Scrapbook
Scrapbook A Quagmire for Bush-bashers? He's probably not losing any sleep over it, but George W. Bush has lost the Conde Nast primary (i.e., Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, GQ, et al.). Along with...
...Why Is There Still a War on Drugs...
...Zeyad on Saddam The Iraqi blogger whose photos adorned this page last week was thrown into a depression by the pictures of the captured Saddam...
...All of the glossies are openly hostile...
...He drove off our gallant and too-prescient allies, and Iraq hates us...
...And so, in between the stories about sex and shopping, about crime and scandal, about air-headed film stars (and of course, the ads for things costing obscene sums of money), come all of the hits, not only from regular writers on politics, but from artists, cartoonists, film and food critics, all getting in on the fun...
...Wolf fears "we are losing the battle of ideas and perceptions regarding our intentions and actions abroad...
...Or at least Shays did...
...Look for lots of baffled Conde Nasties next year...
...They assume it has been badly lost...
...If I had a serious health problem and I was not getting better as fast as I wanted to, I'd get a second opinion," he says...
...The finding translates into 400,000 fewer teen drug users over two years...
...After all," he says, "your house is different in the morning than in the evening...
...By the time the issue (a double one, no less) hit the newsstands and door sills, Saddam Hussein had been rousted out of his rathole, James Baker had managed to soften up Europe, coalition forces were rolling up the heroic "resistance" with the help of documents found in Saddam's "spider hole," happy Iraqis had screamed themselves hoarse, and the only civil wars being fought were among the demoralized Democrats...
...Between the teens and the war on terror, that adds up to 400,001 good reasons why there's still a war on drugs...
...Wolf reports distinct progress since a May trip to Iraq, including rebuilt schools, playing fields, and infrastructure...
...Says Bush drug czar John I? Walters: This means "teen drug use has [declined to] a level that we haven't seen in nearly a decade...
...Roughing It in Iraq Virginia congressman Frank Wolf and his colleague Christopher Shays of Connecticut recently returned from a three-day-two-night trip to Iraq that was not your typical jet-in, jet-out congressional junket...
...It was out of a feeling of impotence and helplessness...
...The Navy announced that day that it had intercepted a boatload of hashish in the Persian Gulf...
...At the wedding, Shays and Wolf even partook of the local cuisine...
...Oops...
...This is the question our libertarian-leaning friends were asking over at National Review Online last Friday, December 19...
...In the absence of an Iraqi leader, President Bush holds power...
...Along with Richard Gephardt, the glitziest magazines in the country have come to declare the president a "miserable failure...
...This was just one old disturbed man yet the whole country couldn't dispose of him...
...We "rode in old, beat-up vehicles," Wolf told us, to visit schools, meet with community leaders, and even attend an Iraqi wedding in an alley in Kut...
...Of course, Iraqis won't get to vote for him when they do eventually go to the polls, and for that, at least he can be grateful," writes Philip Gourevitch...
...This idiot Bush lied us into a hell-hole, and then screwed up further...
...I couldn't make myself believe this was the same Saddam that slaughtered hundreds of thousands and plundered my country's wealth for decades...
...Wolf recommends the creation of an independent panel of experts to advise the president on Iraq in "frank, off-the-record discussion" and periodic audits of the situation there by a "team from outside the administration," which Wolf likens to Richard Pipes's "Team B" of outside experts called in during the Ford administration to give the CIA a competing opinion on the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union...
...The controversial anti-drug advertising campaign run by the drug czar's office, one of whose themes—the link between terrorism and revenues from trafficking— was also highlighted on December 19...
...In all of these cases, ran the argument, the terrorists won, and then civil war followed...
...Three of the men on board were believed to have al Qaeda ties...
...The humiliation I experienced was not out of nationalistic pride or Islamic notions of superiority or anything like that...
...They did not identify themselves as congressmen during most of the trip, because "you can find out more if you don't pull up in a Humvee with flak jackets on...
...His explanation is worth pondering: "The images were shocking...
...And they weren't asking it because they think the war has been won...
...That same day, however, the president's Office of National Drug Control Policy released an astonishingly good piece of news: The latest federal survey shows "an 11 percent decline in drug use by 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students over the past two years...
...In a written report, at the press conference, and again in conversation, Wolf reads Matthew 23:12 "because he wants to get this right": "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted...
...Wolf and Shays are the only congressmen to have spent the night in-country since the war, which Wolf says was important "to get a feel for the whole cycle of the day...
...And what was a big factor in changing teen attitudes toward drug use...
...We needed a superpower from the other side of the ocean to come here and 'get him' for us...
...But he frames his objections as constructive criticism...
...Still, he noted with a smile, "this stuff was not my cup of tea, it was some kind of milk," he said, "but lord knows what...
...A cartoon showed a depressed and simian Bush figure up to his gonads in quicksand, and the story around it upped the Vietnam War ante with a still more dispiriting analogy: Algiers...
...Wasn't it another New Yorker writer— Pauline Kael—who said after the 1972 49-state Republican blowout that it was baffling to her how this could have happened, as everyone she knew had supported McGovern...
...Now and then, however, one of these solons gets a little bit over his pay grade, as occurred in the current New Yorker, which led off its "Talk of the Town" column (a fairly dependable Bush-bashing venue) with yet another quagmire story last week...
...When Wolf pointed out that Shays "ate everything on his plate," the Connecticut congressman credited his stomach of steel to the Peace Corps (he served in Fiji...
...Bruce Hoffman, a RAND terrorism expert, was quoted by the AP as calling this "the first empirical evidence I've seen that conclusively links al Qaeda with the drug trade...
...It's no insult to the doctor...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 16
