Tag: Jonah Goldberg

Why Did Bush Invade Iraq? To Curry Favor with the Jews, Of Course

Personally, I think the answer to the question “Why did Bush invade Iraq?” is pretty clear — the administration clearly thought that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons. Hell, Al Gore insisted in late 2002 that Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Both at that time and today I think the administration made a major mistake (one of many involving Iraq) in focusing on WMDs so much and was clearly too insular in critically examining intelligence, but clearly the administration thought that going into the 2004 election it would be able to gloat that it had stopped a terrorist-supporting dictator from potentially turning over WMDs to terrorists.

A popular alternative answer, generally from supporters of the war, suggestion that WMDs were a cover for a broader administration initiative to change the status quo in the Middle East. Certainly this was an important secondary goal — and one that some in the administration probably thought as primary — but the case that this was the main reason for going to war appears to this observer as trying to explain away the intelligence failure over WMDs (which, by the way, has been overblown by administration critics — the lesson of 9/11 was that it is better safe to act on sketchy intelligence than to be sorry later for not having acted decisively and watch a tragedy unfold on national television).

Democrat Sen. Fritz Hollings has a different answer that sounds like it came from some anti-American Middle Eastern newspaper — Bush went to war to appease the Jews.

In an op-ed and then in a speech on the Senate Floor, Hollings asserted that the main reason the Bush administration went to war with Iraq was to try to enhance Israel’s security and to “please American Jews.” And, of course, this wouldn’t be complete without Hollings giving a list of Jews — including columnist Charles Krauthammer and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz — both of whom have publicly supported the view that the United States needed to overthrow Hussein in order to establish democracy in Iraq and thereby hopefully spread it throughout the region.

As Jonah Goldberg noted in National Review, only one politician has gone on record as making the absurd claim that he supported the war against Iraq in order to promote the interests of Israel rather than the United States, and that politician is Hollings, who said in 2003,

The truth is, I thought, we were going in this time for our little friend Israel. Instead of them being blamed, we could finish up what Desert Storm had left undone; namely, getting rid of Saddam and getting rid of (his) nuclear (weapons) at the same time.

Of course Hollings wasn’t the first Democrat to suggest that the real reason for the war was to appease the Jews. Rep. Jim Moran told an anti-war forum in March 2003 that,

If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should.

As Goldberg notes, this idea is just plain nuts. Nationally, Jews are only about 4 percent of the electorate and are disproportionately located in states, such as New York, that are solidly Democratic. As Goldberg writes,

. . . the notion that Bush and Karl Rove are pinning their reelection hopes on winning 10 percent or 20 percent of the Jewish vote by getting America embroiled in a risky, dangerous, and costly war is batty.

But not batty enough for Moran or Hollings.

Source:

The S.C. Senator & the Jews. Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, May 27, 2004.

Jonah Goldberg and Religion

Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg had me laughing out loud today at what I assume is his unintentionally amusing take on something I could care less about — the controversy over Mel Gibson’s film about Christ (now another Lethal Weapon film — that would be an abomination). Goldberg criticizes part of a New Republic story on Gibson’s film, writing,

Still, the New Republic piece suggests Gibson does have a lot to answer for. He claims time and again that he’s simply sticking to the “historical record.” Frederiksen offers some interesting stuff I didn’t know about how mixed the historical record really is. There are major — and often irreconcilable — differences among the various versions of Jesus’ death in the Gospels. More important, Gibson relies on the writings of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich as a “historical” source. But Emmerich, born in 1774, was one of several Nuns who claimed to see visions of the Passion. To use her visions — not her “research” mind you, but her visions — as a historical source isn’t any more legitimate than using Elijah Muhammed’s visions for a film about Mohammed’s life.

Yeah, and then the next thing you know people like this start thinking the visions are from God, and then that they speak for God. Then they attract followers who insist that these are the only true visions from God and before anyone know what happened you’ve got a full-blown religion complete with holidays that have to be neutered for our secular age.

