The Belgravia Dispatch: Condi's Trip to the 'Region'

February 23, 2006

Condi's Trip to the 'Region'

At least if you believe the dastardly MSM, Condi's coming up empty this trip. In Egypt. And now in Saudi. And, of course, we knew where Iran stood on this issue...

B- so far. Next stop, UAE! Maybe they agree to cut off aid to Hamas if they get the port deal!

P.S. The port hullaballoo is embarrassing. To us, that is. From Schumer to Hewitt, not in recent memory have I witnessed such a pitiable tempest in a teapot, such absurd hyperbole, such gross xenophobia, such naked ignorance. Bush should hold firm on this one...

P.P.S. Brooks, the best columnist currently active at the NYT:

It's come to my attention that many of the foreign goods we import into our country are made by foreigners who speak foreign languages and are foreign. It's come to my attention that many varieties of hummus and other vital bread schmears are made by Arabs, the group responsible for 9/11. Furthermore, it's come to my attention that the Chinese have a menacing death grip on America's pacifier, blankie, bunny and rattle supplies, and have thus established crushing domination of the entire non-pharmaceutical child sedative industry.
It's therefore time for Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Bill Frist and Peter King to work together to write the National Security Ethnic Profiling Save Our Children Act, which would prevent Muslims from buying port management firms, the Chinese from buying oil and mouth-toy companies, and the Norwegians from using their secret control of U.S fluoridation levels to sap our precious bodily fluids at the Winter Olympics.

In other words, what we need to protect our security and way of life is a broad-based, xenophobic Know Nothing campaign of dressed-up photo-op nativism to show foreigners we will no longer submit to their wily ways.

Never mind — the nativist, isolationist mass hysteria is already here.

Sad.

Posted by Gregory at February 23, 2006 04:47 AM | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Sad, indeed. Altough, I wouldn't shed a tear if Bush (and Europe, for that matter) were to demand of Middle Eastern oligarchies that they invest in the education of their own peoples a proportion of the revenues resulting from their (rather vast) investments in the West.

At the end of the day, the Democratic party is not alone in trying to make political capital out of ignorance and xenophobic feelings (distressing as that is): those are the same feelings that the governments of Syria and Iran exploited a month ago over the Mohammed cartoons.

Posted by: Andres Kupfer at February 23, 2006 01:07 PM | Permalink to this comment

Trannationalism, expressed as broadly as Kupfer does above, is to propose an impossibly absolute form of non ID, a complete rejection of all the compenents that make up our sense of belonging somewhere--aswell as to and for something. This notion of a world made up of new unattached dream-ciizens remains for the moment still largely within the confines of an intellectual romance, a large, burning gleam in the eyes of all true, self-respecting post modernists. However, such citizens, without basic loyalty, can only create soldiers without basic loyalty. Obedience, ultimately even sustained comittment to anything, then become a commodity to be bought and transferred like so many tons of pork jowles or pounds of coffee beans.

Such a world might work if armies were really no longer a necessity. Is such a fantasy really just over the horizon as so many in the MSM so urgently believe ?.

the potential destructive chaos inherent in a society so decentralized, so decontructed should be obvious to all...........

Posted by: Ron Proby at February 23, 2006 02:39 PM | Permalink to this comment

At the end of the day, the Democratic party is not alone in trying to make political capital out of ignorance and xenophobic feelings

Agreed.

That's why I've written the DNC to request that Hugh Hewitt, Mike (Weiner) Savage, Curt Weldon, Rick Santorum and Bill Frist among others be permanently banned from the party.

I'm still waiting for a reply though.

Posted by: Davebo at February 23, 2006 02:41 PM | Permalink to this comment

Re: Brooks, Bush and the Port Deal

If you train a dog to be mean you shouldn't be surprised when it bites you in the ass.

Posted by: Martin at February 23, 2006 02:50 PM | Permalink to this comment

What Martin says. It's sad that there is a sizeable portion of this country that now wets its pants when it sees an old "Sinbad" movie, sad that images of a tiny fraction of Muslims burning down embassies over cartoons "confirms" so many people's belief that the entire Muslim world is the enemy.

