Author: Jonathan Schwarz

For years Peter “Pe-Nart” Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he’s gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it’s only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart’s book The Good Fight that he has reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:

Gerbil narcolepsy sofa-bed detritus squanders Bigfoot. Crapulent snurf machine? Crapulent snurf machine knob knobbler! Groucho lithe koala traipsing noreaster flange mucus. Mithril acne fluffernutter shamus fling-ding-a-ling-doo!

Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to “sit at the center” of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?

You may wonder, then, why Beinart’s saying something so blatantly absurd. The answer is that the “liberalism” he espouses is incoherent. The Cheney platform—Let’s Rule The World By Hate And Fear—at least has an undeniable internal logic. So too does a radical evaluation of U.S. foreign policy. They both tell coherent stories. But the mushy tale “I, Peter Beinart, will run the planet except I’ll be nice” simply doesn’t make sense. Thus he doesn’t have any alternative to saying preposterous things.

This preposterousness reaches its noisy climax when he argues the Bush administration has become “sincere in its commitment to democracy.” Specifically he has in mind Bush himself (!), Wolfowitz (!!), Elliot Abrams (!!!!!!) and arguably Cheney (!!!!!!!$#@#$????).

SURE. They’ve spent their entire careers thwarting democracy in the United States. This indicates their commitment to democracy. Elliot Abrams lied to Congress about Iran Contra. Why? I guess because of his commitment to democracy. Paul Wolfowitz berated the Turkish army, with its long history of coups, for allowing Turkey’s parliament to vote against assisting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That’s thanks to his commitment to democracy. The entire administration lied us into war, then ferociously covered it up. It’s the ultimate commitment to democracy.

Power really does corrupt. And we’ve been so powerful for so long there’s very little left in our political classes but intellectual and moral corruption. That is to say: we’re really in trouble.

BONUS: Beinart also informs us “understanding intellectual history is important not because the historical analogies are exact, but because most people don’t think of great ideas de nouveau.”

That’s right, de nouveau. As long as we have generals who talk like this, I can’t see anything but overwhelming political victory ahead.

UPDATE: Could I have been wrong about the precise nature of Beinart’s gibberish?

The “jihadism at the center of everything” part I still think is absolutely meaningless. But I believe Jethro, commenting here, is correct that I misunderstood Beinart—that rather than meaning global warming et al are greater threats to the U.S. than they are to other countries, “Beinart was trying to say terrorism and global warming threaten the US more than any particular country threatens the US.”

Of course, this is still nonsensical. Among Beinart’s chorus line of catastrophe—terrorism, global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion—only global warming might compare to today’s greatest threat to America, which is obviously nuclear weapons. The one thing that currently could actually obliterate us is ICBMs—i.e., Russia’s and perhaps someday China’s nuclear arsenal.

So I may have incorrect about the exact way Beinart wasn’t making any sense. But I remain correct about the overall non-sense making.

As the three recent suicides at Guantanamo have shown, our enemy is even more devious and ruthless than we supposed:

Military officials on Saturday suggested that the three suicides were a form of a coordinated protest.

“They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,” Admiral Harris said. “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

But this doesn’t exhaust the asymmetric tactics they’ve adopted. Reliable sources indicate our terrorist foes are also using these even more appalling methods to attack us:

1. Crying
2. Begging for Mercy
3. Getting Tuberculosis
4. Forcing Us To Torture Them
5. Not Being A Terrorist
6. Being Four Years Old

Both our gracious host Tom Tomorrow and Bob Harris are at YearlyKos. I’m hoping they may check in before too long, but in the meantime you can find a snippet here (scroll down) of Tom Tomorrow’s speech at the reception opening night. There’s more video at Fora TV (free registration required), both from YearlyKos and other interesting venues.

I’m a big fan of “To a Louse”, the 1785 poem by Robert Burns. It’s about how the high and mighty tend to be hilariously oblivious to how ridiculous they appear to everyone else.

