that I can’t guess what these “many occasions” of “heroism and integrity” have been. (I’m assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the New School authorities aren’t counting the Thanh Phong massacre.) He was a fairly decent senator, as I’ve already said. But he showed then, as he shows now, a pronounced tendency to have things both ways. Like the Moynihans and the Gores, he was fond of privately denouncing Clinton as a crook and a liar and a thug, and then casting the ultimate vote in his favor. He told me in the week of the impeachment trial that he was determined to vote to convict Clinton for obstruction of justice, adding rather irrelevantly that it “wouldn’t do him any harm” in his home state of Nebraska. And then, maybe when he remembered that he’d steered the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee through one of the greatest fundraising bonanzas in history, he thought better of it. “They all do it,” of course, but then they needn’t expect moist tributes for their bravery.

And yet–they don’t all do it. Think again of Ridenhour, Thompson, Colburn, Andreotta–names that are barely known, names of men who would have been ashamed to leave a ditchful of women and children behind them, or to watch such a ditch being filled and say and do nothing. And think of what a great wall we’d have to build if we intended to inscribe all the Indochinese names. There’s no possible repair or apology that could measure up to such a vast crime. But this must not mean a culture of stupid lenience and self-pity, in which the only wounds to be healed are those of the perpetrators, or of their obedient servants. How wonderful that at last we are forgiving the people of Vietnam for what we did to them.

There are war crimes and there is the crime of war, and it’s ethically null to say that only veterans can pronounce on either. (There could be no human rights tribunals or Truth and Justice Commissions if this were so.) Kerrey was not caught in an ambush or suddenly placed in a hopeless situation. He led a stealthy, deliberate incursion into other people’s homes, and the first act of those under his command was to slit the throats of an elderly couple and three children to keep them from making a sound. Kerrey now says that he didn’t enter that particular “hooch” before, during or after–something of an oversight for the team leader, whose job it was to ascertain the nature of the opposition. He says it was a moonless night; the US Naval Observatory says there was a 60 percent disk until an hour after the squad had finished up….

This horror occurred in the context of two others: the Phoenix program and Operation Speedy Express. The first has been acknowledged even by its architects as a death-squad campaign, and the second was exposed at the time, by Kevin Buckley of Newsweek, as a mass slaughter of the civilians of the Mekong Delta. In other words, it’s a bit late for armchair supporters of the war, or armchair excuse-makers, to discover indecipherable subjective mysteries where none in fact exist. Kerrey’s after-action report on Thanh Phong, for which he received a Bronze Star citation, reads, in a vile code compounded of cruelty and falsification: “21 VC KIA (BC).” That stands for twenty-one Vietcong, killed in action according to body count. Did he accept that medal as part of coming to terms with how haunting it all was?

The humanoid who came up with the shady term “Vietnam syndrome” was of course Henry Kissinger, who had every reason to try to change the subject from his own hideous responsibility. But even now, the president of a humanist academy takes up that same pseudo-neutral tone of therapy-babble and quasi-confessional healing, instead of demanding the Truth and Justice Commission that might establish what we owe to the people he killed, as well as what we could and should do about the still unpunished and still untroubled people who directed him to slay them in their sleep.

Picture a grown-up discussion in Iceland, Portugal, Italy or Poland. The question is–what to do with a confessed mass murderer? The argument veers between different kinds of therapy and incarceration, and then somebody says: Let's kill him by playing doctors, and invite some people over to watch it on TV! All eyes roll toward the ceiling.

A few years ago, I took the tour that the federal government offers visitors to its facility in Terre Haute, Indiana (see "Minority Report," May 8, 1995). This rather depressed little burg, once celebrated as the birthplace of the mighty and humane Eugene Victor Debs, had become the lucky recipient of a state subsidy for a new death row. Local boosters talked vaguely of how this might bring much-needed jobs to the area. Now I notice that there has been a recent and well-publicized shot in the arm for the town's T-shirt and souvenir concessionaires. At the time, I remember wondering what I was being reminded of. It came back to me this week. In The Adventures of Augie March, old man Einhorn warns Bellow's young protagonist that the state buys beans in bulk, and well in advance, knowing that there are some people who can be counted upon to get themselves behind bars and come and eat them.

In something like the same way, if the federal government decides to join the death-penalty racket, it will sooner or later find someone to execute. And it can also count on a number of liberals, all troubled and conscientious, to bite their lips and say that perhaps just this once wouldn't matter. "Poster boy for capital punishment" is the lazy phrase that has been employed by several columnists and commentators to describe Timothy McVeigh, as they agonize about whether the state should have the power of life and death, not to mention the right to reinforce this power by means of compassionately conservative closed-circuit TV.

If McVeigh is the poster boy for anything, he is the poster boy for the feral American right. He is opposed to "big government," yet–in his most callous and disgusting phrase–he regards dead children as "collateral damage." (Where on earth did he pick up that obscene phrase, I wonder?) He is also the poster boy for a cult of death and revenge, which takes its tune from the state murder of civilians at Waco, Texas. His last request, or the closing point in his demented program, is a demand that society put him to death without further reflection. Now we can see the same Justice Department bureaucracy that brought us Waco, as it scurries to attend to every detail of the mass murderer's wish.

