Quote/Unquote 2006 Feb.

Bush has all along made the mistake of playing to Muslim leaders rather than to Muslim publics. Yet he has at the same time undermined authoritarian leaders with his talk of spreading democracy. So a military dictator like Pervez Musharraf, who intervened to corrupt the 2002 Pakistani parliamentary elections, lacks legitimacy according to Bush's rhetoric even as Bush pals around with him and makes him as an individual the cornerstone of US policy in that part of the world.

JOHN Howard's Australia is a solid, sandstone institution, civilised and exemplary, like a private school in fine repair. But wait, what's all that noise? Where's the teacher? Who's in charge? In History House, where the nation's biography should be sagely intoned by dignified experts for the edification of the class, behold a disgraceful mess: pandemonium. Little piles of history lie about, higgledy-piggledy. Some people are on the floor engaged in riotous creative play, others stand about squabbling over how to tidy it all safely away.

BOB GARFIELD: When you read criticism of the press in general, that it is somehow so fixated on bad news that it doesn't report the good, that it's essentially suppressing the good news out of Iraq, what do you all say to one another? How do you react?

FARNAZ FASSIHI: I can just say that if there were five car bombs going off in New York and 50 people kidnapped a day, I'm sure that metro reporters would be writing those stories and not talking about the school that was painted.

In 1960 about 80 million people in the U.S. lived in coastal areas, including the Great Lakes. Thirty years later population in those areas was about 110 million. By 2010 the figure is predicted to be 127 million.

Mike McCurry, who was President Bill Clinton's press secretary a decade ago, is kicking himself to this day for ever allowing the White House briefings to be televised live."It was a huge error on my part," Mr. McCurry recalled the other day after watching a relentless White House press corps badger Scott McClellan, the current White House press secretary, about a hunting accident in which Vice President Dick Cheney shot a friend, Harry M. Whittington, and delayed telling the news media about it."It has turned into a theater of the absurd."

WEEK of February 20, 2006

The Nixon-China analogy is growing stale. Every time an extremist takes power anywhere, the starry-eyed immediately trot out the"but it took Richard Nixon to go to China" example as evidence that the newest ideologue to win an election will pull a 180 once he's in office.

Using this logic, Hamas, now that it has been elected to lead the Palestinian legislature, is in a position both to make peace with Israel and to make it stick, something the more moderate Fatah could not do.

Unfortunately, the Nixon analogy probably doesn't apply here. Nixon was a pragmatist, not an extremist. Nor was his opposition to recognition of the People's Republic of China the centerpiece of his worldview. He did recognize China but only because he wanted to. At this point, there is no evidence whatsoever that the leaders of Hamas-in contrast to many of the people who voted for them-want normal relations with Israel. That does not mean they won't move toward a policy of peaceful coexistence, but if they do, it will not be by choice but because Hamas feels compelled by outside pressure or, more likely, internal necessity.

I attended the president's inauguration in 2001. When he took the presidential oath, I cried. What was I so afraid of? I was weeping because I was terrified that the new president would wreck the economy and muck up my drinking water. Isn't that adorable? I lacked the pessimistic imagination to dread that tens of thousands of human beings would be spied on or maimed or tortured or killed or stranded or drowned, thanks to his incompetence.

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians....

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. [J. William] Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped"declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

[Richard] Carwardine, whose previous books include"Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America," lingers longest [in his new biography] on Lincoln's considerable ability to rally evangelical Northern Protestants to the flag by nourishing the millennial belief that they were God's chosen people, defending what was truly"the last, best hope on earth" against"all the powers of hell." This was no mean feat, coming from a man who had been suspected of agnosticism or atheism for most of his life. Yet by the end, while still a religious skeptic, Lincoln, too, seemed to equate the preservation of the Union and the freeing of the slaves with some higher, mystical purpose.

WEEK of February 13, 2006

For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present.

Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief.

But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing.

Man bites dog; dog bites man; vice president shoots friend.

WEEK of February 6, 2006

You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we'll also know how you feel.

Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her,"Write this one in your diary, Anne." But I still don't know how you feel. I still don't feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don't feel your rage. I don't feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.

At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don't just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.

If you had to date it, you could say that our permanent energy crisis began, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day, 2006, when Russia's state-owned natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, cut off gas deliveries to Ukraine in punishment for that country's pro-Western leanings. Although Gazprom has since resumed some deliveries, it is now evident that Moscow is fully prepared to employ its abundant energy reserves as a political weapon at a time of looming natural gas shortages worldwide. It won't be the last country to do so in the years to come. In just the few weeks since then, the world has experienced a series of similar energy-related disturbances

The cartoon protesters--and the nations stirring them on--have done something I thought was impossible impossible--they have united the listserv!

To a person, everyone writing in, Left, Right Or Center, has been appalled by the propensity of the protesters to blindly lash out at the norms and traditions that hold democratic, pluralistic societies together, as well as their contempt for any religious beliefs other than their own. Those who seek to destroy democracies from without or within in the name of religious fanaticism and nationalistic zeal or to intimidate their citizens into relinquishing precious freedoms will discover a suprising unity and determination among people who may disagree on almost everything else. It takes a lot to make Americans band together across lines of race, region and political conviction, but the attackers on September 11 managed to do so, and so are the protesters advocating violent attacks and propogating"Springtime for Hitler" style humor.

What is especially gratifying to me is that no one on the listserv has promulgated sweeping attacks on Islam as a religion; rather, people have come together in defending freedom of expression and traditions of racial and religious tolerance that all Americans benefit from and the human rights pioneers like Dr King fought and died for.

Thank you all for being there and for standing together in this difficult time!

Senator John Warner upbraided Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the mistakes made in Iraqi reconstruction. Rumsfeld now says that rebuilding Iraq's infrastructue could take decades and that the US should not make Iraqis"dependent" (apparently by helping them out of the mess Bush and Rumsfeld have made of the country). Rumsfeld, whose administration of Iraq has been the most corrupt Western government of a colony since King Leopold of Belgium looted the Congo, had the gall to blame Iraqi problems on Iraqi corruption.