Posts For: October 15, 2007

Annapolis Syndrome

10.15.2007 - 5:29 PM

There is an unmistakable tinge of insanity creeping into the U.S. effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It takes form in the embarrassing desperation of Condoleeza Rice, as she countenances the increasing implausibility of the Annapolis conference with ever more florid and urgent declarations of the imperative of creating a Palestinian state. It takes form in the haphazard manner in which the U.S. has jettisoned virtually every requirement arrived upon in previous negotiations, most notably the unannounced dismissal of the 2003 Roadmap. And this creeping insanity takes form most strikingly in the refusal of U.S. strategists to deal seriously with the array of facts on the ground, facts that would undermine any print-on-paper agreements arising from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Rice arrived in Israel yesterday—her eighth visit in the past year—to continue cajoling her interlocutors toward Annapolis. “Now we are talking about a joint document that will seriously and substantively address core issues. We have come quite a long way. We’ve got quite a long way to go,” she said. Actually, we have not come a long way. Anyone familiar with even the most basic outlines of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking knows that in all but the finest details, everything being negotiated today has been negotiated dozens of times before in summits and conferences and shuttle diplomacy and secret meetings undertaken by every U.S. administration stretching back decades: borders, refugees, Jerusalem, water, security, etc.

Some Advice for Would-Be Martyrs

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.15.2007 - 5:28 PM

If you are an aspiring Muslim suicide bomber living in Europe, what is the best way to die?

One path is to travel to Iraq and set off a bomb in, say, a marketplace. But you might end up killing only a handful of people, all of them fellow Muslims–and having little impact on the course of world events.

Another path is to travel to Pakistan and prepare there for a “martyrdom operation” in Europe or the U.S. that might end up killing many more people, all of them likely to be infidels. This choice has the added bonus–if it is a bonus–of keeping you alive a bit longer.

It seems that the second option is becoming more attractive. The Los Angeles Times reports that “a dangerous new pattern” is emerging: “an increasing number of militants from mainland Europe are traveling to Pakistan to train and to plot attacks on the West.”

The shift is indeed dangerous, but is it bad news or good news, or mixed? Among other things, it may be yet another piece of evidence that the “surge” in Iraq is working and it is becoming a less hospitable place for foreign terrorists who want to blow themselves up.

Paris Art Woes

Benjamin Ivry 10.15.2007 - 4:23 PM

An old saying in Europe goes that British people “take their pleasures sadly”; an update might add that the French take theirs violently. On the night of October 6, known locally as the “Nuit Blanche” (Sleepless Night) Festival, during which musical and artistic events are presented all night long, five vandals broke into the Musée d’Orsay (Paris’s treasure trove of 19th century art) and punched a four-inch hole in an 1874 canvas by the Impressionist Claude Monet, Le Pont d’Argenteuil. Security cameras captured images of five visibly drunk Parisian teenagers forcing open a door to the museum just before midnight. After smoking cigarettes and urinating on the museum’s floor, they were scared away by the rather belated sound of an alarm. Patrick Bloche, a deputy in France’s National Assembly, reasonably inquired whether the embattled Minister of Culture Christine Albanel intends to wait until a four-inch tear is also made in the Mona Lisa, before having the locks on national museums double-checked.

The damage to the Monet painting (showing idyllic boats on the Seine River in a happier time) is less dramatic than a near-tragic episode during Paris’s “Nuit Blanche” in 2002, when the city’s openly gay mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, was stabbed in the abdomen in the City Hall in the early hours of the morning. The assailant, who almost killed the mayor, claimed to be a “devout Muslim” who “does not like politicians and in particular does not like homosexuals.”

The Persian Version

Gordon G. Chang 10.15.2007 - 1:35 PM

Yesterday, Interfax reported that “several groups of suicide terrorists” are planning an attack on the life of Vladimir Putin during his oft-postponed visit to Tehran, which begins tonight. The Russian news agency, the country’s largest, attributed the report to “various sources outside Russia.” Iran’s foreign ministry called the report “completely baseless.”