The McVeigh case makes absolutely no difference at all to the arguments against the death penalty. It is not news that we have depraved people among us; nor is it news that they like to taunt society with their combination of relish and indifference. The number of victims, the heinousness of the offense–these considerations do not and should not weigh in the balance. Ted Bundy could have been snuffed for any one of his crimes, or for none of them. Many people sentenced to death have doubtless been executed for crimes they might have committed but for which they were not convicted. Many living prisoners have committed appalling and evil crimes for which any sentient person would want them to die. And many murderers have been reprieved because they were condemned for the wrong murder, quite probably just as many as have been executed for the only murder they did not in fact commit. People sternly say that at least there is no doubt about McVeigh. Does that then nullify all their previous doubts on the death penalty?

The case can be put quite simply and intelligibly. It is not possible to be in favor of the death penalty à la carte. The state either claims the right to impose this doom or it does not. Nobody will ever be in possession of enough information to determine which convict is deserving of death and which one is not. (This is what people mean when they say rather falteringly that nobody can be "god" in such matters.) Subjective considerations about atrocity and wickedness are what the judicial system exists to prevent, or at the very least to contain. The argument about "closure" and satisfaction for relatives and friends is a sinister and bogus appeal to the irrational; the same argument would support a closed-circuit torture session for the condemned man, and it would not startle me in the least if McVeigh demanded this, too, as his right and his preferred means of checking out. Would we then defer to his expressed wishes and enact a scene of cathartic cruelty?

All but the most extreme pacifists will admit of a case where it might be immoral or amoral not to use force, if not to defend oneself then to defend others. All but the most fanatical opponents of abortion will allow for certain customary "exceptions," too well known to be rehearsed by me. The most committed vegetarian may still employ a leather belt if the consequence of not doing so is that his pants fall around his knees. But capital punishment is an either/or proposition, as every law-bound society except the United States has come to realize. The state, even in time of war, may not lawfully kill its prisoners. (And the populace has no business demanding that it should.) There are even some good utilitarian arguments for this. We don't know enough about serial killers and mass murderers, and, humanely treated, these very perpetrators might live to yield useful information. The possibility of rehabilitation cannot be excluded; it occurred even with some of the Nuremberg defendants and can also be accompanied by some worthwhile disclosures.

The utilitarian argument ought not to be the deciding one, though it's interesting to notice that even the basest version of it will vanquish the emotional nonsense put forward by Attorney General Ashcroft and his closed-circuit constituency. Ashcroft found the idea of further interviews and statements from the Terre Haute death cell too repulsive to contemplate. But as I write, and in full view of a mass audience, McVeigh is orchestrating the last chords of a fascistic anthem and hypnotically persuading the whole dignified force of law and order to join in.

It was touching to see Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger back on the tube again during the Hainan confrontation, with Brzezinski recommending to Jim Lehrer’s audience that Kissinger be appointed supreme envoy and mediator for the resolution of the crisis. He wasn’t completely clear on the credentials Kissinger would be employing: his usual ones as middleman and facilitator for US corporations in China (and chief justifier of the Tiananmen Square bloodbath in 1989) or his consummate skill as a handler of touchy moments on the Asian mainland. As it happens, the last time US citizens were "held hostage" within the orbit of China, Kissinger committed yet another in a long series of the commingled crimes and blunders that have been the milestones of his career.

An extraordinary new book by Ralph Wetterhahn, The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (forthcoming from Carroll & Graf), unpacks the entirety of the official claims made at the time, to the effect that swift and decisive action saved the crew of the merchant ship Mayaguez, taught the Khmer Rouge a lesson and restored American "credibility" at the close of the Indochina debacle. The names of those lost in the recapture of the Mayaguez in May 1975 are the last names inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, so a good deal of emotional and ideological credibility is invested in the idea that they did not die in vain. As recently as last year, this triumphal myth was featured at the Republican National Convention. And now, some of the political dinosaurs of the Ford Administration, notably Donald Rumsfeld, are back in the Washington saddle with, so to speak, a vengeance. Ralph Wetterhahn now shows that:

(1) The crew of the Mayaguez was never held on Koh Tang island, the island that was invaded by the US Marine Corps.

(2) The Cambodians had announced that they intended to return the vessel, and had indeed done so while the bombardment of Cambodian territory was continuing, during which time the crew was being held unharmed on quite another island, named Rong Sam Lem. President Ford’s statement, claiming credit for the release and attributing it to the intervention on the wrong island, was knowingly false.

(3) American casualties were larger than has ever been admitted; twenty-three men were pointlessly sacrificed in a helicopter crash in Thailand that was never acknowledged as part of the operation. Thus, sixty-four servicemen were killed to free forty sailors who had already been let go, and who were not and never had been at the advertised location.

(4) As a result of the panic and disorder, three Marines were left behind alive on Koh Tang island, and later captured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. You will not find the names of Lance Cpl. Joseph Hargrove, Pfc. Gary Hall or Pvt. Danny Marshall on any memorial. For a long time they didn’t have any official existence.

It didn’t surprise me to find that Henry Kissinger had at every stage argued for the most grandiose and hysterical response, forever puffing smoke and speaking of "American will." It seems to have been his idea to drop a BLU-82 bomb on the center of Koh Tang island; a 15,000-pound device that was the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Ford and Rumsfeld were appearing at a black-tie dinner and arguing about when and how to claim the credit, and whether to interrupt the Johnny Carson show for a presidential announcement, while Kissinger, whose diplomacy with the press may be his single greatest accomplishment, was spreading the myth of a successful combined operation. The best evidence now is that the Mayaguez was seized without orders by a rogue Khmer Rouge unit, and that there was no dispute that could not have been arbitrated by simple diplomacy.

