The American Conservative

As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale.

He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself had written. Bush did as told, said Olmert.

The crowd loved it. Here is the background.

After intense negotiations with Britain and France, Secretary of State Rice had persuaded the Security Council to agree on a resolution calling for a cease-fire. But Olmert wanted more time to kill Hamas.

So, here, in Olmert’s words, is what happened next. Read More…

A new issue of The American Conservative went to press yesterday and is now on-line for subscribers. Our lead feature is a package of stories on the Gaza crisis, with essays by John Mearsheimer, Avi Shlaim, Daniel Levy, Glenn Greenwald, and Tom Streithorst. We’ve put up the Mearsheimer and Greenwald essays as a preview — take a look. (Update: We’ve also made available Phil Weiss’s terrific take-down of the new Rupert Murdoch bio.)

If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up now for a free, three-month trial subscription and you’ll get instant access to the new issue and our full archives.

Mark Weston at Global Dashboard has a plan to reduce the spread of AIDS, based on a proposed World Bank scheme to fight sexually transmitted diseases in Tanzania. It’s simple: give cash rewards to those who test negative,

The Bank will pay 3,000 Tanzanians $45 – good money in Tanzania – if they regularly test negative for sexually transmitted infections (though not HIV, which is more expensive to test for but for which diseases like gonorrhoea are a good proxy).

Weston thinks the initiative should be expanded to deal with AIDS. He writes,

You might think that not dying of AIDS would be reward enough for practising safe sex. In an environment where people have little to hope for, however, and thus no reason to make plans, you’d be wrong.

Weston means well, of course. But this is surely a wrongheaded and very dangerous idea. They may call it “reverse prostitution” at the World Bank, but it’s more like reverse charity: give alms to the healthy, turn away the sick. (Weston does not mention what happens to the poor African who tests positive, but he or she must be punished for the scheme to work). Surely it is in fact AIDS sufferers who need financial help the most? Would the money not be better spent on anti-retroviral drugs for people who are actually dying?

There is, moreover, something deeply sinister about this particular brainwave. The notion of rewarding the fit and punishing the diseased carries a strong whiff of the Third Reich. Indeed the idea amounts to a sort of monetary eugenics. It’s just like recent plots in the UK to punish smokers who refuse to quit by banning them from treatment, or turning fatties away from hospitals because they won’t stop being obese. Only it’s worse.

Another day, another Andrew Roberts op ed insisting that “history will show” Bush to have been the greatest leader of all time. We’ve seen this before from Bush’s favorite historian. But today’s piece of flattery possesses an strange, urgent quality. Roberts reaches for the highest apple on the ingratiation tree:

Films such as Oliver Stone’s W, which portray him as a spitting, oafish frat boy who eats with his mouth open and is rude to servants, will be revealed by the diaries and correspondence of those around him to be absurd travesties, of this charming, interesting, beautifully mannered history buff who, were he not the most powerful man in the world, would be a fine person to have as a pal.

Anybody feeling a bit sick?

Bill Kauffman on the great, but much maligned, Victorian anti-statist.

Barak Obama, being the smart cookie that he is, moved quickly to disarm his potential opposition among the Cosmo pundit class by recently meeting with several notable Right and Left wing columnists. The lists of Right-wing social democrats were: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot (and Will’s home no less) while the Leftists include: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Gerry Seib, Ron Brownstein, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Andrew Sullivan, and Rachel Maddow.

What’s interesting is not that he met with the boys and girls members of the insider club. Its that he’s not extending his “outreach” to those outside Cosmo world. Now, I certainly didn’t expect him to set up a working breakfast with Lew Rockwell, Dr. Thomas Fleming, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Bill Kauffman, Eric Margolis, Scott McConnell, Peter Brimelow or Jason P. Sorens.  Hell, I would have settled with 15 minutes with Ron Paul and all he has to do for that is walk down Pennsylvania Ave.

But I didn’t see Kos’ name, or that other prominent Left bloggers on the guest lists for the liberal’s face time, nor that of Glenn Greenwald, Matt Ygelsias, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Matt Rothschild, Paul Glastris, Michael Lerner or even a Unte Reader editor either.

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There are competing narratives in the debate over whether Israel Defense Forces are using white phosphorus munitions in its bombardment of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Such munitions have been employed since World War I — by Americans since World War II – against the enemy and for general tactical illumination, because its shells, when raining down, can cast a bright white light on targets and troop movements. The shells, packed with phosphorus, release filaments that when exposed to oxygen, ignite and burn anything they land on and can sear flesh right to the bone, turning human beings into what soldiers have coarsely referred to as, “crispy critters.” Armies have long used white phosphorus or “willy pete” against enemy positions, and it’s not illegal. But its use on people, particularly civilian populations, is forbidden by international law and widely considered a war crime.

“The use of white phosphorus is banned as a weapon that causes ‘unnecessary suffering,’ ” according to Mark Ellis, director of the International Bar Association in London, who spoke with the Christian Science Monitor. “It isn’t to be used in civilian areas, or indeed against people since it creates horrible damage to the human body, and unnecessarily so.”

Thus, there are three narratives. Witnesses, including international doctors and human rights groups on the ground, say Israel is indiscriminately using white phosphorus against the densely-packed strip. They say they have seen and treated civilians with severe, horrific wounds indicative of white phosphorus. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle have carried hair-raising stories from alleged civilian victims.

