George Will Previews SOTU, Takes Shot at Ex-POTUS
Forgive me for this one, peter, we know you’re a fan, but it’s too good to pass up:
Regarding cynicism, Jimmy Carter, an even worse ex-president than he was a president, responded to the Hamas victory by quickly suggesting a way to evade the U.S. law against providing funds to terrorists. He suggested that the executive branch of the U.S. government could launder money destined for Hamas, passing it through the United Nations. This suggestion has a certain piquancy, coming as it does from someone who was elected president as a national penance for President Nixon’s lawlessness, and coming as it does after the oil-for-food program in Iraq, which demonstrated the United Nations’ financial aptitude.
Read the whole thing; it’s a little unfocused, but vintage Will…
OK, I’ll take the bait.
1) George Will mischaracterizes what Carter actually said:
He added that if international law barred donor countries from directly funding a Hamas-led government than the US and the EU should bypass the Palestinian Authority and provide the “much-needed” money to the Palestinians via non-governmental channels such as UN agencies.
“Regardless of the government, I would hope that potential donors find alternative means to be generous to the Palestinian people [even] if the donor decides to bypass the Palestinian government completely,” Carter said, stressing that his main concern was to avert the “suffering” of the Palestinian people, which he said could lead to a new cycle of violence.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1137605924691&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
What Carter is advocating is not supporting Hamas — it is supporting the Palestinians through NGO’s if necessary. Nor is it “money laundering” through the UN. If George Will wants to let the Palestinians starve: fine, let him say it. He shouldn’t criticize people suggesting alternatives.
2) The implication in Will’s piece is that Western governments should stop all aid to Palestine immediately. There are legitimate arguments to be made for this position. However — putting aside the suffering of the Palestinians — there is also the very real possibility that Hamas will turn to Iran to be its sponsor. As noted elsewhere, Iran is the country which saw the most benefit from our invasion of Iraq. With Saddam gone, they have lost an implacable foe; they are more aggressive now that our troops are bogged down next door; and they can extend their influence in Iraq through the Shia. If Will is comfortable having their influence extend into Palestine, he ought to say it. Otherwise, it is foolish to dismiss the one source of leverage we have with Palestine: aid.
3) Will also mischaracterizes the Times piece on Haiti. The point of the article was that US diplomacy was undercut by a tax-funded group which represented itself as the true voice of the Bush administration to both the rebels and the Aristide government. The article was thorough, well-documented, and showed how ideologues allied with the Bush administration worked directly against the State Department and led to the misery which is now Haiti. This is not a matter of nation-building or having “more deft” diplomacy: it’s a question of having minimally competent diplomacy and not allowing ideologues to run foreign policy. Read the article. It is nothing like what Will portrays.
4) Will can dump on Jimmy Carter all he wants, but an inescapable fact remains. Tens of thousands of people died because of George Bush’s mistake. For the first time in modern history, America launched a war against a country which did not attack us, in search of weapons which did not exist. The rest of the world feels, with some justification, that we are an aggressive and belligerent country. In my view, this so tips the scale that any comparison between Carter and the current occupant of the White House is risible.
Hey, I said I was sorry, but that I couldn’t resist…look, I can’t pretend to believe Jimmy Carter was a great president. I think Bush has done things, good things, that will reverberate through time, such as the deposing of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein (who killed more people than the Iraq invasion in a typical year, intentionally).
I hear Jimmy Carter talk about human rights, but I can’t think of anything he did that remotely freed so many from tyranny as either of those actions of GWB’s…
Well, I don’t think Carter was a great President either — but I don’t think he was awful. Somewhere in between.
Not to be contrary, but the things I see reverberating through time because of the Bush Presidency: huge deficits, broken alliances, a general disgust through the world at American foreign policy, a huge medical entitlement, and a weakened armed forces, as well as a lack of progress on the environment, health care, dependence on foreign oil, or American competitiveness.
And as for purportedly killing less people than Saddam Hussein — an unverifiable claim, as we don’t know how many people Hussein killed, nor do we know how many people died as a result of the invasion — do you really want to make your case by suggesting that Bush didn’t kill as many people as Hussein did?
Absolutely not – our deaths were accidental incidents in a time of war – his were cold-blooded murders – I would never dream of comparing the two, that would be morally reprehensible.
We can verify the number of deaths – the mass graves speak volumes…
Do you really want to make your case by suggesting Saddam didn’t butcher thousands upon thousands?…
Of course not — he was a butcher and there is no doubt about it.