With the help of the admirable William Triplett, late of Capital Style magazine, I can add one more detail to this history of lethal fiasco. In December 1997 Triplett interviewed James Schlesinger, Ford’s Secretary of Defense, for the publication of the Vietnam Veterans of America. Schlesinger recalled two discussions that occurred at the initial National Security Council meeting on the Mayaguez. The first was a demand by Kissinger to use B-52 bombers against Cambodia at once; a suggestion that was eventually overruled. However, Secretary Schlesinger was not able to prevent a decision being made to sink all ships spotted in the vicinity of Koh Tang island. Here’s the relevant extract of the verbatim interview:

When I got [back] to the Pentagon…. I said that before any ships are sunk, our pilots should fly low over the ships and see what they could see, particularly if there were any [Mayaguez] crew members aboard. If they did see them, they were to report back immediately before doing anything. In the course of flying over the area, one of our Navy pilots called back saying that he saw "Caucasians" aboard a ship coming off Koh Tang. Or he thought he saw that. It later turned out that every member of the Mayaguez crew was on that ship….

Q: Did you apprise the White House of this ship with the Caucasians aboard?

A: Yes, indeed.

Q: And it was then that the White House said to sink it?

A: Yes, the White House said, "We told you to sink all ships, so sink it!"

By stalling for three hours, Schlesinger managed to avoid committing this atrocity.

I have just published my own book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, $22), and was intending to exploit this column to get you to buy a copy or two. It has some good Mayaguez stuff in it, as well as the goods on Chile, Bangladesh, Timor and much besides. However, I cede the laurels to Wetterhahn, whose book deserves the highest praise and the widest circulation.

"The project of Greater Serbia," I was once told by one of the many pessimistic intellectuals in Skopje, "has within it the incurable tumor of Greater Albania. And this cancer will metastasize in Macedonia." The "logic" of enclosing all contiguous minorities into one state, and mustering them all under one flag, was the essence of the Milosevic scheme until it brought destruction on itself. The urgent question now is whether the large Albanian populations living next to Albania in Kosovo and Macedonia have assimilated this lesson or have decided to try to improve on it.

Writing from Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia seven years ago [see "Minority Report," April 18, 1994] it was extremely easy to predict that before long there would be trouble between the Slavic and Albanian populations. The city is semicircled by the Sar Mountains and surmounted by an old Turkish fortress; the mountains are the frontier with Albania and Kosovo. Between 70 and 80 percent of the people of Tetovo are Albanians, and their schedule of grievances was classically nationalist, at least as adumbrated by their spokesman Menduh Thaci, whose name you will be reading again in the newspapers. (He is a kinsman of Hashim Thaci, founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose Albanian initials, UCK, have been adopted by the new guerrillas operating in the hills above Tetovo.)

Eighty percent of local state jobs were filled by Macedonian Slavs…the police were racist…the Albanian language was not properly allowed in schools and there was no Albanian university…the number of Albanian books in the national library was 150 out of 250,000 (someone had counted them)…Albanians were described as a "minority" in the Constitution, along with tiny groups like Egyptians!… On the table as we spoke lay an Albanian national flag. One could see where this was going. And one could see it, too, when interviewing Ljubco Georgievski, who was then the leader of Macedonia’s right-wing opposition party VMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) and is now Prime Minister. From his point of view, the minority was already demanding too much and demonstrating more dissatisfaction with each successive concession. This is the classic formula, where both sides feel themselves to be the endangered ones.

Since then, the idea of a Greater Albania has both advanced and receded. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees fled to Albania proper during the Serbian assault of 1999, and they were warmly received by the people of the poorest nation in Europe. (You may have noticed that people share poverty better than they share wealth.) But they were shocked to discover the sheer backwardness of the country; even the poorest Kosovars are used to ideas like telephones and paved roads. On the other hand, those Kosovars who had to make for the Macedonian border were treated with callousness by the Macedonian police, who made it obvious that they thought there were enough Albanians in their country already. And meanwhile, in Albania proper, the implosion of the ultracorrupt pro-American regime of Sali Berisha had led to a spontaneous popular uprising in which every armory in the country was looted. Those weapons did not stay "in country" for long; they went across to Kosovo and helped give birth to the KLA/UCK. Thus, at just the point when Albania itself was weakest, and at just the stage when many neighboring Albanians might have settled for "autonomy" if they could get it, the militants were in a position to quite literally call the shots. And it is also the militants who find it easiest to raise remittances and volunteers from Albanians living in exile overseas.

In case this complexity isn’t enough for you, there is a further metastasis that might be worth keeping in mind. The Slavic Macedonian language is a close cousin of Bulgarian; irredentists in both countries consider Macedonia to be part of Greater Bulgaria. The symbol of the VMRO party is the Bulgarian lion. Bulgaria itself, in a unique manner, announces that it recognizes Macedonia as a state but not as a nation. (In 1991 Bulgaria changed the date of its national day to March 3, the anniversary of the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878. That treaty, which reflected pan-Slavic triumphalism after the defeat of the Ottomans, awarded almost all of historic Macedonia to Bulgaria. The Great Powers then became nervous about the idea of Bulgaria dominating everything between the Danube and the Aegean, and reversed the decision at the Congress of Berlin the following July. But some Bulgarians are nostalgic still. Between 1941 and 1944 they managed to regain northern Greece with German support.)

