Drawing Fire

National Review Online, February 6, 2006

It says something for the cowardice, duplicity, and wishful thinking of too many of the West's politicians (and much of its media) that one of the most striking illustrations of the crisis in its relations with the Islamic world has come from twelve mediocre cartoons.

The broad outlines of this saga ought to be familiar, wearily, painfully familiar, but they are still worth tracing back to the beginning, both to clear up some of the distortions that have grown up around it, and to see what the very nature of the controversy itself can tell us. The whole thing began when the Danish children’s writer, Kåre Bluitgen, complained last autumn that he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his forthcoming book about the Prophet Mohammed. He had, he said, been turned down by a number of artists frightened by the prospect of reprisal if they ignored the traditional Muslim prohibition on pictorial depictions of Islam’s founder. Twenty or thirty years ago, such fears would have been no more than paranoia, but that was before Denmark, like elsewhere in Europe, found itself with a large, and incompletely integrated, Muslim population. Back then Salman Rushdie had not yet been driven underground by an Ayatollah’s death warrant. Back then Theo Van Gogh was still alive.

Self-censorship is tyranny's sorry, trembling little helper, and so it's to its credit that the right-of-center (which, in Denmark, is not very right at all) Jyllands-Posten, one of the country's major newspapers, picked up Bluitgen's story. What it did with it was ornery, well-intentioned and somewhat naïve. Forty cartoonists were invited to give their own interpretation of the prophet. Twelve, a little more than a third, accepted, for 800 Danish crowns (roughly $125) apiece. As we now know, the result was a storm of protest in the Muslim world, and in recent days, pushback in the West. The cartoons have been republished all over Europe and the twelve cartoonists are now, like Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Salman Rushdie before them, learning what it is to live in hiding. They have reportedly opposed the republication of their work. It's difficult to blame them. They have been given a terrible demonstration of what it takes to survive in an era rapidly tumbling back into the pre-modern.

As for the cartoons themselves, they come from all perspectives. One satirizes Jyllands-Posten, another Mr. Bluitgen. None are very funny, or, by Western standards, remarkable. It's telling that the delegation of Danish Muslims who visited a number of Middle Eastern countries to stir up trouble over the cartoons, had to boost their dossier of grievance with three additional (and genuinely disgusting) pictures that Jyllands-Posten had never even seen and whose provenance remains, let's be polite, unclear. To try and compare the actions of Jyllands-Posten, as Bill Clinton effectively did, with the race-baiting traditions of Der Stürmer   is to reveal an ignorance of history and a disdain for free speech that disgraces the office he once held. Even the most notorious of the cartoons, the one that shows Mohammed with a bomb decorated with Islamic text in his turban, can be seen not as an insult, but as a challenge to Muslims to demonstrate that (as is indeed certainly the case) there is far more to their faith than the atrocities that have recently defaced it. Harsh? Maybe, but it was also in the Western tradition of vigorous, free discussion. And as such it should be defended.

Ideally, the publication of these cartoons would have prompted Muslims to ask themselves why Islam, one of the world's great religions, could come to be seen in such a bad light. It hasn't worked out that way. Protests have been followed by boycotts, bluster and, now, violence. The protests and the boycotts are fine. They are all part of the debate. Violence, and the threat of violence, is something else, and, as many more moderate Muslims understand, it is doing far more damage to the reputation of Islam than a few feeble caricatures.

Needless to say, the theocracies, kleptocracies, and autocracies of the Middle East, always anxious for something, anything, to distract attention from their own corruption, uselessness, and thuggery, have played their own, typically malign, part in whipping up anger. Ambassadors have been recalled. Denunciations thunder down. Angry resolutions are passed. But amid all these calls for "respect" is there any acknowledgement that many Islamic countries could do more, much more, to respect the rights of those of different faiths to their own? To take just one example, Egypt's ambassador to Copenhagen is recommending that diplomatic action against Denmark should continue, but her own country's persecuted Christian minority would be grateful indeed if their troubles were confined to a few cartoons. Respect, it seems, is a one-way street.