However, while our intentions were certainly nobler than Hussein’s, an innocent who died in his prison or because a bomb fell on them is still dead. You can’t excuse the deaths of those who died as a result of our invasion because our intentions were good.
As for the number of deaths resulting from our invasion: we just don’t know. It is ludicrous to suggest that we know how many people died as a direct result of American firepower, as well as secondary effects (hospitals closed because of the war, lack of electricity, etc.). Even if the deaths we caused were 10% less, 20% less, whatever: does that really affect the issue?
“a general disgust through the world at American foreign policy…”
That’s quite true, actually. Our enemies really liked us, so much so that Soviet hegemony increased dramatically, in spite of the great President’s shaking of his finger and moralizing ad nauseum.
Oh yeah, the Russians and other despicable dictatorships loved our fearless leader – particularly when he cut our military’s budget to almost zero. They were absolutley crestfallen when he left the world’s stage (too bad he didn’t have the deceny to stay off of it).
According to the Wallstreet Journal’s bipartisan scholarly rankings of US presidents (except William Henry Harrison and James Garfield), Jimmy Carter comes in 34th out of 40. James Taranto’s accompanying column explains why presidents fell where they did: the great and near-great presidents faced unprecedented challenges, resonded boldly, and succeeded (ACW, Great Depression, WWII). The above average and high-end average presidents were bold and ambitious, but things didn’t quite work out (Versailles, Vietnam). Failures and below average presidents, like Jimmy Carter, either sat back and did nothing during crises (oil embargo? we can fix that with sweaters) or responded in a way that was so foolish it produced disastrous results (Operation Eagle Claw).
link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007243
Well, rather than compare death tolls, my preferred argument is to compare life expectancy – not how long the average Iraqi will live, but what they can expect out of life…and it seems to me that a life that was once dead for most, if not all of them, now holds some degree of promise…
Bullseye Mark!
>……and it seems to me that a life that was once dead for most, if not all of them, now holds some degree of promise…
hamass negotiating position.
Source: UPI
Hamas calls withholding aid ‘blackmail’
Date: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:40:41 AM EST
RAMALLAH, Gaza, Jan. 31 (UPI) — The newly elected Palestinian Hamas party on Tuesday denounced as blackmail international demands it drop its resistance to Israel to keep foreign aid flowing.
At a meeting Monday in London, officials from the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations said it was inevitable that some $1 billion in aid to any new government would be reviewed in the light of Hamas’ refusal to accept Israel’s statehood, the Financial Times reported.
But Tuesday, various Hamas officials spoke out, the BBC said.
“Hamas is immune to bribery, intimidation and blackmail,” Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ overall leader, wrote in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday.
He called on other Arab states to increase aid, saying that Palestinians should not wait for aid from countries that attach “humiliating conditions to every dollar or euro.”
For its part, Israel is debating whether to withhold a regular monthly payment to the new PA administration of about $50 million in tax revenues on Wednesday, the BBC said.
Well, I dunno. For much of Iraq, there is no security, electricity is intermittent, hospitals are overwhelmed, and people die in random acts of violence. If you want to make the case that this is all justified because life now “now holds some degree of promise,” then you have a tough putt to sink. Somehow I think it will be quite some time before you see Dick Cheney Boulevard or Donald Rumsfeld Avenue in Baghdad.
Not at all…it’s the easiest case in the world to make…have you seen the polls showing the Iraqi people’s optimism? It’s sky-high…
peter, I usually give some ground, but not on this one…
An uncertain prospect of success versus a surety of life under the thumb of a tyrant? And you consider that questionable?
Nonsense…
Well, I don’t know about the sky-high optimism bit. I did a little research and found the following compendium of public opinion surveys in Iraq:
http://www.iraqanalysis.org/info/55
It appears that a) results are all over the map – some surveys indicate optimism, others pessimism, and b) when you take the Kurds out of the sample, you get results that point towards a very negative Iraqi perception of the invasion and the occupation.
Also, polls can be misleading because they are based on averages – if I told you that you have to cross a lake that is on average five feet deep, I haven’t really told you that much. Depth of feeling counts as much as breadth of sentiment. If the Sunnis and the Kurds both think that everything is hunky dory but the Sunnis are so pissed off that they are willing to continue the insurgency for years, I don’t think you have a recipe for sustainable success.
Well, this is too wonky for my tastes when we are talking about a core principle: liberty.
Patrick Henry did not say, after all, give me a recipe for sustainable success or give me death…
Peter…
As usual, I hardly know where to begin…
(1) “For the first time in modern history, America launched a war against a country which did not attack us…”
You mean except for the Korean War, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan, as well as a dozen smaller scale conflict like Grenada, Somalia and Libya?