At present, Bulgaria is more than anything determined to become a member of the European Union. It is thus on its best behavior and officially has no truck with border disputes or minority scuffles. But if the fighting in Macedonia is not contained, and the Slav majority begins to feel unloved by the West, or gets the idea that it is being asked to make concessions to Albanians under duress, then there will be another external factor to be considered. And the more the identity of a two-nation Macedonia is disputed, the closer it comes to involving both Greece and Turkey, who have enough by way of casus belli as it is. It was also interesting to see that the new helicopter gunships deployed by the Macedonian air force in Tetovo were a "gift" from Ukraine.

Just as before, one is open-mouthed at the startled looks and frowning expressions on the faces of our so-called statesmen. Absolutely everything comes to them as a complete and utter surprise. The Macedonian question is one of the oldest and most toxic issues on the international agenda; it is famously intractable and notoriously destabilizing. Yet there they go again, the diplomats and mediators, scampering to improvise a micro-solution to a macro-problem that was never a question of if, but only of when. Macedonia was the first Balkan territory on which American soldiers set foot, though you would never know that from reading the press or listening to the State and Defense departments. Here is one of the many crises from which a missile shield cannot protect anyone.

When Rudyard Kipling’s British soldier caught his first glimpse of Burmese beauty, on the road to Mandalay, "I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,/An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:/Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud–/Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd–/Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!"

The lines came back to me when I read the recent statement from the architectural and cultural spokesman of the Taliban, who dismissed all the fuss about the destruction of Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage by saying that images made of mud were a blasphemous insult to the one true faith. He probably doesn’t care much for reading (and the Bamiyan sculptures were cut from the standing rock, not fashioned from terra cotta, like some of the exhibits in the despoiled national museum), but he would undoubtedly have been surprised to know that he was quoting Kipling, who also had some harsh words to say about the cruelty of Afghan women in wartime. An Afghan woman today, mind you, would not need to be caught kissing a whiskery British conscript in order to be publicly flogged, or stoned to death. Leaving her home unaccompanied would be enough, or failing to adjust her shroud so that it covered every part of her face and hair.

And it is true that there has been less emotion about this than about the desecration of the ancient statues of the Buddha. On the face of it, such pseudo-aestheticism is grotesque. However, I freely admit to feeling worse–more desolated and more drained–at the destruction of the Old Bridge at Mostar, and of the National Library of Sarajevo, than by any other events in the Bosnian war. A number of Bosnians felt even more intensely, and risked or gave their lives in an attempt to prevent those cultural obliterations. During the Greek war of independence, Turkish troops occupying the Parthenon were surrounded, and began to break open the walls to get hold of the lead shielding and melt it down into bullets. The appalled Greek besiegers offered to send a supply of ammunition if the Turks would refrain from damaging the temple.

In these cases, as with Afghanistan, there is no real contradiction between asserting the value of artifacts and the value of people, because the desecrators of the first are the murderers or the oppressors of the second. But the question is not always as seamless as that. The vile dictatorship that now rules Burma is never happier than when opening another vast Buddhist temple, testimony to its own piety and nationalism. Saddam Hussein, when he is not sponsoring giant new mosques, is engaged in reconstructing the ruins of Babylon nearer to his own heart’s desire. In the underdeveloped interior of the Ivory Coast, at Yamoussoukro, I once saw the monstrous basilica, modeled on St. Peter’s in Rome but slightly larger, that President Houphouët-Boigny raised as an exorbitant monument to his own sanctity. There seemed nothing wrong with it that a few tons of dynamite would not have put right.

Iconoclasm, which in Greek means no more or less than idol-smashing, is not an insult in our vernacular, if only because it honors the early Christian militants who would break the polytheistic statuary of pagan Rome. Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell pulled the roofs off the monasteries, shattered the stained glass and splintered the graven images, and, though their motives were not entirely pure, they did help safeguard the Reformation. (There has hardly been a sighting of a weeping or bleeding Virgin in England since.) When the Spanish Civil War began, the peasantry made the first order of business the pillaging and burning of the churches–though sparing Gaudi’s work in Catalonia–and it is a fact that Spain has never again succumbed to the same degree of sheer clerical tyranny as existed before 1936.

In many instances, those who fetishize holy objects or sacred places are the very ones who exhibit the most depraved indifference to human life. The Serbian claim to Kosovo, even if it was prosecuted most recently by secular materialist barbarians, rested quite largely on the veneration of shrines and stones and on the assertion that this was Serbia’s "Jerusalem." (Actually, it was more like Serbia’s West Bank, where the occupiers wanted the land without the people. Archeology became a warrant for ethnic cleansing.) And just take a steady look at the present insanity in Jerusalem. Three faiths–each of them equal glimpses of the same essential untruth–are quite prepared for slaughter in order to assert authority over ephemeral, man-made structures. This is highly amusing, of course, because it shows that the Believers regard their god as a moral cretin, unable to distinguish his vast and magnificent Creation from a few shoddy altars and artifacts put together by clumsy mammals. But it’s distinctly less amusing to reflect that people would gladly take the life of another in order to advance the claim that, say, Mohammed’s horse left a hoofprint in the rock on its way up to paradise.

