Do As We Say, Not As We Do

“You, quite simply, [are] ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer [our] questions . . . I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . led to your party’s defeat in the [last] elections.”

So said Columia president Lee Bollinger to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I'd be hard-pressed to choose which of these men's worldviews is more absurd, but in terms of being a spineless and self-absorbed prick, Bollinger wins it hands down.

Bollinger is the man who invited Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia. He is also the man who keeps ROTC off of the Columbia campus on the grounds that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is discriminatory towards gays. So the American military is discriminatory towards gays, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't? The American military is not allowed on Bollinger's campus because of its attitude towards gays, but a man who a) denies that gays exist in Iran and b) hangs the gays that do manage to exist, is given an invitation to speak.

So, aside from some rather dubious standards about what people and institutions live up to Columbia's professed standards of decency, what's the problem? The problem is that, after inviting Ahmadinejad, Bollinger then buckled to the people who protested. He did not, of course, cancel the invitation; he simply used it as a forum to look "tough on terror", which, in the modern American parlance, means "treating foreign leaders like petulant children and judging their responses as ignorant and evasive before they are even given."

Lee Bollinger is a coward. What kind of man stands at a podium and levels ad hominem assaults at an invited guest who doesn't speak English? A solipsistic and petty brat. A douchebag, if you will.

Much has been made of the fact that "nobody in Iran could have said such things to Ahmadinejad" and that "no American leader would be allowed to adress such an audience in Iran". These points are hard to refute, but they also crystallize the current American zeitgeist; we do brutal, petty, criminal, and disgraceful things in all matter of fora, with words and with weapons, and then we assure ourselves that we are better than whoever we did those things to.

This is the wrong metric. Ready for the right metric? What we should have asked ourselves is this: "Forget the state of free speech in Iran. Forget President Ahmadinejad. If President Bush had been invited to an American university to field unscreened questions from an unscreened audience of college students, would he even have showed up?"

We all know the answer of course. Not a chance. Firstly, we know that no host would dare utter the words quoted above to President Bush. And, if you study the quote closely, it is rather relevant to the president.

"Preposterous and belligerent statements?" Ahmadinejad says the jury's out on the Holocaust. Bush says we found the WMD in Iraq. Ahmadinejad says there are no gays in Iran. Bush says there are no uninsured in America ("folks can just go to the emergency room" is how our compassionate Christian squared this circle. That's just Bush's version of Ahmadinejad's "there are no gays in Iran", although there are apparently plenty of men in Iran who have sex with other men).

Not only would nobody confront our president the way Bollinger confronted Ahmadinejad, the president would never show up at an unscripted event with a question and answer session. Ever notice how Mr. Bush's audiences consist overwhelmingly of soldiers and children? Ever notice how people with signs protesting the president are routinely arrested? Arrested. For a sign. In the United States. Well, we have free speech, but free writing? That's anarchy.

So while we pat ourselves on the back over how much we value free speech, (by which we mean insulting guests and refusing to confront our own government) we may want to consider what would happen if President Bush was invited to attend a celebration of this right that we so self-righteously use to flagellate others.

How Do You Say "Idiot Savant" in Persian?

It is amazing how comfortable Americans are comparing people to Hitler. It's such an attractive parallel, of course, because to utter the name Hitler is to end debate; it is to conjure up a spectre that can not be negotiated with, that can not be rationalized, that can not be met halfway, that can only be destroyed with unrestrained violence.

The bad news is that Americans tend to paint themselves into corners by associating every two-bit thug with Hitler; the good news is that, thank god, we are always wrong when we do so.



Some things to consider:


1) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not the dictator of Iran. He was democratically elected to a largely ceremonial position. He is perhaps the fifth most powerful man in Iran.


2) The Iranian nuclear program is entirely legal, as every nation has the right to enrich uranium for electricity and, despite all the hysteria, nobody has proven that Iran's program is for any use other than power.


3) Since the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Iran has invaded zero countries and has bombed zero countries which have not directly attacked it. In the same time frame, the United States has invaded five countries and has bombed more than one dozen, zero of which had directly attacked it.



Ahmadinejad is clearly not a friend of the United States, as the relations now exist. There are clearly fundamental differences between us, mostly concerning the legitimacy of Israel and the definition of human rights. But our behavior towards this man, vacillating from a petty refusal to talk to an intellectually barren association of him with history's greatest monsters, frankly makes the United States look ridiculous.