But how did we get to this state of xenophobia? For once, I don't blame Bush, who has reliably steered clear of typecasting Islam as the enemy in word, if not as overtly in deed, but rather the Hannity-Coulter wing of your party, that you rightly condemn in your earlier post.

Posted by: AssParrot at February 23, 2006 03:04 PM | Permalink to this comment

I think the backlash from the elected politicians, both Republican and Democrat, in Congress over the sale of port operations is really indicative of the lame-duck status of President Bush. He will somehow limp through this latest political crisis to finish his term in office, but the snarks have tasted blood in the water and are circling in for a kill. It is ironic that in the same manner and style which the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence on WMD and links to Al Queda, a brillant tour de force in the annals of war propaganda that rivals British PM George's execution prior to England's entry into The First World War, is being turned on President Bush. If anyone still believed that President Bush's political currency isn't debased, this controversy marks his fall from grace. Of course, Congressmen and Congresswomen of both parties, who are up for re-election, have studied the polls; 55% of American voters now think that the war in Iraq is a failure. And in Iraq, the country sits like Humpty Dumpty on the wall of sectarian violence and appears ready to fall into a full-scale civil war. And on the intellectual front, Francis Fukuyama is abandoning the ship in his article, "After Neoconservatism," appeared in the February 19, 2006, edition of the NYT. His previous best-selling politcal tract proported that with the blossoming of liberal democracies throughout the world, we were witnessing the Marxist equivalent of the end of history as we know it. Of course on 9/11, Americans saw the facile and superficial analysis that FF employed in his main theme in rubble like the remains of the smoldering World Trade Center. Or as George Will, who gave a ringing endorsement of that book in a burb, commented that the 9/11 attacks proved the end of the end of history.
I really hate to harp upon this point, but the war in Iraq in its intellectual, political and social underpinnings reminds me so much of the progress of the war in Vietnam. Again we have an administration of true believers in the force of American exceptionalism asserting the military forces of this country in a attempt to bring nation-building and democracy to a far distant shore. But in Vietnam the American messianic missionares confronted its opposite mirror image, namely, the ruthless resolve of the North Vietnamese Communists in the guerilla movement and the North Vietnamese Army in the big units engagement such as the Tet Offensive of 1968, which was a military defeat for them yet turned public opinion in the United States against this misadventure. In Iraq, the true belivers have met again their mirror image, the jihadists and insurgents, who have brought the latest experiment in exporting democracy to a country teetering on the brink of full-scale civil war. Now the leading public intellectual in the neoconservative movement, specific arguments of which were used by UnderSecretary of Defense Paul Wolfovitz in the rationale of the war, has held a public funeral for his ideas and this political movement.
And the publication of FF's article coincedes with Paul R. Pillar's article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. Pillar was in charge of the Middle East desk at the CIA from 2001 to 2005 and shows how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal bypassed all the intelligence on Iraq's WMD and links to Al Queda, which was ambiguous at best, and "cherry-picked" the intelligence to reinforce the Bush administration's fixation on going to war in Iraq. In that article, Pillar made an important historical allusion to how LBJ and his New Frontiersmen relied upon ambigous intelligence over an insignificant incident in the Gulf of Tolkin to push a resolution through Congress for a military escalation of that war.
And if these two important articles weren't enough, there is the article in The New Yorker that shows the political bankruptcy of the Bush administration in Moro's valiant but failed effort to bring basic human rights and some accountablilty to the Department of Defense's handing of enemy combatants at Gitmo.
All the hostility over the invasion in Iraq, the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharif, the loss of over 30,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in the war and the continuing anarchy came to a head in a prefect storm of 12 rather insiginificant cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper that no one had ever heard of prior to the actual publication. Finally Muslims in the streets through the world found an issue to rally against the humilations and resentments that were festering like an untreated and open wound upon their community. And of course, Blair and Bush, the two main actors in this grand experiment to bring democracy to the Middle East, capitulated to the Muslim extremists over the bedrock issue of free speech and artisitic expression in the democratic model that they wanted to export to a far distant shore.
But such is the nature of the American messianic character, both in Vietnam and in Iraq, of which feverish nighmares come and rival the fiction of one of George Orwell's politcal satires. And we are still waiting for the denounement.
Who would have ever thought that the photograph of Marines wading ashore from amphibious assault crafts toward a group of pretty Vietnamese women offering boutiques of flowers on China Beach in DaNang would have been replaced by American dipolmats fleeing in a Huey helicopter from the landing pad of the American embassy in Saigon as the NVA soldiers entered the city, now named Ho Chi Minh City? Would would have thought that a noble experiment in exporting democracy to The Republic of South Vietnam would have ended with between 3 to 3.4 million Vietnemese killed, a black wall on the Mall in Washington D.C. to commemorate the 58,000 American soldiers fallen and a destabilized Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge regime committed genocide against its own citizens?
But such is the nature of American exceptionalism taken to a messianic extreme of which nightmares are made. As Betty Davis said in the movie, All About Eve: "Fasten your selt belts. We're in for a bumpy ride."