(2) “And as for purportedly killing less people than Saddam Hussein — an unverifiable claim…”
Only in a post-modernist fantasy in which facts don’t exist. The total number killed in three years of war is about a factor of three lower than those killed by Hussein in an average year of his multi-decade reign. Responding by pointing out that our numbers might be off by 10% or so just makes it sound like you don’t do math good. (which reminds me… it’s fewer people)
The point, I believe, is that if you’re going to blame George Bush personally for the deaths his actions caused, any honest analysis would also credit him for the lives he saved — easily many times larger.
1) The four most probable outcomes in Iraq are these: civil or ethnic war which tears the country apart (e.g., the pissed off Sunnis mentioned above); a theocracy or a democratically elected but unsavory regime (e.g., Hamas); the re-emergence of another strongman; and a functioning democracy. You clearly believe in Door Number Four. I think it is way too early – maybe years too early – to make that call. So while I know what Patrick Henry said – we’re hardly at the point where anyone can say that the Iraqis live in liberty.
2) I should have rephrased my sentence to read “attacked us or an ally,” defining an ally broadly enough to include a race of people (Kosovo, Somalia). However, this is a distinction without a difference. In Iraq, we were not defending anyone and we were not responding to a provocation. We fired the first shot. Initiating a pre-emptive war is far different than, for example, defending an occupied Kuwait in Gulf War I.
3) How do you know how many people died as a result of our invasion of Iraq? For that matter, how would you know how many people died under Hussein? There are simply no hard data to rely on. People can speculate all they want, but, as the saying goes, opinions are like certain body parts, everybody has one.
4) Is it true that “less people” is incorrect English? I’m not disagreeing – but I’m really curious why that phrase is incorrect –
US and British fighters patrolling the no-fly zones (put in place to prevent Saddam from using chemical attacks against those who resided in his country) were subject to irregualr ground fire by the Iraqi military.
I’m not sure what your point is — you’re suggesting that this justifies invading Iraq?
My response to your possible outcomes argument, peter, would be this: there was one possible outcome had the U.S. not invaded: life under the tyrant, followed by life under the tyrant’s sadistic son…
Or not: Caucesceau no longer rules Romania and Hoxsa no longer rules Albania. Both were removed from office by their own people. Pol Pot and Idi Amin no longer terrorize their people. American military force is not the only way in which dictators are removed from power.
“Pol Pot and Idi Amin no longer terrorize their people.”
So by your own calculus here, even though the aforementioned murdered millions of their own people, they were eventually toppled from within – so why interfere?
So by your calculus, we should have invaded Cambodia? Uganda? What about Cuba? North Korea? Stalinist Russia? Maoist China? Iran? Burma?
I believe that some regimes are so odious that they forfeit the right of sovereignty. However, I don’t think that it is the obligation of the US to invade countries, regardless of how brutal their leader is. I do not believe that it is the right of any single country to invade another country unless it has been attacked, or faces a clear and present danger that it will be attacked imminently.
Well, there goes D-Day, then…after all, it was the Japanese who attacked us at Pearl Harbor…
Peter-
Do you consider claims that on the order of six million people died in concentration camps in Europe during WWII to be established fact or mere speculation?
It seems rather convenient to dismiss facts you don’t like with phrases like “[t]here are simply no hard data.” Are you seriously suggesting that our current estimates, for example, of the dead in the Iran-Iraq war might be wrong by a factor of ten?? Or are you rather trying to rhetorically conflate a reasonable ten percent uncertainty with a total lack of information in order to dismiss inconvenient facts?
Re: “less” and “fewer” ( — a pedantic difference. I just put it in there because I liked the irony of putting it right after my own deliberately ungrammatical “do math good”.)
It’s the difference between things that you count (e.g. jelly beans) and things that you measure (e.g. water) — you have less water in your glass than I do, but I have fewer jelly beans.
Mark: not at all — our allies were attacked by the Germans, we had the perfect right to defend them –
Clint: of course the Holocaust is established fact. The estimate of six million is considered reliable because the Germans were obsessive record-keepers and there is lots of hard data to support this estimate.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no similar data for Iraq. There are no census takers recording how many people died from bombs and ordnance, much less how many died from secondary effects such as hospitals which lacked supplies or electricity due to the war. There is no organization — not the US military, nor the Iraqi government, nor anyone else — which compiles this information. I don’t see how you could possibly say that more Iraqis died under Hussein than due to the invasion when nobody really knows how many people died as a result of the invasion.