“These are very strange types of injuries and burns.We don’t know the type of weapons used which cause these injuries,” Nafaz Abu Shaaban, head of plastic surgery at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the past 20 years, told the paper. “The cases we received in the last few days are not usual burns. It’s severe, massive burns, very deep burns. The site of the injury continues to produce smoke and burning for a long time, even after dressing,” he said.

Meanwhile, Israeli military officials have moved between suggestions that white phosphorus is not being used at all, to insisting whatever is being deployed there is within the law. “All weapons used by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) are in accordance with international law,” one Israeli military official told Agence-France Press, without ultimately confirming — nor denying — the use of WP. Then he added, ironically, “we are only using what is being used by other Western armies — we are not using anything out of the ordinary.” (He no doubt is referring to the American use of WP, later admitted to by the Pentagon, against enemy combatants in the battle of Fallujah).

The third narrative actually backs up the Israelis. The International Committee of the Red Cross, not usually a reliable witness for war hawks, said most recently that the Israelis are indeed using phosphorus, but not illegally. “In some of the strikes in Gaza it’s pretty clear that phosphorus was used,” Peter Herby, head of the ICRC arms-mines unit told The Associated Press. “But it’s not very unusual to use phosphorus to create smoke or illuminate a target. We have no evidence to suggest it’s being used in any other way.”

However, according to the AP, “Herby said evidence is still limited because of the difficulties of gaining access to Gaza.”

Therein lies the root of problem. The Israelis may be targeting civilian areas like refugee camps with WP munitions — or they may not be. Palestinians and their advocates may be ginning up the number and the severity of burn victims, or the Israelis could be significantly playing the human toll down. As a journalist, this is what I find incredibly mindblowing, and deeply appalling: that we have no idea what is really going on in Gaza because the Israelis have banned all foreign reporters from doing their jobs, and as an institution, the American Fourth Estate seems unwilling to fight it. Read More…

In less than a week Barak Obama will be inaugurated as President and what has come of the time of reflection the new loyal opposition has supposedly gone through from the day he was elected until his moment next Tuesday?  Well, Fred Barnes is writing mash notes to outgoing President Bush II, the would-be chairmen of the Republican National Committee are competing to see how many times they can drop Ronald Reagan’s name and the neoconish Pajama’s Media is employing “Joe the Plumber” as their war correspondent in the Middle East who believes their shouldn’t be any war correspondents at all, lest they get in the way of the war.

In other words the social democrats who control the Right have learned nothing new about themselves so they revert to type, especially when it comes to ”Populist Chic”, their supposed love affair with the middle and working classes which is why Mr. Wurzelbacher is covering Israel’s attacks on Gaza instead of snaking pipes. Oh well, I supposed its better than sending Richard Perle to Gaza to be their war correspondent or Douglas Feith. It’s just less believable.

Dan Larison has a nice column on Eunomia about how the Wurzelbacher dispatches won’t make anyone forget Edward R. Murrow from London. How long the social democrats wish to keep pretending that they’re just ”keeping it real,” is up to them, for however long it’s politically expedient I suppose. Leonard Bernstein held just one fundraising soiree for the Black Panthers as far as I know, so maybe the Cosmos will come to their senses and realize they are who they are, and no amount of fantasizing that they’re all just God-fearing, pick-up driving coal miners in their glass tower, Beltway think tanks is going to change their status as Bobos. Say what you want about David Brooks but at least he’s honest about who he is.

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You don’t have to buy into nightmare scenario about the coming collapse of the USA that Russian analyst Igor Panarin has been promoting (Joel Garreau did a better job in partitioning America). But you have to take seriously historian Paul Kennedy’s most recent revisiting of his declinism thesis. It makes a lot of sense to me (see for example here and here and here and here).

A recent topic of conversation in the TAC office has been the strange career of Hillary Clinton, who went from being a president’s wife to becoming a U.S. senator, a serious contender for president, and now secretary of state. Does anybody think Laura Bush or Rosalynn Carter could have a career like that?

Actually, maybe they could. When Rep. Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident, his wife replaced him. Jean Carnahan, wife of the Missouri governor who died in a plane crash in 2000, was appointed to the senate seat Governor Carnahan posthumously won. U.S. politics is dynastic enough that being married to an officeholder apparently is qualification enough for holding office oneself.

But widows are a different matter than Hillary, who in any case has gone much further than most political consorts. She’s not stupid, but then, she’s not conventionally qualified for most of the office she’s held, either. What gives?

She’s a monster of the conservative movement’s creation. Throughout the ’90s, the movement’s mouthpieces put about the idea that Hillary was the power behind the throne — she was, after all, less popular and further to the Left than her husband. This backfired spectacularly: after all, if Hillary could be co-president, doesn’t that make her eminently qualified for the senate, to be president again, or to be the nation’s top diplomat?

And having done at least as much as her feminist fans on the Left to build up the myth of omnicompetent Hillary, what is the Right doing now? Lying down for her: “even firebrand South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint,” Time‘s Massimo Calabresi writes, “said he was ‘optimistic and hopeful about [Sen. Clinton's] role as secretary of State.’” If there is a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, it’s evidently the best friend Hillary Clinton could hope to have.