When President Bush spoke at the United Nations, the Iranian delegation, including Ahmadinejad, sat and listened to his speech, even as they were excoriated directly. When Ahmadinejad spoke, the American delegation left. While this is played as a matter of principle, all it is really reflective of is a childish petulance and an all-too-common refusal to talk to anyone we disagree with because if we disagree with them, they must be evil. And we don't negotiate with evil.



Okay. We all know that any individual who refuses to interact with people who challenge him or disagree with him is cutting himself off from intellectual and emotional maturity. If one is so convinced of his superiority, he would not fear being exposed to different views, as these manifestly illegitimate views would simply reinforce his original stance. The alternative, that one may actually learn from different opinions, is what really frightens the insecure and immature.



What are Iran's sins? They are pursuing nuclear weapons. We take this as an article of faith. It is very, very easy, living in the United States, to lose track of the most salient fact here: there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons. It most likely is, of course, but we must remember that our idea of manifest truth is what the rest of the world would call an unproven assertion.



Iran's other unpardonable sin, in the eyes of the United States, is that it is aiding insurgents in Iraq. Firstly, we must clarify what is meant by "insurgent". Iran has no common cause with Sunni insurgents, since Sunni chauvinism bled Iran for eight years in the 1980's and Sunni Arabs regularly display contempt for the Persian Shi'ites. If Iran is arming anyone, it is arming Shi'ite militias.



If Iran is arming Shi'ite insurgents, it is only arming the same factions in Iraq that the United States is arming. If some Iranian weapons are being turned on Americans by Shi'ite splinter groups, are American weapons not being used for the same purpose? Do we not honestly think that most American soldiers are being killed by weapons that America gave to the Iraqi government at one time or another? There is one country that is flooding Iraq with weaponry, and it is not Iran.



None of this should be taken to exonerate Ahmadinejad of any of his words or deeds, but it should put those words and deeds in context. The United States invaded Iraq and armed the factions it favors. It then tells Iraq's neighbors that it has no right to do the same, even if those factions are identical. The United States can arm Shi'ites, but Iran can not. This policy is not based on any authority or any legal precepts; it is based only on power. Pure, arrogant power. Iraq is our backyard, not Iran's. That argument falls apart the second you look at a map.



Several of the Iranian president's statements during his recent visit show him to be a foolish and provincial man, such as his insistence that there are no gays in Iran and that a man who has been hiding in a well for the past 1,300 years will return imminently to save the world. On these grounds, he is clearly an idiot. On other grounds, however, we get a glimpse of the savant; there are certain things that this man is actually quite lucid about.



There were two statements that Ahmadinejad made that all Americans should consider. The first, given during a dubious insistence that Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, asserted that nuclear weapons are worthless. If they were of any use, he said, why did they not save the Soviet Union? This is an insight that it would do us well to mull over.



We are horrified at the prospect of Iran having one nuclear weapon. We have 30,000. We seem not to realize that these are useless weapons. They are made simply to destroy indiscriminately. Since states seek control if nothing else, nuclear weapons are useless, since if you destroy everything, you can no longer control it. Ahmadinejad seems to understand this; even if Iran were to acquire such a weapon, using it would bring about the incineration of the entire country, and we should not pretend that whole civilizations can be suicidal.



If Iran is suicidal, why has it not directly attacked the United States? Why has it not rained missiles on Israel? Why has it not flooded Iraq with Revolutionary Guards? Suicidal states, if they existed, would not wait to be struck before attacking; they would attack before being attacked, when they are at their strongest. If we go to war against Iran over the nuclear issue, we will be committing homicide with the "rationale" that we had to preempt our victim from commiting suicide first.



The second prescient statement is that the post-World War II order is over. The idea that France or Great Britain or any other country can unilaterally tie the hands of the world is clearly past its expiration date. These nations have not truly renounced colonialism until they have denounced the power to veto something that 190 other nations may desire.

The security council reflects a worldview in which there are victors (of World War II) and there are vanquished (most of whom were not even involved in that war). Indeed, the huge majority of nations in the UN did not even exist at the end of World War II. The security council reflects a balance of power that has not existed since the late 1940's. It is no longer viable. Period.



So while Ahmadinejad may be an idiot, he also has some valid points. And that, perhaps, is what we fear most of all.

Who's to Bless and Who's to Blame

Either George W. Bush is abnormally skilled at sleight-of-hand tricks, or the American public is abnormally skilled at falling for sleight-of-hand tricks. The “deference” that the President is showing to General David Petraeus is cynical and dangerous; it not only shifts responsibility away from the President, but it casts an ominous shadow over the inevitably painful domestic reckoning that will follow the American defeat in Iraq.