For once, the Iranians appear to be correct. Interfax often works closely with the Russian government to disseminate its views, and, if the assassination threat were real, it is unlikely we would ever have heard about it. Moreover, Putin is shrugging off the threat and continuing with his travel plans, a sure sign that the Interfax report is bogus. So we have to ask what the Kremlin seeks to gain by releasing the news about a Persian plot. Putin’s Iranian visit, the first by a Russian leader since Stalin’s 1943 trip, is important to the mullahs. “It’s a break in international isolation, a chance to show that Iran is an important country,” said Alexander Pikayev, a Russian analyst.

Putin is scheduled to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in what is bound to be a difficult session. Undoubtedly, the most contentious issue is Russia’s ongoing failure to supply uranium fuel for Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, the nation’s first. The Russians were instrumental in building the facility, but they’ve shown reluctance to let it begin operations. “Tehran views Russia as an unreliable partner that uses Iran in its game with the West,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, the Russian editor of Global Affairs. Although some of the disagreements between Russia and Iran undoubtedly are manufactured for the West’s consumption, there is more than a hint of real tension in Tehran’s recent relations with Moscow. Perhaps the Interfax report is intended to put Ahmadinejad on the defensive by embarrassing Putin’s Persian hosts.

Putin, for instance, is just about out of maneuvering room in his delicate—and duplicitous—balancing game between Iran and the West. If, for example, in the next few weeks, the atomic ayatollahs do not come clean with the International Atomic Energy Agency about their nuclear program, Russia may be backed into supporting a third set of Security Council sanctions against Tehran next month. Any new measures are bound to be more coercive than the slap-on-the-wrist provisions imposed in the past, and new UN actions are bound to turn Tehran against Moscow. So whatever the unusual assassination rumor indicates, it shows that not all is well between Russia and Iran. And the disagreements between the two nations are just additional symptoms that the Iranian crisis is reaching a decisive moment.

Mind the Gap

Michael J. Lewis 10.15.2007 - 12:25 PM

According to the London Times, “Shibboleth,” the Tate Modern’s new installation, has already claimed its first victims. Last week, three visitors fell into the work, a 548-foot-long crack that runs through the floor of the former power plant like an earthquake fissure. Since the visitors were not injured (unlike a young lawyer who fell to his death at the Tate earlier this year), the British press treated the incident light-heartedly. “Mind the gap,” joked the Guardian, invoking the loudspeaker warning at London underground stops. But if the press has been light-hearted, “Shibboleth” is anything but.

“Shibboleth” is the creation of Doris Salcedo, who was born in Colombia and studied at New York University, and whose work invariably is political. She first won international attention five years ago, when she encrusted Bogota’s Palace of Justice with a mantle of wooden chairs, her memorial to the violent coup attempt of 1985. Her new work aspires to more universal symbolism. As the Tate proclaims, it depicts the

long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase, or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

It is hardly novel for an artist to mutilate, disfigure, or otherwise violate an object in order to represent violence; on the contrary, one might call it art school vernacular. It is the atrophied symbolism of the political poster, the absolute literalism of graphic art, rather than the imaginative language of allegory. But what is novel about Salcedo’s project is that the artist was able to persuade one of Britain’s most prestigious art institutions to mutilate itself, as it were, and at considerable expense.

Of course it is possible, as the Independent points out, to enjoy the spectacle without subscribing to its ponderous theoretical program. Perhaps this is why the British press has been generally respectful about the exhibition (apart from waggish comments about “Doris’s crack”). Only the Times brought a refreshing skepticism to the spacious claims made on behalf of Shibboleth. Its review concludes with this gem of British dryness:

According to Salcedo, the fissure is “bottomless . . . as deep as humanity.” However, it appears to be around three feet at its deepest point.

