Continuing my last Spine…
“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine
This was in Baghdad. I am sure that it does not please Allah. Yet it goes on without hesitation. Of course, it pleases his servants.
Also yesterday, but in one of the busiest markets in Lahore, Pakistan, two bombs, 54 murdered, at least 150 maimed.
And don't think these are just occasional skirmishes.
I haven't seen anything by Tom Friedman or Fareed Zakaria about Dubai. But who knows? Maybe they are confiding to their diaries, although I don't think their type enjoys diaries. (I don't like them either, except the diaries of others.) Anyway, there's nothing good to say about Dubai, and Tom and Fareed don't like to displease their friends. Unless they are no longer their friends.
Congressman John Murtha passed away today. Below, you'll find a recent magazine feature that we ran on him--and the town he represented for 36 years.
Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.
But Cohen is a special case. He wrote several pieces from Iran early this year, and anybody reading them would be hard-put to call them other than suck-ups. All of this was before the electoral calamity that befell the country in what Cohen anticipated would be a reaffirmation of the country's "old-itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution." One fact is apparent: this man does his research in Wikipedia. Better than writing from total ignorance, I suppose. Or maybe not. By the way, this column was reprinted by Hezbollah with a macabre cartoon at its side.
"I'm convinced," wrote Cohen in a prior Times column, that "the 'Mad Mullah' caricature of Iran and likening any compromise with it to Munich 1938 ... is misleading and dangerous." Maybe it is. (But it has never been made in this space or any space adjoining.) Still, what's wrong with the Munich analogy? Dachau was opened in March 1933, soon after the Nazis entered the government. Buchenwald welcomed all comers already in 1937.
Cohen's standards for an evil regime are quite specific and tough. He will not judge Tehran harshly until it murders many many Jews. Not that he's especially sensitive about Jews. What he won't contemplate is that Dr. Ahmadinejad is quite serious about with his menacing of Israel. And he hasn't weighed--he will not weigh--the heavy valence of the Iranian president's denial of the Jewish catastrophe.
'Yes, sometimes I go into the room with my advisers and I start shouting. And then they say, 'And then what?'" The question hangs in the perfectly cooled air in Sa'ad Hariri's marble-floored sitting room, where Beirut appears as a sunlit abstraction visible at a distance through thick windows. Hariri's father, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, martyr of the Cedar Revolution, arches his black eyebrows from a giant poster near the sofa, looking out at his son with a sidelong, mischievous glance. "It hasn't been a joyful trip," Sa'ad Hariri is saying.
The Jerusalem theater lights came on, and no man between the ages of 25 and 35 moved. We had just watched Waltz With Bashir, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Chatila massacre. The film deals with Folman's struggle with the surreal trauma that many veterans of that conflict retain.
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
By Ali A. Allawi
(Yale University Press, 518 pp., $28)