This faux-subservience to the generals comes approximately five years too late. I think any realist, and I take pride in fancying myself a realist, would agree that the officer corps of the American military was opposed to invading Iraq. And all honest people that disagree with me on that point would have to concede that, if the generals had truly been in charge, the invasion and occupation force would have been three times as large as it was.

It was clear from the start that this was a civilian war; no generals were pushing for war in Iraq. This was a strictly bureaucratic bloodletting. Smart and vain men, elected to office or appointed by those who were elected to office, came up with the brilliant idea of an unprovoked invasion and indefinite occupation of the cradle of civilization with a "light footprint".

The military, it must be said, did not protest enough before being sent on this fool’s slaughter. They should not be faulted for this, however, because arguably the most precious element of our Constitution, which is far more inspired than the Bible, is the principle of strict civilian control over the military.


The generals were given an illegal and impossible task by eggheads and sociopaths who aimed to remake the world. This is the point where the civilians should have stepped back; they gave the strategic task to the military. They should have then ceded total control over tactical decisions to the military, but they didn’t.

Nearly five years on, the President speaks of General Petraeus as if the President owes the General his job. This is cowardice; the present policy in Iraq is the President’s, not the General’s, and it is an abdication of leadership to imply otherwise. The President is constantly trumpeting the fact that Petraeus “wrote the book on counter-insurgency”. Indeed he did, and if the President had read the book, he would have learned that the General’s calculus calls for half a million men to occupy Iraq and successfully defuse an insurgency.

So the President tells us that this is an existential undertaking, of a moral and strategic gravity that is equivalent to the wars against fascism and communism. This is a war of necessity, the President tells us, a war that we can not and must not lose. Does he then allow his commanding general to run this war as he sees fit? No.

As noted above, Petraeus' counterinsurgency calculus calls for 500,000 soldiers to secure a population of 25 million. The President, who tells us that this war is on par with World War II, rules out the possibility of a draft and has called for absolutely no material austerity from the American people. So this is the greatest struggle of our time, and the military must be allowed to run the war as it sees fit, but it must do so with one-third of the troops that its own doctrine calls for.

And while the President attempts to shift responsibility, a.k.a. blame, to the military, so is the anti-war Left. Let me put it metaphorically: Fuck MoveOn.org. Oh, wait, that was literal. What balls it must take to print “General Betray-Us” in the New York Times. And what folly; I couldn’t imagine a better way for the anti-war movement to discredit itself. By castigating General Petraeus, a Princeton PhD and a patriot if nothing else, MoveOn is marching to the President’s drum.

If MoveOn.org is so incensed about the war, which they have every reason to be, they should take out a full-page ad in the New York Times charging George W. Bush with war crimes. To blame the generals is to create a crippling synthesis; both the Democrats and the Republicans are now blaming the military for the defeat, which will rip this country apart at the seams.
If the war is allowed to be remembered as a tactical military blunder rather than a civilian-driven criminal enterprise, it will happen again, and eventually the military will revolt, and for good reasons as well.

This war is not a military failure; it is a moral failure. And it is a civilian failure first and foremost. We did this. This is a democracy; even if we didn’t vote for George W. Bush, and even if he wasn’t legitimately elected, we are going to pay for this.

The War That Was, And The One To Come (or, Scotch and Acid)

It is misleading, in both a logical and a gramatical sense, to speak of the war in Iraq. There have been several wars in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, many of them occurring simultaneously. Since so many wars have been grafted onto and spawned from the original "cause" for the war, which in my mind was non-existent, we must assess the wisdom of the war now as being distinctly different from the wisdom of the war in 2003.

To say that it is intellectually dishonest for one to feel differently about the war today than he or she felt about the original invasion is like saying it is inconsistent for one to feel differently about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds than he or she felt about Eight Days a Week.

The war started out rather straightforward. It was conventional, with conventional goals and a conventional and predicatable course. American tanks rolled into a largely defenseless country and blew shit up until the government disappeared. This was the war for which Americans trained and which they won in less than a month.

The next war was the war for control. And, since the goal of the first war was to destroy the government that controlled essentially everything in Iraq, the American military found itself with the task of controlling....essentially everything in Iraq. This war was a war for which Americans most decidedly had not trained, and in five years minimal progress has been made.

The Americans' inability to run Iraq, which could only have surprised people as naive and self-absorbed as our boy king and his sycophantic entourage, led to the next war. The next war was the Sunni insurgency against American occupation. This was also a war for which the American military had not trained and which they tried to win via indiscriminate arrest and blunt force.