When artists practice such blatant literalism as Salcedo does, they can hardly blame their critics for doing the same.

Comments Problems

Sam Munson 10.15.2007 - 11:23 AM

A number of our readers left comments over the weekend, during the launch of our redesigned site. These comments, unfortunately, were lost during our database migration. Apologies! We value all comments highly, and hope this won’t discourage any future response, praise, and criticism.

Behind the Barn at the CIA

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.15.2007 - 11:12 AM

Whom should the CIA hire? With the United States engaged in a war in which intelligence is the critical front, finding the best and brightest and putting them in charge of counterterrorism and related black arts is an essential task.

The good news is that the CIA is being flooded with applicants at the staggering rate of 10,000 a month. The bad news is that the process of sifting and screening these aspiring spies remains distorted.

One problem is an affirmative-action program that seeks to replicate the ethnic balance in the United States rather than focus singlemindedly on hiring men and women steeped in knowledge of our adversaries. Another is a security-screening program that remains ferociously suspicious of applicants with foreign roots. A third is an organizational culture that in some measure remains, despite radical changes introduced after September 11, risk averse.

How can we do better? One place to begin is by looking at what has worked, and/or failed to work, in the past.

The Right Man, The Right Post

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

10.15.2007 - 10:35 AM

In recent days we’ve seen two significant Iraq-related pieces in the Washington Post. The first is a front-page story today by Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq Reported Crippled.” The second is a Post editorial from Sunday, “Better Numbers: The evidence of a drop in violence in Iraq is becoming hard to dispute.”

The Ricks-DeYoung article begins this way:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al Qaeda in Iraq in recent months . . .

The Post editorial concludes this way:

[I]t’s looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus’s credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq’s bloodshed were—to put it simply—wrong.

These two pieces underscore the military progress we’ve seen this year in Iraq since General David Petraeus took command and began implementing what is clearly, and at this point almost inarguably, the right strategy in Iraq. And it makes one wonder what complicated set of factors was driving the recent remarks of retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commanding general Iraq in 2003-2004, when he said about Iraq that the United States is “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Sometimes Ignorance Really is Bliss

Gabriel Schoenfeld 10.15.2007 - 10:05 AM

We Americans pride ourselves on our “right to know,” guaranteed by our free press and the sweeping words of our Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

But do we also have an equally important right not to know? The idea sounds absurd, but I am an avid defender of this peculiar right and I explain why here in the latest Weekly Standard.

Candidate Gore?

Gary Rosen 10.15.2007 - 8:58 AM

It is hard to begrudge Al Gore his consolation prizes, first the Academy Award and now the Nobel for peace. None of it quite makes up for the bitter loss of the 2000 election, but his concern about the climate “emergency,” as he invariably calls it, is long-standing and plainly sincere. The issue has preoccupied him for decades and now, thanks in no small measure to his efforts, it preoccupies a great many people all around the world. Such influence is rare, even for Presidents.

But there is no prize like the Oval Office, and Gore knows it. His latest best-seller, The Assault on Reason, is a peculiar distillation of the hurts and grievances that still weigh on him from 2000 (see my review of the book in the September issue of COMMENTARY). Will he run again? Can the prophet return from the wilderness? Some Democrats hope so, as the “Draft Gore” campaign suggests, and Gore himself has not absolutely ruled out the possibility. But it won’t happen.

It is not just that Gore is fat and happy these days, basking in a kind of popular adulation that he never knew even at the height of his political success. Nor is it that he has now reached a plane above mere politics, which has become the conventional wisdom among Democrats eager to keep him from joining the race. “Why would he run for President when he can be a demigod?” Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and Democratic strategist, told the Times with an apparently straight face. “He now towers over all of us because he’s pure.” This will be news to anyone who has dipped into Gore’s virulently partisan book or heard him speak lately in something other than his unctuous “save the planet” mode.

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