Posted by: George at February 23, 2006 05:43 PM | Permalink to this comment

Greg,

I know that you like to blame the GOP's sins on the Coulter-Savage-Limbaugh-Hannity-Malkin wing of the party (with a dose of scorn for Cheney, Rummy, Delay, Frist and others), but at a certain point, you have to acknowledge that this IS the GOP - like it or not. These people have more power, reach and influence than the moderates like Hagel.

This nativist trend so critiqued by Brooks of all people has been stirred up by the aforementioned GOP powerhouses ever since 9/11. Savage: "nuke an Arab capital" picked at random. Malkin: "in defense of internment camps for Muslim Americans." Coulter: "ragheads." Limbaugh: "Holiday at Guantanamo" and "Happy Abu Ghraib," etc.

And all those that don't care whether the "Muslims" at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib are guilty, because they look like others that might be guilty. So we shouldn't care if they have access to due process, or if they are tortured/abused. Why give them access to a judicial venue? They are terrorists?

I know that many reasonable and moderate Republicans like to pretend that these are fringe voices, but the sad fact is, they are not.

Millions upon millions of American Republicans read, listen to and patronize Coulter-Savage-Limbaugh-Hannity-Malkin. They sell millions of books, host radio shows with vast audiences, host popular TV shows, have columns in newspapers and magazines, are privy to highly exclusive spots on Armed Forces radio networks and are featured speakers at extremely important national conferences of Republican leaders.

If Republicans want to "reclaim" their party from these folks, here are a few tips:

Stop paying their salaries. Stop hiring them. Stop buying their products. Stop inviting them to speak. Stop putting them on taxpayer funded radio. Stop giving them access in major Republican funded periodicals and TV channels. Stop buying into their ideas. Stop agreeing with them. Stop nodding your head.

It's really rich to help create a monster and then turn around and get all Claude Raines on us. Shocked, shocked I tell you. Who knew these attitudes were out there? And how did this happen?

Posted by: Eric Martin at February 23, 2006 06:03 PM | Permalink to this comment

"I know that you like to blame the GOP's sins on the Coulter-Savage-Limbaugh-Hannity-Malkin wing of the party (with a dose of scorn for Cheney, Rummy, Delay, Frist and others), but at a certain point, you have to acknowledge that this IS the GOP - like it or not. These people have more power, reach and influence than the moderates like Hagel. "

when exactly did Hagel get to be the poster boy GOP moderate? IIUC his positions on everything from global warming, tax cuts, abortion, etc are from moderate. McCain would seem to have about as good a claim to being a moderate, despite his conservatism on many issues. The big diff between Hagel and Mcain is their relations to the neocons, and their positions on the mideast. Im not sure it makes sense to use that as definitional of GOP moderate.