The Crimean War was initiated by the imperial Russian insistence on arbitrating an "interfaith" dispute between Christian factions over the key to a door in Jerusalem; it dragged in half of Europe before it was over and did almost as much damage as the Crusades. Judaism–which maintains that Jehovah was too stupid to know his own unless tipped off by a smear of blood–permits state-sponsored Israeli rabbis to argue in public that the Palestinians ought to go the way of the Amalekites. Many credulous and sentimental Westerners, I suspect, were upset by the destruction of the Afghan Buddha figures because they believe that so-called Eastern religion is more tender-hearted and less dogmatic; to them I would recommend a reading of Brian Victoria’s superb book Zen at War, which shows how Buddhist discipline and obedience became the semi-official ideology of Japanese imperialism in its most vicious stage. So–is nothing sacred? Only respect for human life and culture, which requires no divine sanction, and no priesthood to inculcate it. The foolish veneration of holy places and holy texts remains a principal obstacle to that simple realization.

During his closing weeks in office, Bill Clinton refused a plea, signed by many leading lawyers and civil libertarians, that he declare a moratorium on capital punishment. The moratorium enjoys quite extensive support among Republicans and is gaining ground with public opinion; its imposition would undoubtedly have given a vital second chance to defendants and convicts who are in dire need of it. Clinton waved the petition away. So I think we can safely dispense with the argument being put forward by some of his usual apologists–that his sale of indulgences in The Pardoner’s Tale was motivated by his own fellow feeling for those trapped in the criminal justice system. His fellow feeling is for fellow crooks, now as ever.

In those same closing weeks, while he was claiming to be too busy to address the new opening in North Korea (no money in that famine-stricken state), Clinton purported to be working tirelessly and down to the wire on a Middle East settlement. It appeared that he couldn’t see enough of the doomed mediocrity Ehud Barak. But now we know–since there most certainly was no movement on any "settlement"–what they were talking about. Barak and others like him were also facing retirement from politics and wanted to remember those who might make that retirement a little more comfortable. (Perhaps you noticed that the plans for the Clinton library in Arkansas include a 5,000-square-foot penthouse, big enough for one man to have his wife sleep over, if she wasn’t content with the two palaces somehow acquired during an eight-year hitch on a civil-service salary.)

There are two very serious implications arising from this. First, did Clinton franchise his office as President and convert public foreign policy into private donations? Second, does he now intend to imply that if people don’t like his pardon policy, they should blame the Jews and Israelis? The clear suggestion of the vast, mendacious Op-Ed piece that he wrote for the New York Times on February 18 is that it was this latter faction, and not any consideration of personal gain, that tipped the scale for Marc Rich and Pincus Green–labor exploiters, frauds and profiteers from the Ayatollah and apartheid.

My e-mail traffic and my antennae all tell me that the point has not been lost on those who notice scandals that feature Jewish names. Secret deals, underhanded bargains, occult political influence and international finance–I don’t have to draw you a picture. I admit with embarrassment that I was almost relieved to see the terrific article in the Washington Post of February 25, demolishing in detail all the falsifications contained in Clinton’s original piece. Relieved, that is, to see that it was written by Morris Weinberg Jr. of the old firm of Zuckerman, Spaeder, who led the prosecution of Rich in the first place. Has it come to this?

Don’t omit to notice, either, the studied insult offered by Clinton to the black community. Do I look like a crook? Hey, I’m off to Harlem! This is another variation on the old theme that his sexual thuggery, family dysfunction, hysterical lying and chronic self-pity make him an African-American. Who could confect a more gross libel on a whole people? It’s made even worse by Clinton’s breathtaking invention of a boyhood spent walking the Harlem streets; this to follow his earlier falsehoods about having stuck up for Jackie Robinson against the rednecks and about having sat with his friends at the back of Arkansas buses in solidarity with Rosa Parks. (He offered that choice fabrication at the very ceremony where Ms. Parks was at last invested with the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.)

I offer this piece of inductive reasoning. Clinton was notoriously legacy-conscious. He also possesses a very strong instinct about what can and what cannot be made to "fly" with the press. He must have known he was running a considerable risk by the promiscuity of his pardon policy. Ergo, it must have been worth the risk. Ergo, it must be something very squalid indeed; probably at least as squalid as it looks. But this is nothing when compared with the degradation that he continues to inflict on the rest of society, loudly insisting as he wallows in the muck that others be dragged down into it with him. It’s absurd to talk about "moving on" while this persists. The only way to move on, or to achieve "closure," is to bring this person and his accomplices to justice at long last and to learn from the ways in which they so long evaded it.

Talking of another character whose role in The Pardoner’s Tale was so ethically uplifting, I have received a freshet of inquiries about Elie Wiesel [see "Wiesel Words," February 19]. Many readers were astounded to hear that he had been a zealous supporter of Menachem Begin’s Irgun in the 1940s, some doubted it, and others challenged me.

This confusion arises partly, I suspect, from the failure of those who bought his memoirs (glutinously titled All Rivers Run to the Sea) to undertake the daunting task of reading them. But Wiesel there gives an account of his days working on the newspaper Zion in Kamf, an organ of the Irgun based in Paris in the late 1940s. With the easy dishonesty that marks everything he writes, Wiesel spends a paragraph or two affecting not to have known this paper’s real views. But he then seems to forget this excuse (he admits to knowing from the start that its owner was a Jabotinsky militant) and devotes a long passage to hailing the mobilizations of the Irgun and the Lehi/Stern Gang, and to bewailing the Altalena affair. This was the famous ship, carrying weapons for Begin’s private militia, that was fired upon and sunk by Israeli officers, including Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin, who feared that the armory would be used against Jews as well as Arabs. The ultraright’s loathing of Ben-Gurion for issuing the order is given the fullest expression by Wiesel, who terms it "murder and treason." Since the forces of Irgun and Lehi had until recently been professing open admiration for Mussolini and Hitler, it’s easy to see that Wiesel’s support for the extremist wing in Israeli politics is not of recent date.