Smashing a ketchup packet with a hammer does not get rid of any of the ketchup, however, and four years later the Americans essentially surrendered to the Sunnis, entering into an agreement with the killers of thousands of American soldiers wherein the local Sunnis would be left unmolested as long as they kept control of Al Qaeda, another enemy the Americans had been unable to defeat or control.

The Americans' primary enemy in Iraq is now Iran. America's natural allies in Iraq are once again the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, which makes one wonder what the point of this war was in the first place, since this allignment simply represents a regression to the status quo ante bellum, with the interim price of one million dead and three million displaced. Oops.

By destroying Saddam Hussein, the man who for 25 years kept revolutionary Iran at bay, the United States finds itself with this unenviable task. And here we have the latest war, the true war, that has resulted from the invasion of Iraq: the inevitable war with Iran.

Any honest debate about withdrawal from Iraq and troop levels would make it clear that Iran is the primary determinant in the equation. Iraq is over. No longer a country, one fifth of its population displaced, its intelligentsia shattered, its children irrevocably brutalized, its infrastructure eviscerated, a land where trust is as dangerous as the gun.

We will go to war with Iran. This is the war to come. This is the acid trip after the glass of Scotch. Iran is the Sgt. Pepper to Iraq's Love Me Do. The irony is that, with American armies in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, any American war with Iran will be primarily fought in Iraq. In the coming year, we will see that our crime of agression in Iraq was a crime against American soldiers as well as the Iraqi people, and the south of Iraq will become a graveyard for America's delusions.

The Smoke and the Fire

When we gain greater perspective on the events that have so molded our world in the last ten years, it will become increasingly clear that the ultimate actor in this drama, or rather this tragedy, was not George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden or Bill Clinton. It was Monica Lewinsky.

This sordid truth indicts us for what we have been for the last decade: a petty and childish people, who invested our energies in embarrassing ourselves even as others plotted to strike at our vitals.

The last two presidents stand out in our pantheon as almost uniquely divisive men; toward the end of their second terms, it was hard to find an American who was neutral about either man. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush solidified the animosity and paralysis of the 50 / 50 nation, a regretful phenomenon that has quickly established rather deep roots.

While similar in their solicitation of blind love or blind hate from millions of Americans, Clinton and Bush are fundamentally different in many ways. Clinton was loved, or hated, by obsessing over details, by weighing every conceivable option and ramification, by compromising when reaching a final decision, and by making those "final" decisions amendable in the face of new or countervailing evidence.

Bush, on the other hand, is loved, or hated, by disregarding details as the province of pessimists or cowards, by eschewing the seeking of alternative options as soft-headed dithering, by defining compromise as defeat, and by making final decisions which, however hastily arrived at, can not be reversed or seriously amended, even in the face of objective evidence of their error, because admitting to mistakes is held to be even worse than committing them.

Each president was handled differently by the political opposition, and the choices the opposition made in each case have shaped the country as much as the presidents themselves have. The republican opposition in the 1990's wanted so much to destroy Bill Clinton that they seemed totally unaware that they were disgracing the office of the presidency itself, the nation at large, and any vestigial traces of respect for the government that may have lingered in the hearts of the citizenry.

And here we have the debate: which was worse, the smoke or the fire? Was it Clinton's fault for having an affair and then lying about it? Or was it the Republicans' fault for trying for the first time in American history to remove an elected American president from power for a personal and moral transgression which bore absolutely no relation to the execution of his office? The answer, of course, is both. The problem, of course, is that so few Americans are willing to see it that way.

Firstly, the president's serial infidelity to his wife does not represent simply a "personal choice" which we should all accept as the reality of a "new set of values" of which we should all be anything but, God forbid, "judgemental". What the president did was completely disrespectful to his wife, his daughter, and, after 1992, his office.

To say that it did not matter at all that Bill Clinton was a serial adulterer is to say that there is no such thing as right and wrong, or that the distinction between them is simply academic rather than practical. In the case of Monica Lewinsky, which simply represented the one tryst that was actually proven, the president's conduct was even more unacceptable.

Lewinsky was 22 years old when the affair began. 22. The president was more than old enough to be her father. This was not a harmless dalliance; it bordered on pedophilia. That Lewinsky seemed to have actually believed that the most powerful man on earth was deeply in love with her speaks volumes to her childish state.

The president carried on affair with a woman less than half his age in the building where he lived with his wife and daughter. This is a degree of recklessness and disrespect that is genuinely hard to articulate; it represented a staggering failure of judgement and a blindness to morality and decency that should have shaken us deeply.

The truth, however, was that, at its core, it was a personal failure. The Republicans, driven by a still-difficult-to-comprehend hatred for the Clintons, chose to make it public and to attempt what must be rightly understood as a coup d'etat.