I can certainly say that if McCain runs in 2008 against Democrat hawk (Warner, Biden, Bayh, or Clinton) I'll have a difficult decision to make. If its Hagel vs the above, I'll happily return to my Democratic roots.

Posted by: liberalhawk at February 23, 2006 06:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

"And all those that don't care whether the "Muslims" at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib are guilty, because they look like others that might be guilty"

Some folks dont care, because the folks at Gitmo were picked up either on the field of battle in afghanistan, or were found in pro AQ madrassahs, etc. You can argue with the legality, ethics, or prudence of that, but it really isnt fair to group people who hold that position with those who bigots who blanket blame all muslims or all arabs.

Posted by: liberalhawk at February 23, 2006 06:57 PM | Permalink to this comment

The problem with that is that too many folks at Gitmo were NOT picked up on the battlefield or in pro-AQ madrassahs. Based on a review of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, the results have been, shall we say, underwhelming. Here is a segment:

One thing about these detainees is very clear: Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers -- not lawyers -- who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man -- the aforementioned accuser -- had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.

But you see LH, that's what due process is all about. You have it so you don't rely on the accuser's word for evidence. You don't assume that anyone caught up in a wide net is guilty. Greg posted on this recently, with quotes from lawyers involved (not liberal lawyers, but big white-shoe law firm republicans).

It's been despicable, and all too many people are willing to ignore it, dismiss it or rationalize it based on fear and an utter lack of curiosity. While some casual observers may make honest mistakes and believe the official party line about the detainees, I think there is an underlying attitude for far too many that they are all appear guilty based on their status as Muslims. After all, where else has such shoddy standard of proof been used to justify abuse/torture and indefinite detention?

Likewise, the officials in charge don't seem terribly concerned with matters of guilt or innocence.

Posted by: Eric Martin at February 23, 2006 07:18 PM | Permalink to this comment

And I'm comfortable with the notion that McCain is also a moderate. No slight intended.

Posted by: Eric Martin at February 23, 2006 07:27 PM | Permalink to this comment

you seem to have missed my statement that you can disagree on legal, ethical, or prudential grounds. Perhaps I didnt make myself clear. I wasnt defending the policy (I dont agree with all your statements on the details, but i wont belabor that here) I was saying that some defended it on grounds that are not based on the race or religion of those detained. I stand by that. There are real debates to be had over all the policies in question. From detention of alleged enemy combatants, to questionable interrogation methods, etc. To group everyone who disagrees with you on those questions together with bigots, to assume motivations, strikes me as one of the things that has made rational conversation on these issues so difficult. (the right does this too with cries of traitor, that match the lefts cries of bigot)

Posted by: liberalhawk at February 23, 2006 08:55 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Conservative
(Back to top)

Fall 2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Conservative Index - The John Birch Society 90 percent in Fall 2004.

2005 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Eagle Forum 50 percent in 2005.

2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Eagle Forum 100 percent in 2004.

2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Christian Coalition 100 percent in 2004.

2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the American Conservative Union 87 percent in 2004.

2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Republican Liberty Caucus 79 percent in 2004.

2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Christian Action Network 84 percent during their legislative career up until 2004.

2003-2004 Senator Hagel supported the interests of the Concerned Women for America 100 percent in 2003-2004"

Posted by: liberalhawk at February 23, 2006 08:57 PM | Permalink to this comment

you seem to have missed my statement that you can disagree on legal, ethical, or prudential grounds.

Fair enough. I acknowledge that possibility, and should not imply that all are bigoted. That is not accurate, and you are right, not helpful to the discussion.

Posted by: Eric Martin at February 23, 2006 09:21 PM | Permalink to this comment

Thanks for highlighting Brooks, I had missed that.

Also adding the opinion that the Bush Administration is not responsible for the xenophobia in grosso modo. They bear respoonsbility for gross incompetence in the execution of their Iraq adventure, but not this outbreak of complete idiocy.

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