Are the Clintons better off than they were eight years ago? The evidence appears to point to a resounding yes. So why do they seem to resent the question? Probably because only a full-dress Congressional investigation could establish quite how this came to be and exactly how much better off they are. And are we all better off as well? It depends, as Bill Cosby’s grandmother famously said while solving the half-full, half-empty distinction, on whether you’re pouring or drinking.

In Korea this past fall, after the visit of Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang, expectation was high that a presidential visit would follow and that perhaps the long and lethal confrontation on the peninsula would begin to dissipate somewhat. This would have had an importance well beyond the local: North Korea is the central exhibit in the Rumsfeldian worldview and the main pretext for the "Star Wars" fantasy incubated by Reagan, preserved by Clinton and Gore, and now approaching consummation with Bush. To defuse this and, incidentally, to begin the emancipation of the North Koreans from their petrified party-state, would have been a "legacy" action worthy of the name. But Clinton, with several weeks still to go, announced that he just could not find the time.

Now we know what was keeping him so busy in his closing months. He was working like a beaver on arranging his own immunity, on trading pardons for kickbacks and on asset-stripping the White House. He was also working on the lying cover stories that would justify these things. Only in the latter respect has his usual luck failed him, and I suppose that this is because he no longer has the bodyguard of hacks and spinners who were retained at public expense to defend him on previous occasions. Sidney Blumenthal–whose own defenders once accused me of denouncing him in order to sell a small book I hadn’t even written–is too busy justifying his own $650,000 advance to spare much time to put a nice gloss on the embarrassment of the Riches. And so Clinton was reduced to red-faced and pathetic spluttering before an audience of bond traders in Boca Raton, unable to face the simplest questions and unable any longer to hide behind ludicrous claims, such as that he was our first black President, still less the friend of those who "work hard and play by the rules." He sucks up to the fat cats; they wrinkle their noses and hand him the check using a pair of tongs. Perfect.

To anyone with eyes to see, the Clinton presidency always had the look and feel of a shakedown enterprise–the transfer of the Arkansas racketeering style to the more lush and lucrative terrain of Washington, DC. "Nice to see you," the eventually discovered video has him saying to Roger Tamraz, a man who raises eyebrows in the Beirut "business community," when this choice person appears at a White House coffee morning. We don’t know what he said to James Riady, front man for Suharto, when Riady gave him a very thick and sleek envelope in the back of a limousine, because although he admits to the meeting and to the money, the master of the briefing book and the king of detail has no real-time recall of the actual conversation. Other influence-peddlers for the Chinese had virtual passes to the Executive Mansion; Dick Morris was employed there under a code name while helping to concert a fantastic circumvention of all known laws on campaign finance.

The "privacy" defense was a very ingenious way of fending off inquiries into this, and it worked, too, when Clinton was accused of using campaign-finance cupcakes as personal comfort women. How nice it was to see that Walter Kaye, the New York moneyman who bought Miss Lewinsky her internship, also contributed some furniture and even paid for Mrs. Clinton’s victory ball at the Mayflower in January. (No hard feelings, eh Walter?)

The First Lady has taken to the privacy tactic like a duck to water, first saying that what happened in the publicly owned Oval Office and Lincoln Bedroom was confidential, and nobody’s business, and then agreeing to write about it herself at the rate of $1 million per year of occupancy. Obviously, it became tiring to the Clintons to raise money from sleazebags only for their own re-election. The time comes, as come it has, when you weary of public-spirited effort and want a little pot of dough for your own pretty needs.

In much the same way, Jesse Jackson feels entitled to use the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow to succor the unintended and inconvenient results of his own safe-sex "ministry"; hell, a preacher can’t be expected to live for others all the damn time. (What I like about the Reverend is his lack of hypocrisy; he told Clinton to keep lying, to make a pious and prayerful face, and to pay off the inconvenient chick with other people’s money. At last–a Christian who really practices what he preaches!)

A proper investigation of the Lewinsky matter, and of the Revlon money that was used to try and help condition the testimony of Lewinsky and of Webster Hubbell, would have exposed the nature of this lawless and corrupt White House several years before it exposed itself, and in time to do something about it. But a majority of the American left decided that it really did not want to know, and that the "privacy" defense was a valid one. Some things, indeed, were so "private" that they justified the invocation of "executive privilege." Not even that flagrant contradiction was enough to unsettle the loyalists. By the time Al Gore had his tear-stained confrontation with Clinton last November, it was all too late. And he, like everyone else, was calmly told that if he didn’t like it, it was just too bad. Clinton already had, as LBJ used to relish saying, the man’s pecker in his pocket. For good measure, the Democratic National Committee is turned over to Terry McAuliffe, the President’s ex-mansion hunter, who brings the fresh, breezy atmosphere of Teamsters Union ethics to this already rather raddled outfit. So it seems that the Clinton legacy is secure, and that most liberals can safely claim to have been a part of it.

Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24.

As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel’s internal debates…. My critics have their conception of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.

Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel’s internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim above is only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present because Jerusalem is at stake, and "the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives within me." (Again the modesty.) There are, sad to say, serpents in Wiesel’s internal Eden, and they too must be patronized:

That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.

