Catching My Eye

Tim Cavanaugh on Rafiq Hariri, recently murdered in Lebanon, and what he meant to the Middle East. They killed more than just a politician.

Unlike the self-promoters, family legacies, D.C. con artists, holy men, and stupid grandsons who make up the bulk of the Levant's political class, he was never content merely to talk about the region's problems or enlist foreign patrons to serve his ends. Since 1979, thousands of Lebanese attended college courtesy of Hariri Foundation scholarships. The media empire Hariri built to further his business interests—including the Future television network, al-Mustakbal newspaper, and the only Lebanese radio station I was ever able to listen to for more than five minutes, Radio Orient—set a consistent example of open and diverse media in a country where you still need a government "license" to report about politics. Throughout the war, Hariri maintained construction projects (frequently destroyed) in his birth city of Sidon. In the postwar period, he dwarfed even these projects with his Solidere organization and its massive project to reconstruct downtown Beirut. The heavy-handed methods of Solidere in the 1990s, and the organization's virtual monopoly on local construction projects—roughly coinciding with Hariri's terms as prime minister—were nobody's model of a truly free market (i.e., one that operates through voluntary contract rather than government gamesmanship); and the buildings that resulted are frequently ugly, gaudy, unwelcoming, or all three. But considering the alternative, it's impossible to gainsay Hariri's achievement in Beirut. It's also impossible, considering the measureless obstructive strength of Lebanese society, the structural sickness of the country's economy, and the hostility of the Syrian occupiers to any and all displays of initiative, to imagine anybody else who would have been capable of it.

[Belmont Club has a good round-up of the speculation on who killed him.]

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Paul Campos on Ward Churchill, recently pilloried in America, and what he meant to academe. They dissed more than just a charlatan.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

As someone of generally liberal political inclinations, I support affirmative action in principle. (And I have surely benefited from it in practice: My parents came to this country from Mexico in the year of my birth, and I spoke no English when I started school.) In theory, the argument that aggressively seeking out persons of diverse backgrounds can enrich the intellectual life of the university has great force.

Affirmative action is based, in part, on the idea that it will help us understand the viewpoints of the conquered as well as those of the conqueror, of the weak as well as the strong, of those far from power as well as those who wield it.

Too often, these sentiments are abused by those who sacrifice intellectual integrity while engaging in the most extreme forms of preferential hiring. Ward Churchill's career provides a lurid illustration of what can happen - indeed, of what we know will happen - when academic standards are prostituted in the name of increasing diversity.

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Mary Madigan, filling in for Michael Totten, discovers a fascinating, eccentric brand of "liberal, anti-totalitarian Leftists" in the former East Germany.

A self-described "cosmopolitan communist," Fischer is an activist and publicist for the so-called "Anti-Deutsch," or radically anti-German, pro-Israeli, pro-American position, a minority view among the range of mostly anti-American radical left subject positions in Germany. He had rejected the traditional pro-Palestinian view of the German left (and of the GDR) by adopting a historical narrative of the postwar German state as incurably anti-semitic and potentially (again) genocidal. This is a position that defends the U.S. as the primary ally to Israel, views the September 11th attacks as essentially anti-semitic, accepts the U.S. war in Iraq as necessary to eliminate the "fascist dictator" Saddam Hussein, and believes that "communism can come only after full bourgeois freedom (simply: liberalism) has been spread worldwide."

Well, what do you call that? Right pew, wrong church?

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David Brooks, returning from the grand trans-Atlantic security conference in Munich (the one where Eason Jordan stuck a foot in his own mouth), encounters a Marine usint that lost 22 men in Iraq, and thinks about how he would describe the U.S. dimplomatic effort at Munich to the men who gave their lives in the military arm of the same effort.

The first thing I'd tell these marines is that when these politicians went abroad to represent the U.S., they didn't take their squabbles with them. There were Democrats and Republicans in this delegation, but you couldn't tell who was who by listening to their speeches.

Instead, what you heard were pretty specific, productive suggestions on winning the war against Islamist extremism. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham lobbied for ways to use NATO troops to protect a larger U.N. presence in Iraq. Democratic Representative Jane Harman was pushing the Europeans to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Hillary Clinton suggested ways to strengthen the U.N., while also blasting its absurdities. Clinton affirmed that the U.S. preferred to work within the U.N., but she toughened her speech with ad-libs, warning, "Sometimes we have to act with few or no allies."

The second thing I'd tell them is that the politicians were willing to talk bluntly to the tyrants. McCain sat on a panel with officials from Russia, Egypt and Iran. He began his talk with suggestions on how to use NATO troops in the Middle East. Then it was time for a little straight talk. He ripped the Egyptians for arresting opposition leaders. (The Egyptian foreign minister held his brow, as if in grief.) He condemned the Iranians for supporting terror. (The Iranian hunched over like someone in a hailstorm.) He criticized Russia for embracing electoral fraud in Ukraine. In the land of the summiteers, this was in-your-face behavior.

UPDATE: New Sisyphus read the Brooks piece and liked it, too. And had this observation to add:

We in the Foreign Service are well aware of this fascinating fact; differences that appear so key, so fundamental at home--differences like race, religion, party affiliation, regional origin--all of them seem to disappear in the foreign context. One very quickly realizes that we are a people, with a hell of a lot more in common than you would think were you just to listen to the partisan bickering in Washington. At times, like after Pearl Harbor and September 11, this commoness, this shared ideology, this Americanism bursts through even in the domestic context. We are a people with a shared history and a shared culture just as much as the French, Germans or Japanese.

Yep. That's what makes much of the rest of the world have to go home and change its underwear after seeing us in those mements. Our usual vocal divisions are salve and comfort to them. There's antiAmerican-ism, and there's anti-Americanism, and at this point in history they converge.