Jonah Goldberg’s Straw Man about the Importance of Web Logs

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has an article in the American Enterprise in which he tries to bring the hype about weblogs down a notch or two. But Goldberg seems to be tilting at windmills. Goldberg’s thesis can be summed up by the final paragraph of his article,

Should the marketplace show its appreciation by generating significant revenue for a blogger, you know what will happen? A big newspaper or magazine will offer him or her a job. ThatÂ’s why McDonaldÂ’s sells fajitas now. And thatÂ’s why bloggers arenÂ’t going to put serious media publications out of business.

But who, other than Dave Winer and Doc Searls, thinks that weblogs are going to replace the traditional media anytime soon?

What weblogs are going to do is gradually take the sort of niche market that magazines like National Review and The Nation currently occupy. Goldberg vastly underestimates the reach that weblogs have in those niches.

Look at the whole Michael Bellesisles controversy, for example. The National Review has certainly done a lot of original reporting on that controversy, but when Glenn Reynolds posted a link to a PDFed law review article on the topic, around 100,000 people (including myself) downloaded it. Does National Review have that kind of reach? I doubt it?

Besides, most of the right and left weblogs represent versions of liberalism and conservatism that often fly in the face of the orthodoxy that afflicts The National Review and The Nation and acts as a filter on what they publish (besides which, those magazines are just plain boring. When Reynolds posted about how much more fun conservatives have, surely he wasn’t talking about the boring folks who inhabit NR’s universe).

Jonah Goldberg on Executing Retarded People

Unlike Jonah Goldberg, I do not support capital punishment, but Goldberg is absolutely right when he argues that the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding the execution of low IQ individuals is inconsistent with the fact that we regularly grant both rights and responsibilities to such individuals. Attacking a New York Times editorial in favor of the ruling, Goldberg writes,

If liberal editorialists want to say that retarded people cannot be held accountable for their actions, fine. But let’s be consistent about this standard. The retarded have voting rights. They can marry, have children and in some cases drive cars.

. . .How can we on the one hand applaud giving major responsibilities to the retarded but on the other hand recoil in horror at the suggestion we hold them responsible when they fail?

Hypocrisy at National Review

National Review Online recently fired columnist dropped syndicated columnist Ann Coulter’s column, whose post-9/11 columns were getting increasingly bizarre. For example, in one column discussing what should be done about the Arabs who were taped celebrating the attack, she suggested that the United States should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “We didn’t feel we wanted to be associated with the comments expressed in those two columns.”

Which would be understandable if Goldberg himself wasn’t in the habit of penning bizarre, borderline racist lines in his own NRO columns. For example, when there was much controversy between the United States and China over the fate of a downed spy plane, Goldberg published a column in which he actually wrote that,

In fact, I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Red Chinese — despite the fact that if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.

Apparently Goldberg has never heard of leading by example.

Will It Be Impossible to Determine Who Won Florida?

Writing for National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg points out that it is very likely that after doing a recount of votes in Florida, the number of votes separating Al Gore and George Bush is likely to be within the margin of error for the counting process.

This means that, theoretically, Florida could do a dozen recounts and get a dozen different results each time. If Gore turns out to win the recount (and it doesn’t look like he will) by a few hundred votes, for example, Bush could sue to get yet another recount only to have that recount put him up by a few hundred votes and the process could go back and forth ad infinitum.

On the other hand, while I am indifferent to whether Gore or Bush wins, the hints that Gore might actively campaign for electors to vote for him rather than Bush is obnoxious. It would be like a football team that loses a game 14 to 9 begging the referee to change the rules so that the team with the most field goals rather than touchdowns wins. It may or may not make sense for touchdowns to count for more points than field goals, or for the electoral system to allow the popular vote loser to take the electoral college, but those are the rules that both teams were operating under when the contest began.

Both the winning football team and Bush would have used different strategies if field goals and popular votes counted more than touchdowns and the Electoral College respectively. Punishing either for playing by the rules of the game does not make any sense.