Correspondence
Correspondence THE FOG OF PEACE As a big fan of David Brooks, I read with interest "The Fog of Peace" (Sept. 30), his piece on the left's rhetoric opposing U.S. intervention in Iraq. As an active...
...While the vision of some on the left may be clouded by partisanship and conspiracy theory, it does not mean that their caution is misplaced...
...The Voting Rights Act virtually excludes white Democrats from House seats in states subject to it...
...I have been telling friends and family for weeks now "even a broken clock is right twice a day...
...Thus I find myself a staunch supporter of Bush's policies regarding terrorism and Iraq, despite my conviction that his administration's domestic agenda is bankrupt, bordering on criminal...
...In the long run, restraint and vigilance will work better than precipitous violence in proving to the world and to our enemies that America, not Islamic dictatorship, offers the greatest chance for peace, security, prosperity, and human flourishing...
...And of late they have little to apologize for, unlike my erstwhile friends on the left...
...To the extent that they could do so within the constraints of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrat governor and legislature created a grossly gerrymandered scheme for the thirteen new districts...
...But there's a wide gulf between doing nothing and launching a full-scale invasion...
...Its present House delegation consists of eight white Republicans and three African-American Democrats...
...Mr...
...In those states, all other considerations are subordinated to the requirement to maximize minority representation...
...Yet he understates the long-term costs involved...
...Brooks grants that to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of intervention was not to be lost in the persuasive fog...
...In his eagerness to connect twenty-first-century Europe to 1920s Europe, Gelernter ignores the very real possibility that Europeans did learn some things about the causes and effects of imperialism and aggression from the past century—things the United States has so far had the luxury to avoid...
...The war on terrorism, like the Cold War, is fundamentally an ideological war...
...In the eighth, a white Democrat and a white Republican appear to be in a dead heat...
...Unfortunately, this is all at the service of calling into question European attitudes toward the United States and Iraq...
...Even their foreign policy is marred by an absurd rejection of diplomatic norms...
...Even if intervention succeeds temporarily in installing a friendlier regime in Iraq (a big "if"), to dismiss as "Groundhog Day predictions" the likely explosions in the "Arab Street" and the creation of "a thousand new bin Ladens" is as cloudy as any thinking on the fog-bound left...
...KELLI KOBOR Arlington, VA GERRYMANDERING IOWA'S APPROACH TO REDISTRICTING is commendable and appropriate, as described in Fred Barnes's "Where Incumbents Tremble . . ." (Sept...
...Clearly the three African-American districts will remain so (with the welcome elimination of Cynthia McKinney in one of those districts...
...Maintaining the upper hand morally as well as militarily is essential to our ultimate success...
...rudeness for its own sake seems a hallmark of this administration, and it has poisoned the waters for them more than they wish to admit...
...We regret the mistake and apologize to Mr...
...Compactness and attention to communities of interest should be paramount in drawing districts...
...In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was a necessary remedy for deep-seated political discrimination...
...Unfortunately, however, Iowa's approach is not available to states subject to the Voting Rights Act...
...So he told me, 'The door is wide open for speculation.' I said what indicates that Muslims are not behind this operation is the big contradiction between what was said in the biographies of the suspects, that they were drinking alcohol and sleeping with women, and the behavioral biographies of Bin Laden's group...
...It gained two seats in the 2000 census...
...So Bush said, 'This means that if those that carried out the attack were Arabs, then non-Arabs and non-Muslims could be behind them.'" (The White House denied the content of this conversation...
...Hussein is certainly a brutal dictator with imperial ambitions, but he's also a fading and failed imperi-alist—his war with Iran (which, for some reason, the American press keeps forgetting to mention was supported by the Reagan-Bush administration) left his nation depleted, and his invasion of Kuwait was a complete disaster...
...Phew...
...Awad and CAIR for the misattribution...
...As a lifelong Republican I recognize the advantage the act gives to my party...
...Of the other eight districts, white Republicans are heavily favored in seven...
...7), an error in the translation led to the misattribution of a quotation to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR...
...Consider Georgia...
...DAVIS HARTWELL Portland, ME KUDOS TO DAVID BROOKS on his lucid and devastating critique of wishywashy anti-warriors in "The Fog of Peace...
...JESSE FOX MAYSHARK New York, NY CORRECTION IN "CAIR-LESS WITH THE TRUTH," by Jake Tapper (Oct...
...His contrast of the First and Second World Wars highlights important distinctions and rightly questions our tendency to lump them together like a blockbuster film and its sequel (WWI and WWII...
...Awad replied to this comment as follows: "There are theories leading in this direction...
...JAMES F. TRUCKS Alpharetta, GA WWIITHE SEQUEL David Gelernter's "The Roots of European Appeasement" (Sept...
...Nevertheless, I believe the United States would be better served if all states could follow Iowa's approach...
...And there are a range of ideas filling that gulf, both for the United States and Europe...
...That's not to suggest the United States or Europe should simply do nothing about either his pursuit of dangerous weapons or his vicious internal rule...
...It took 40 years, but containment worked against a much greater threat from the Soviet Union than anything posed by Iraq today...
...In my meeting with President Bush and during my conversation with him after last September's events, I said to him that there is talk in the region leading to [the belief that] what happened could not have been carried out by the hand of Muslims or Arabs, due to the gravity and strength of planning and the efficiency of its execution...
...It was not Mr...
...Still, only a fool would argue that Bush and his team have not done tremendously well abroad since September 11...
...Even one bin Laden is too many...
...It's certainly true that Saddam Hussein is more like Hitler than he is like Kaiser Wilhelm II, but he's not really much like either one...
...Bush's hand around the collar of the Rumsfeldian dogs of war has proved more effective, without a single shot being fired, than all the multilateralist drivel of the Clinton years combined...
...As an active Republican, I was particularly interested to see whether my own strenuous objections to such an adventure could be found in that catalogue of confusion...
...Awad but the interviewer, Sanaa Al-Said of the Egyptian newspaper El-Osboa, who said of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, "My belief is that the beneficiary is behind the attack and the biggest beneficiary of the September 11th event is certainly Israel, as it took advantage of it in a wide scale...
...Two other districts are likely to be taken by African Americans, although one of them is in doubt, in part because the Democratic candidate is the son of an ethically challenged state senator who designed the district for his son...
...It has now become a law with unintended consequences...
...23) is fascinating...
...The insistence on seeing Iraq in the light of either example is disingenuous—the circumstances are too different to warrant easy comparisons...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 5