"Might wish." "Ties." "Understandable." "Third holiest." Even these lordly and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he announces that the city is "mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible," which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab–these being at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population–quite a strong claim on the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city is mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even if they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that Jerusalem dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home."

This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late historian and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as far back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of course the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the entire problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel’s negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don’t claim to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)

In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel’s largest Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not to Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad quest for purity:

Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within the bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso to rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it does not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden and put your boots on her dining-room table.

Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago "adorned with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif, built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted cypresses and palm trees." He’s wasting his time on Wiesel, who says that Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin’s thugs, and who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying that they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by disputing their right even to feel nostalgia for it.

In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. "I don’t think we should even comment," he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt "sadness– with Israel, and not against Israel." For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.

As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will become Israel’s prime minister. If you recall, he occupied West Beirut in September 1982, after the assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister Bashir Gemayel, on the announced and highly believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would need protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then sent into their undefended camps the most extreme faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the dirty work of these notorious fascists with flares during the night, and rear-guard cover during the day, for thirty-six hours before having them escorted out in triumph and thanked for their work. In other words, the bulk of US overseas military aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with hands on hip, in belt and boots and steel helmet and binoculars, and saw a mound of human corpses rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome, the soil has been manured by the beautiful thoughts of Elie Wiesel.

Truffling through the frothy and tawdry scraps of pre-inaugural Zeitgeist, I found this on the front page of the Washington Post's Style section:

"The heart will be the favorite organ of the Bush administration," says Marshall Wittmann of the conservative Hudson Institute. "That's to distinguish it from the favorite organ of the Clinton administration."

Wittmann, formerly of the Christian Coalition, helpfully explained that among religious conservatives the term "heart" has become a friendly synonym for the more controversial "soul," and that this explains President Bush's frequent recourse to it–as in "Jesus changed my heart" or, more controversially, "The senators, if they are objective, they'll take a look at Senator Ashcroft's heart and his record and they'll confirm him."

Don't be fooled. The giveaway is in the comparison between the two throbbing items in the original excerpt and the strong subliminal connection between them. I think I can say I saw this coming during my controversial live stand-up act at the Washington Improv last year, where I was narrowly beaten by Senator Joseph Lieberman (who cheated by using cue cards) in the run-off. The trick consists, having lulled the audience somewhat by a snatch of song and a few consensual gags, in making them substitute the work "d**k" for the word "h***t" in any familiar context. You should do this, ideally, by citing or reciting the original and by letting them do the rest. Thus:

"I left my heart in San Francisco"

"Heartbreak Hotel"

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains"

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (scattered titters by now, or you're dead)

Heart of Darkness

"Two hearts that beat as one"

The Heart of the Matter

Jack of Hearts (mirth, mounting to spontaneous bursts of laughter)

The Heart Has Its Reasons

Gary Hart

"I * NY" (or "My Lab/Apso/honor-student daughter")

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

"Don't Go Breaking My Heart" (all rise; prolonged and stormy applause)

Then a few grace notes about the heartland, about speaking from the heart, about your heartfelt appreciation–don't overdo it, or that's where your heartaches will begin–and you can exit in a pelting tempest of undergarments.

Heart like a wheel; hearts afire; total eclipse of the heart; heart to heart; artichoke heart…it's of course utterly puerile to go on like this…be still, my heart; Kind Hearts and Coronets; heart bypass surgery; quadruple heart bypass surgery; heart transplant; heart murmur; heartburn; absence makes the heart grow fonder…

Actually, I dreamed up this ridiculous game with my dearest friend, Martin Amis, after a heavy dinner; we liked it for its pointlessness alone. And then, as so often happens, a point began to occur. Did Jimmy Carter not say that he had committed adultery but only in his heart? Did Ronald Reagan not say that while the evidence told him he had sold heavy weapons to the Ayatollah, his heart told him he hadn't? (According to various toadies, Clinton's heart told him the same thing, even more paradoxically, about not having "really" had carnal relations with Ms. Lewinsky.) When Woody Allen was upbraided for setting up housekeeping with his adopted daughter, he gave the shrug to end all shrugs and said, "The heart wants what it wants." In Vietnam, a "pacification" officer, wearying of bleeding-dick talk, exclaimed, "Grab 'em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow." The whole joke started, on mature reflection, to become a trifle eerie.

"Stylistically, it's very evangelical to talk about what's on your heart," Wittmann of the Hudson Institute continues breezily. "It's nothing scriptural, but it's a way of saying someone's a good man, almost a spiritual reference." And it would of course have to be a male reference, like Braveheart, say, or Kipling's encomium out of Bunyan to Teddy Roosevelt: "Great-Heart." Even the Nixonoids used to say, "You can't lick our Dick"; he was a hand-on-heart type if ever I saw one. (There were even those hooligans who yelled "Dick Nixon!–before he Dicks you.")

In the presidential "debates," Bush protested that Gore, by stressing the GOP emphasis on tax cuts over child health insurance, had impugned his heart. Gore couldn't back away fast enough from these fighting words. "It's not a statement about his heart. I believe his statement that he has a good heart." Typical boy behavior. "In the foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart"; "Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods/And he hardened Pharaoh's heart"; "faint heart never won fair lady"; Dick the Lion-Dick; "Hearts of Oak"; My heart's in the Highlands–if you aren't careful the whole canon changes shape before your eyes.