Firstly, the Republicans insisted that a sitting president could be charged in a civil case alleging wrongdoing before becoming president. They ignored the fact that this threatens all future presidents of any party with any number of frivolous accusations by former staff or political enemies. This is an unacceptable diversion from the business of the presidency; civil suits can wait. The nation can not.

Secondly, they empowered an independent counsel who job became looking for a crime rather than proving that a pre-alleged crime had or had not taken place. With these pieces in place, they simply waited for Clinton to slip. To his everlasting and well deserved disgrace, he did.

Perhaps only such a sleazy prosecution could make such a sleazy defendant look like a victim. Ken Starr's report on his Whitewater investigation mentioned the word "Whitewater" three times. It mentioned the word "sex" three hundred times. No other figure speaks so clearly to what really went on here.

Ken Starr subpoenaed the President's doctor to tell him whether or not the president's penis had a distinct curvature. He subpoenaed a vial of the president's blood to determine whether the president had ejaculated onto Ms. Lewinsky's clothes. He had the sitting president, under oath, answer graphically explicit details about his sexual contact with Ms. Lewinsky. This is where our focus was while al-Qaeda metastasized into a global threat.

When President Clinton struck at al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan following the African embassy bombings of 1998, Republicans accused him of doing so to divert attention from the sex scandal, thus implying that the relative curvature of the president's penis was where the nation's attention should rightly be. Funny that nobody accused the Republicans of impeaching the president to divert attention from the global terrorist threat.

Just as we all know that we would not have invaded Iraq if it were not for 9/11, we also know that Al Gore would have been president if it were not for Monica Lewinsky. (Gore actually won the 2000 election, but that's another blog.)

George W. Bush ran on "restoring honor and dignity" to the office. "Honor and dignity" in this case meant "marital fidelity", which is in itself a very worthy cause. In terms of being an effective president, however, you don't embody "honor and dignity" simply by virtue of not cheating on your wife. In other words, Lincoln is not considered great because he didn't cheat on his wife. There are other elements to greatness than not being a scumbag.

The best we can say of George W. Bush's performance as president, when measured against Bill Clinton's, is that Bush has probably not had any affairs. That's great. But what if an independent council had hounded Bush every day of his eight years? What if this person had forced Bush to testify, under oath, about personal conduct before he was elected? What if Bush had been forced to testify about oh, I don't know, cocaine? One doesn't need an active imagination to picture Bush being forced to lie about one indiscretion or another to save himself and his family public embarrassment.

For fuck's sake, Bush wasn't even under oath when he testified to the 9/11 Commission! If we're looking for "honor and dignity" in the White House, we would be well advised to look past Bush's refusal to be sworn to tell the truth to the 9/11 Commission, which nicely complemented his refusal to allow any recording devices, notes, or oral accounts of what was said during their "candid discussion".

The difference, of course, is that Bush does not face an opposition like Clinton did. Bush's opposition reads more like this: "We'll suspend the constitution for you, but only for six months at a time". While Clinton committed personal crimes, there is a reason that he was not impeached for official misconduct. That reason, simply enough, is that there was none.

Can we imagine what the Republicans would have done if Clinton had governed as Bush has? The Republicans in the 1990's disgraced this country by attempting a coup d'etat which hinged on the public embarrassment of the elected president for a personal sin. The Democrats today disgrace this country by allowing President Bush to commit any manner of executive error and sin and then explaining "we were lied to", before proceeding to do absolutely nothing about the lies.

In 1998, the Republican mentality went like this: "Two American embassies in two countries were blown up five minutes apart by a global terrorist network? Bummer.......do you think Clinton's dick is really curved?"

In 2007, the Democratic mentality goes like this: "Yes, I voted to allow the President to violate all domestic and international law by waging aggressive war against a sovereign nation that had not attacked or threatened to attack the United States. Yes, the president has established a constellation of secret prisons around the world where kidnapped suspects are held without charge. Yes, the president has allowed American personnel to torture detainees. Yes, the president has suspended habeus corpus for American citizens in the event that the President deems them unworthy of such luxury, but it wasn't my fault; he took advantage of my trust."

The only bright spot here is that the American people, in large numbers, see these people for what they are. They saw Clinton as sleazy yet competent and empathetic. They saw the Republicans as hateful and vindictive. They see Bush as arrogant and incurious. They see the Democrats as the very definition of spineless.

From this multifaceted failure of leadership, can we find one person who motives and priorities are anything other than hopelessly venal and self-centered? Monica '08.