Which GOP lawmaker has vowed not to “cut and run” — from Tom DeLay? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
“Hitler was a bad man, but what’s wrong with having food here?” That’s what Ashwini Phadnis has to ask Jews upset about the opening of a Hitler-themed restaurant in Kharghar, India near Bombay. More here. As Mike Crowley notes the guy at the end of one of these articles who says naming a restaurant “Hitler’s Cross” is just like naming a place “George Bush Footwear” seems to have lost the plot.
I’m surprised, though, that nobody seems to be making the analogy that actually is appropriate here — plenty of businesses operate on a Communism theme. When I lived in the Boston area, I used to go to People’s Republic in Central Square. When I’m in New York City I’ve been known to frequent KGB Bar and while I think it may have closed, Nikita on MacDougal Street was definitely more Nikita Khruschev than La Femme Nikita.
I don’t really understand why we have this particular convention in the West. If you actually went around singing Stalin’s praises people would be horrified. But Communist kitsch is fine. Nazi kitsch, however, is not. You can see why Indians might find this nonsensical and think that calling a spot Hitler’s Cross is no more an offensive endorsement of the Holocaust than calling a place KGB Bar is a pro-GULAG statement.
Comparative kitschology aside, let’s return to the subject of Republicans more or less openly demanding that the intelligence community start cooking the books on Iran intelligence. Laura Rozen, doing some guest-blogging for Kevin Drum, wonders has “the marketing campaign against Iran begun?”
In various ways, I think it’s been under way for a while, but clearly things are kicking into a new gear. As I was saying yesterday, this is part of the meaning of the President’s embrace of the “Islamic fascism” locution. If the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, then a big confrontation with Iran is psychotic. But if the United States is at war with Islamic fascism, then the term fits the Iranian regime about as well (or as poorly) as it fits al-Qaeda, so we may as well start a war with Iran. Note that although the administration itself didn’t play this particular card in selling the Iraq War the basic structure of how the sales pitch goes was previewed in Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. He argued that al-Qaeda should be seen as a species of “Muslim totalitarianism” and that Baathist Iraq was also a species of Muslim totalitarianism, and that, therefore since we were at war with the one we should also be at war with the other.
Bush and Cheney, of course, preferred the more straightforward gambit of simply implying that Saddam was behind 9/11 but the blueprint for the semantic switcheroo is already out there. And now we have the demands for the intelligence to be cooked up to order.
Democrats had better be prepared to confront this business aggressively. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that they won’t be. Months and months ago when the groundwork for all this was being laid by conservative pundits and so forth I made it a habit to ask every Democratic politician I came across whether or not they were prepared for Iran to be an issue in the ’06 midterms. Absolutely none of them seemed to be. People were either confident it wouldn’t come to that, confident they could gin up a counter-pan if it did come to that, or else just expressed outrage at the idea that the GOP might politicize national security. But of course the GOP will politicize national security. What’s more, they should politicize national security — it’s an important and legitimate issue in political debates. Democrats can’t just plead for the refs to call a foul, they need to try to engage in this debate and win it.
Thanks to a reader’s observation, I find myself reading the House Intel report (PDF) on Iran and wondering why the missile range graphic shows the missiles being fired from Kuwait rather than, say, Iran. Note also that the outer circles describes the range of a missile that doesn’t exist.
Bad news for journos: Yesterday a federal judge ordered a probe into the leak of an investigation’s details to CBS, the third inquiry of its kind in the past two years.
Even worse, the judge also ruled it was acceptable for the government to spy on anyone who handles government information “not generally available to the public”– a category which seems to cover any reporter worth his or her salt.
From reader J.L.:
On Foxnews just now, they started up two big new themes. Richard Minter was the guest.
Theme number 1 – Iran is a bigger security threat and more important to deal with quickly than Bin Laden.
Theme number 2 – Iran is supporting Bin Laden anyway, via their intelligence services and funding, so going after Iran is really the same thing as getting Bin Laden.
I’m imagining a good roundtable discussion — Minter versus Laurie Mylroie on the subject of whether Saddam or Ahmadenijad was the real culprit on 9/11. Anyways, I guess I’ve been remiss in my Lieberblogging . . . any reader intel on what Connecticut’s favorite independent has said about Iran recently?
Lots and lots of interesting email on the “Hitler’s Cross” restaurant topic. If this blog had comment threads, it’d be a hell of a good one. Fortunately, I’ve set up a thread for discussion purposes over at the Cafe. Beyond that, let me just quote one message from D.G. because I went to summer camp with him he’s a bona fide Jewish resident of Bombay:
I just wanted to weigh in on the whole Hitler’s Cross Restaurant thing as an honest to god Jewish resident of Bombay. (No kidding, I don’t know if you heard, but I got sick of Washington and wanted an adventure. I have outsourced myself to Bombay. It’s actually pretty awesome, Hitler theme restaurants aside.) First of all, though it’s obvious, I think it’s important to note that the guy fairly explicitly wants, and has received, attention, and he’s gotten it, even if he’s already been forced to change the name. He’s really more Paris Hilton than David Duke. Secondly, Hitler would almost certainly not be terribly pleased with the of idea of an Indian restaurant/hookah bar bearing his name. It’s a little ethnic for him.
That being said, there is an incredible amount of Hitler fascination in India, often tinged with Nazi-sympathy. I noticed this weeks ago, well before this whole restaurant thing blew up. I think there are two reasons for this. A) Hitler and the Indians were to some extent on the same side, and even though Indians know that they shouldn’t like him, they tend to appreciate his role in breaking Britain’s back, and B) they think that if anyone could have made the trains run on time in this country it would have been Hitler. (They’re wrong in that respect, by the way. No one could organize this place.)
I had a surprising conversation with a friend who said that yes, the holocaust was bad, but he heard that the autobahn is the best highway system in the world, and you have to keep things in perspective. (Given that Bombay’s big modern highway has a posted speed limit of 50 km/h, which it’s hard to imagine anyone ever achieving, building an awesome highway system does probably overshadow 13 million or so murders.) Another friend told me about how her husband used to learn all about how great Hitler was by the priests at his catholic school (one wonders what Pope Ratzinger would think about this.) She did, however, seem a bit freaked out by that. You can buy Mein Kampf at the Indian equivalent of Barnes and Noble, with a forward by some Indian guy talking about how everything must be read in it’s context blah blah blah. Anyway, the holocaust is all quite far from here, as are most Jews and Gypsies and (at least uncloseted) Gays. My friends are very concerned about my feeling uncomfortable, but once they realized I wasn’t particularly horrified, they all wanted to be the first to take me.
Food for thought? It’s certainly something. At any rate, in my initial post I wasn’t trying to say that Nazi kitsch and Soviet kitsch are exactly the same. Rather, I just wanted to note that our conventions in the USA treat them very differently for reasons that are non-obvious and possibly not totally comprehensible to people approaching these questions from a different historical background.
Justin Logan writes about the long history of unduly panicked intelligence on Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Lieberman on Iran: Greg Sargent has the excerpts from Joe Lieberman’s appearance on the Glenn Beck show during which Beck said a whole series of absurd things about Iran to which Lieberman happily agreed. The highlight is that Lieberman assented to Beck’s view that “The weapons of mass destruction was a nice side benefit” of the Iraq War, but that fundamentally, “We were trying to go and pop the head of the snake in Iran.”