There are no inconvenient facts I am trying to dismiss. Of course many people died under Hussein. I don’t dispute that. I just don’t see how you can accept as an a priori truth that more people died as a result of his rule than because of the invasion without facts to support it.
sorry, meant to write “there are lots of hard data”
peter, sorry, my friend, it’s time to put an end to this charade:
“Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam’s needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam’s reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power”
But such facts are not enough — because for him the true question is whether civilians killed by the war are “unnecessary”. I need to ask whether he thinks the civilian deaths were necessary or not. I clearly believe they were necessary to oust Saddam and save the lives he would have murdered, to free the children from prison, etc. — in fact more necessary than the atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender If Mr. Crow is willing to accept Muslim fanatic terrorists with WMDs, or Muslim theocracy, rather than fight for Western/ Christian/ Capitalist/ Freedom, then indeed comparing death rates doesn’t mean much”.
Ronald Hilton – 4/25/03
100,000 murdered Kurds in one operation alone – and back to the D-Day analogy…Germany attacked our allies, you say…well, Israel is our ally, and Saddam paid the families of suicide bombers, not to mention the plot to kill Bush I, and the attacks on our planes enforcing the UN-sponsored no-fly-zone.
Really, this is not a debate – the facts point in one direction only…
Some other examples of why the Butcher of Baghdad earned his name:
Under Saddam’s regime many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions – the vast majority of them Muslims.
According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, “victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks… some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage.”
Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered.
Allegations of prostitution used to intimidate opponents of the regime, have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women.
Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. o The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Iraq’s 13 million Shi’a Muslims, the majority of Iraq’s population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.
According to Human Rights Watch, “senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south.” Refugees International reports that the “Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government’s campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran.”
The U.S. Committee for Refugees, in 2002, estimated that nearly 100,000 Kurds, Assyrians and Turkomans had previously been expelled, by the regime, from the “central-government-controlled Kirkuk and surrounding districts in the oil-rich region bordering the Kurdish controlled north.”
“Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living.” (Prime Minister Tony Blair, March 27, 2003) o Under the oil-for-food program, the international community sought to make available to the Iraqi people adequate supplies of food and medicine, but the regime blocked sufficient access for international workers to ensure proper distribution of these supplies. o Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition forces have discovered military warehouses filled with food supplies meant for the Iraqi people that had been diverted by Iraqi military forces.
The Iraqi regime has repeatedly refused visits by human rights monitors. From 1992 until 2002, Saddam prevented the UN Special Rapporteur from visiting Iraq.
The UN Special Rapporteur’s September 2001, report criticized the regime for “the sheer number of executions,” the number of “extrajudicial executions on political grounds,” and “the absence of a due process of the law.”
Executions: Saddam Hussein’s regime has carried out frequent summary executions, including: o 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 1984 o 3,000 prisoners at the Mahjar prison from 1993-1998 o 2,500 prisoners were executed between 1997-1999 in a “prison cleansing campaign” o 122 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/March 2000 o 23 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in October 2001 o At least 130 Iraqi women were beheaded between June 2000 and April 2001
Now, here is the latest from Iraqi Body Count (an anti-war but generally fair source) for civilians killed (not by the U.S., mind you, but total civilians killed) in the Iraq war: between 28,287 and 31,891…a horrifying thought, yes, but an order of magnitude less than Saddam’s intentional butchery…
OK, let’s assume that your numbers are correct: “70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.”
Let’s also assume that, as you cite, the number of Iraqi civilians dead is 30,000. Add 2,250 American dead. How many Iraqi soldiers died? We don’t know — let’s guess 20,000. Could be more, could be less. Now how many people died as a result of the secondary effects of the war? Again, we don’t know – let’s assume that is also 20,000. The total is 72,250.
It’s been roughly one thousand days since we invaded Iraq. That yields a mortality rate of 72 per day. Order of magnitude less than Saddam? Seems pretty close to me…
peter, come on…I give you citations, you pull figures out of the air, and then you compare deaths in wartime to everyday murder by a tyrant…
I’m going to have to let this one go…I’m losing both my patience and my cool at this pointless exercise in moral relativism…
Not to beat a dead horse, but that’s exactly the point: nobody knows these things, so you have to pull numbers out of the air –
Well, no, I don’t concede the point…there are established ways of estimating these things, and human rights groups and other organizations have followed precise methodologies in coming up with their figures…
In any event, and this is truly my final word, though you and others are of course free to continue to discuss it:
Even if the numbers were one for one, any deaths we caused were unintentional and aimed at freeing the Iraqis from tyrany…and that makes all the difference in the world…some things are worth living for, and some are even worth dying for…