For some reason I’m often reminded of it whenever I read the pronouncements of America’s foreign policy elite. For instance, here’s a Weekly Standard piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht about Zarqawi:

Always looking outward toward the larger Sunni Arab world (and away from the Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds, who comprise about 80 percent of Iraq’s population), Iraq’s Sunni Arabs were playing catch-up with their foreign brethren, who had already downgraded, if not buried, secular Arab nationalism as an inspiring ideology and given birth to bin Ladenism.

Let’s see, what’s missing from this brief history of the death of secular Arab nationalism? Oh yeah—the sixty years the United States spent doing everything it could to kill it. I’m sure this just slipped Gerecht’s mind. It’s easy to see how that could happen, since he worked in the Middle East for the CIA for ten years and thus was intimately involved in the killing process. I often forget decades of my life myself.

Also nice is Gerecht’s counsel to Iraq’s Sunnis to “stop using the specter of violence as a negotiating strategy.” Right. I’m sure they’ll get right on that just as soon as the U.S. does—i.e., shortly after the sun explodes.

But this is the very best part:

…the surrounding Arab Sunni world seems quite willing to accept that decent men and women should experience frissons whenever bin Laden launches lethal attacks on the United States.

Gerecht then added, “Now if you’ll excuse me, me and my friends at Project for a New American Century have to go clean up from having jizzed all over ourselves when the U.S. invaded Iraq.”

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion

Here’s Nir Rosen on Zarqawi. Rosen is almost unique among Western journalists in having direct contact with the Iraqi insurgency:

So time to dispel some myths. Zarqawi did not really belong to al Qaeda. He would have been more shocked than anybody when Colin Powel spoke before the United Nations in the propaganda build up to the war and mentioned Zarqawi publicly for the first time, accusing him of being the link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi in fact did not get along with Bin Ladin when he met him years earlier. He found Bin Ladin and the Taliban insufficiently extreme and refused to join al Qaeda or ally himself with Bin Ladin, setting up his own base in western Afghanistan instead, from where he fled to the autonomous area of Kurdistan in Iraq, outside of Saddam’s control, following the US attacks on Taliban controlled Afghanistan in late 2001. Zarqawi only went down into Iraq proper when the Americans liberated it for him. He had nothing to do with al Qaeda until December 2004, when he renamed his organization Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or Al Qaeda in Iraq as it has become known.

Why did he do this? It was a great deal for him and Bin Ladin. Zarqawi needed the prestige associated with the Al Qaeda brand name in global jihadi circles….For Bin Ladin and his deputy Zawahiri it was also a great deal. Al Qaeda was defunct. Its leadership hiding in the Pakistani wilderness, completely cut off from the main front in today’s jihad, Iraq. When Zarqawi assumed the al Qaeda brand name he gave a needed fillip to Bin Ladin who could now associate himself with the Iraqi jihad, where the enemy was being successfully killed every day, and where the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world were turned to, far more than Afghanistan.

Zarqawi was not very important in the first place, and hardly represented the majority of the resistance or insurgency…It took the United States to make Zarqawi who he became. Intent on denying that there was a popular Iraqi resistance to the American project in Iraq, the Americans blamed every attack on Zarqawi and his foreign fighters, and for a while it seemed every car accident in Baghdad was Zarqawi’s fault. The truth was that much of Iraq’s Sunni population, alienated by the Americans who removed them from power and targeted them en masse during raids, supported and participated in the anti American resistance. Even many Shias claimed resistance. Muqtada Sadr, the most powerful and popular single individual leader in Iraq, led two “intifadas” against the Americans in the spring and summer of 2004, and his men still rest on their laurels, claiming they too took part in the Mukawama, or resistance. But by blaming Zarqawi for everything the Americans created the myth of Zarqawi and aspiring Jihadis throughout the Arab world ate it up and flocked to join his ranks or at least send money. Zarqawi was the one defying the Americans, something their own weak leaders in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere, could not do, having sold out long ago. It was then comical when the Americans released the Zarqawi video out-takes and mocked him for fumbling with a machine gun. Having inflated his reputation they were now trying to deflate it. But it was too late.

The rest is here. Also, don’t miss Rosen’s website or his new book, In the Belly of the Green Bird.