Saturday, February 8, 2003
Salon.com has an interview with Camille Paglia a friend pointed me to. I thought I'd take out a few snippets and give my impressions. There are a few gaps here - this is not a cut and paste of the whole interview. You may want to read the whole thing at the link above, first.
"The foreign press has asked me repeatedly to comment on Iraq, and I've said I don't think it's right as an American citizen to do that. I said I should reserve my criticisms of the administration for home consumption," said Paglia. "That's why I'm talking to you now."
Baghdad Sean take note. Credit to Paglia at the start.
But most members of the current administration seem to have little sense that there's an enormous, complex world beyond our borders. The president himself has never traveled much in his life. They seem to think the universe consists of America and then everyone else -- small-potatoes people who can be steamrolled.
Hmmm... this is dangerously close to being just a more nuanced form of the rabid ad hominem so much of the anti-war crowd spews. Still, she seems to recover a bit later, but I continue to bristle at how quick the Bush critics are to assume that Bush and everyone around him are so naive about the world of international relations. I just don't believe it.
And I'm absolutely appalled at the lack of acknowledgment of the cost to ordinary Iraqi citizens of any incursion by us, especially aerial bombardment. Most of the Iraqi armed forces are pathetically unprepared to respond to a military confrontation with us.
Well good! They'll lose faster and with fewer casualties. This is a bad thing?
There's just no way that Saddam's threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don't need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations.
A false comparison. It's a different world. The ability of less advanced, less industrialized nations to do great harm is far different today than it was 60 years ago. Further, the military threat is not the only problem. See my article below.
As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.
From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half -- two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence -- that the president's own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.
Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.
Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut onboard who had bombed Iraq 20 years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology -- of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you're doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he'd call it off.
Please. Don't do that. Don't bring superstitious omens into a situation that calls for deep, cool thinking. Shall we check the entrails of a few pigeons first before we set out? Yeesh.
The Bush administration is not known for thinking twice -- they pride themselves on their certitude, a certitude that strikes many as arrogant.
I'd call them parochial rather than arrogant. Last summer, Bush's tone was certainly arrogant, but he's quieted his rhetoric since then. I don't know who got to him, his father or the elders around him. Talk about destabilizing the world! "Regime change" and "You're with us or against us" and so on -- impatient, off-the-cuff rants that tore the fabric of international relations.
I'd call it more an attempt to be "Reaganesque." An attempt to give the country a little backbone in a difficult time.
I think that Bush administration officials are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their positions, although their biblical piety is cloying. I think they do intend the best for the American people. It's not just a covert grab for oil to placate corporate interests.
Hmm...this is starting to sound like a reasoned, consientious position, not the ad hominem that plagues so much of the debate. Good job.
But I also think that their current course of action in Iraq is disastrous for long-term world safety. After 9/11, what should have been perfectly clear is that we need a long, slow process of reeducating the peoples of the world, to try to convince Muslims of the fundamental benevolence of American intentions. And we had most of the world behind us in the days after 9/11, except for the Muslim extremists.
Shaaa...that'll work. We need some real, long-term fundamental changes for that to happen, and I'm sorry, but most of those changes lie on the shoulders of the cultures spawning the hate.
My own belief is that terror relies on Western passivity, and is galvanized by Western weakness. That's what the 1990s showed. But of course, war is awful, unpredictable and deeply dangerous. Her preferred option - giving inspectors months more time in order to get a global consensus - strikes me as naive. It assumes the good will of countries like France and Russia. I don't. And it assumes that we can somehow dampen Islamist extremism by inaction or soothing words. Sorry, but the 90s proved that strategy wrong. We ducked and weaved and appeased - and the threat merely grew. A climb-down now would do more to strengthen the Islamo-fascists than any war. In fact, it would unleash a wave of terror the like of which we have not yet seen.
Back to Camille.
We desperately need the world's cooperation, from police agencies to informers. Above all, we need moderate Muslims to turn out the homicidal fanatics in their midst.
Very true, that.
Do you think the Bush administration's focus on Saddam is a diversion from this global campaign against terrorism?
The real diversion is from other global hot spots. If we get bogged down in Iraq, China might think it's a good moment to retake Taiwan. Saddam is an amoral thug, but he's not the principal danger to American security. The real problem is a shadowy, international network of young, radical Islamic men. And we have played right into their hands since last summer by coming across as a bullying world power, threatening war with Iraq and acting completely callous to the resulting human carnage and death of innocent civilians. What privileges American over Iraqi lives? Why does the chance of American casualties through random terrorism outweigh the certain reality of Iraqi devastation in a crushing invasion?
Well...yes, fighting Islamic radicals and other enemies of the United States certainly does not endear us to Islamic radicals and enemies of the United States who would certainly rather we sat back and did nothing. Now, I understand Paglia is not asking we do nothing, but take a different tack, but I submit that that tack, at this juncture would be the same as nothing - even worse.
But don't you think if Saddam were to succeed in his longtime goal of building an operational arsenal of doomsday weapons, that he would then provide an umbrella for this network of terrorists to carry out its plots against the West?
But how are we going to counter that threat? Are we going to bomb laboratories and facilities storing dangerous chemicals and release them in the air near population centers? Are we going to poison Baghdad? This is as barbarous as what we're opposing in Saddam. We need to be going in the opposite direction -- to lower global tensions. This constant uncertainty is bad for everyone. It's bad for the economy, it's bad for people's psychic health,[...]
Peace, love, dope will save the world! Sadly, we have to do something, and building a chemical or nuclear plant doesn't make you proof from bombing. There's also a bit of devious implication here. This is close to Chomsky's human shield ploy of holding out all sorts of fantastic civilian casualties (usually only imagined) in order to make th ecost of actualyl taking action sound so horrible that we are held to inaction.
We know so little about Iraq in this country. It's enormous, and yet most Americans can't even find it on the map. I love to listen to talk radio and have been doing it for years. But I'm frightened by what I'm hearing these days from commentators like Sean Hannity, whose program I listen to when I'm driving home from school. He's conservative, but I'm not -- I'm a libertarian Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader. These days I can't believe what I'm hearing, the gung-ho passion for war, the lofty sense of moral certitude, the complete obliviousness to the world outside our borders. How many people has Hannity known who aren't Americans? Has he ever been anywhere in the world? His knowledge of world history and culture seems thin at best. This is increasingly our problem as a nation -- we can't see beyond ourselves. It shows the abject failure of public education.
Uh oh, I'm no fan of rabid talk-radio (well, I listen, but I'm not a *fan*), but this is sounding like the typical leftist, "I'm smarter and more well-read than you, so I must be right." I have a feeling Paglia has no idea how much Sean Hannity knows or does not know about US or World history.
[Rep.] Charles Rangel is quite right that the burden will be borne by a lower social class. The American elite don't view military service as prestigious for their sons and daughters, whom they groom for white-collar professions. In England, however, serving in the military is part of aristocratic and royal tradition.
Although Paglia refers to "lower social class," it is worth noting that recent studies, produced since Rangel's crusade, have shown that while minorities are over-represented in the armed forces as a whole, they are slightly under-represented in front line roles. Rangel was mostly railing against the fact that no member of Congress has a child in the enlisted ranks. Military service is considered a big assist in a political career, however.
I'm going to leave off at this point as...I'm getting tired and...I think many of my reactions to the rest will, where they are critical, be a bit repetitive (you can probably figure it out by now), and where I agree I can just say that I more or less agree with what she says vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and what she says about Hollywood, the Democrats and the rest of the anti-war movement.
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