Riposting to Wittmann, Jackson Lears of Rutgers University argued that though "the evangelical ethos of the 19th century became known as the religion of the heart," it was not axiomatically conservative. Indeed, by valorizing "the rule of the heart," it contributed to movements such as abolitionism. Probably he and Wittmann are both right; by signaling "soul" through the medium of "heart," and thus placating the believers, Bush is also gratefully de-emphasizing the cerebrum. Anyway, it will teach me not to make incautious jokes in the future. When Martin and I kicked off that fatuous postbanquet party game, we never dreamed of a President all of whose brains appear to be in his heart, a President who is seconded and held in place by a cardiac-arrest patient named Dick, who (as ill luck would have it) is only a heartbeat away…

The coronation of Colin Powell will probably not be interrupted by any of the specific questions about his mediocre and sometimes sinister past that were so well phrased by David Corn ["Questions for Powell," January 8/15]. The political correctness of the nomination, in both its "rainbow" and "bipartisan" aspects, will see to that. Powell has often defined himself as "a fiscal conservative and a social liberal," which also happens to be the core identity of the Washington press corps. Set against this, what is the odd war crime, or cover-up of same, or deception of a gullible Congress? Time to move on.

To move on, to be exact, to the militarization of the State Department and the triumph of the military over civilian control. The most important moment in Powell’s career as a Republican came in the first months of the first Clinton Administration, when he organized and led a political mutiny against the Commander in Chief and saw the mutiny succeed. It’s "legacy" time, so everybody feels entitled to be stupidly lenient, but no consideration of Clinton as a President is complete until we take the full measure of his surrender on this critical point.

He was elected, you may remember, having promised to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the military and having promised to lift the embargo on the supply of arms to Bosnia. Nor were these mere "fine print" promises: The first had been front and center in his fundraising and campaigning, and the second had involved comparisons with the Final Solution, of the sort that can’t easily be taken back. Within a few months of his swearing the oath that he was to break in so many ways, Clinton receded from both these pledges. In both instances, he caved in to a political revolt orchestrated by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Could I put you to the trouble of rereading that brief last sentence? The first cold war presidency began with Harry Truman putting the military in its constitutional place on matters foreign and domestic, firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur for trying to run a private war in Korea and telling the armed forces to desegregate and to do it right away. The first post-cold war presidency began with an abject surrender to the brass, on the treatment of an unpopular minority and on an important foreign policy question. The comparison is even more appalling when you remember that Truman did not base his two best decisions on election pledges.

Colin Powell would not have been able to enjoy his long career as a butt-kisser and timeserver had Truman not told the Joint Chiefs to obey orders and desegregate. However, weeks after Clinton was elected and eight days before he was inaugurated, Powell appeared before the Naval Academy and enjoined his audience to consider resigning if they opposed an end to the ban on gays in the military. Not long before that, he had written and signed an Op-Ed in the New York Times flatly opposing military intervention in the Balkans (at least on the Bosnian side; the existing arms embargo already favored Milosevic and Tudjman).

Clinton, of course, could not buckle fast enough. He allowed himself–and his pathetic Defense Secretary, Les Aspin–to be humiliated in public on visits to United States warships [see "Minority Report," April 12, 1993]. He left the Bosnians at the mercy of Milosevic for two crucial years. He allowed the USS Harlan County to be scared away from Haiti by a handful of CIA-financed goons. And he came up with the contemptible policy of "don’t ask, don’t tell," where the police questioning and invigilation and intimidation still went on–even increased–and where volunteer servicemen and -women were told their only hope lay in lying.

Not even this was enough to satisfy Powell. On the day of his retirement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was humbly asked by Clinton what he thought of Aspin, and Powell replied that the poor sap had forfeited the confidence of the armed forces. The President, Powell calmly said, might want to consider replacing him. No sooner suggested than done. This would qualify as gross insubordination in any self-respecting democracy (Powell should not have been asked; neither should he have told), but remember who the President was. It was a little afterward that Clinton decided to ignore all reports of what was impending in Rwanda and to employ the US veto at the UN to forestall any pre-emptive action. This, too, was done to gratify the reactionary and military noninterventionists. (The disgrace was compounded by Clinton’s diplomatic support for the later French intervention, on the side of their client Rwandan murderers.)

Now we enter upon a moment when a gigantic decision has to be made about the building of a suicidally dangerous and stupid "National Missile Defense" system. And the State Department, which has the job of overseeing the numerous arms-control treaties to which the United States is a signatory, has been annexed by a former professional military man with a long record of shady politicization of the armed forces and their role. The selling of Star Wars will be a great deal easier with such a man at Foggy Bottom and with the press and Congress already predisposed to eat out of his "inclusive" palm and lick his highly polished "inclusive" boots. This is actually the continuation of Clintonism by other means, a banana republic garnished with identity politics. (If Toni Morrison and Arthur Miller could be induced to fawn and coo about "our first black President," what can they say about our first black Caesar?)

This is the last column of mine that will appear in the Clinton era. Eight years ago, I concluded that the man was a pathological liar, filthy about women, corrupt about money, desperate to please authority, a serf alike to powerful interests and to opinion polls. His legacy is "managed competition," "don’t ask, don’t tell" and "faith-based" care for the losers. He didn’t mean it about the era of big government being "over," as Powell and others are about to demonstrate, using his same selective principles. It’s been a nasty interlude between the Bushes. The incurables among you can now set to work, to make Bush seem a dismal interlude between two wonderful Clintons.