But that's what too many in the Muslim world have been taught to believe, by multiculturalism as much as the mosque. In the cowed, cowering Europe of recent years the idea that religious minorities have a right not to be "offended," a nonsense notion that gives veto power to the fanatic with the thinnest skin, has increasingly been allowed to trump the far more fundamental right of others to speak their mind. Writers have been prosecuted, plays have been tampered with, and works of art withdrawn. Last week, the British House of Commons came within one vote of passing a law that would almost certainly have made U.K. publication of the Danish cartoons a criminal offense. It is a sign of how far matters have been allowed to degenerate that the initial blunt refusal of Denmark's prime minister to even hold a meeting with a number of ambassadors from Islamic countries over the incident ("I will not meet with them...it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so...As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press—nor do I want such power.") was seen as shocking as it was.

Needless to say, there were others who did their best to ensure that normal servility was resumed. While most Danes backed the prime minister, a former foreign minister, a once-respected figure who has long since become a flack for the Brussels establishment, donned Neville Chamberlain's black jacket and pinstripes to denounce the cartoons "as a pubescent demonstration of freedom of expression." The U.N.'s High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote to the Organization of Islamic Conferences (which, as it was perfectly entitled to do, had complained about the cartoons) saying that she understood the OIC's concerns, if not, it appeared, the right of free speech, and she was far from being the only senior international bureaucrat to do so (and, yes, naughty Kofi made sure to throw in a few weasel words of his own). Closer to home, the EU's commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice denounced the cartoons as "inappropriate," an adjective as Orwellian as his job description, an adjective that can only have encouraged those out to bully the Danes.

In the end, it was left to other newspapers to rally round. With the republication of the cartoons in the Christian journal, Magazinet, the Norwegians were the first to support the Danes, a gesture understandable in a country where the local publisher of Rushdie's Satanic Verses had been fortunate to survive an assassination attempt in 1993, but which was bound to inflame matters still further. And when it did, other newspapers across Europe, in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Spain and elsewhere joined in, either republishing the offending cartoons or, notably in the case of France's left-of-center Le Monde, adding more of their own.

So, what now? Like it or not, the cozy, consensual, homogenous Denmark of half a century ago has vanished, never to return, and, like it or not, the old Europe shaped by Christianity, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment now plays host to a large and growing population with a very different intellectual and spiritual tradition. And, in an age of global communication, the idea that these problems of coexistence can be confined to one continent is an illusion. An insult in Århus can reverberate in Damascus and Amman, and for that matter, Kabul, Basra, and Baghdad too. It's this that explains why the Bush administration, with hearts, minds and a war to win, condemned the cartoons, and it's this, far less forgivably, that explains why Turkey's (supposedly moderate) Islamist prime minister feels that he has the right to tell the Danish press what it may or may not publish.

Of course the publication of those cartoons was (quite explicitly) a provocation, but the furor that followed shows that it was an acceptable thing to do. The editors of Jyllands-Posten wanted to draw attention to the fact that fears for the freedom of expression were both real and realistic. They have succeeded on both counts. Europeans realize now, if they were dim enough not to understand before, that they are faced with two very different ways ahead. The first, and better, alternative is to recognize that, to many, freedom of speech is a value as important as religious belief may be to the faithful, and to give it the protection it deserves. Reestablishing this badly eroded principle will not be easy, but to fail to do so will be to empower the fanatic to legislate for all.

The second alternative is, broadly speaking, for Europe to attempt to buy social peace by muddling along as it does now, muzzling a little speech here, rooting out a little liberty there. But this approach isn't working now. There's no reason to think that doing more of the same will prove any more effective in the future. Besides, at its heart, this is a policy of surrender, submission and despair. It is a refusal to accept that people can agree to disagree, and it is a refusal to confront those who cannot. It foreshadows an era of neutered debate, anodyne controversy, and intellectual stagnation. It will lead, inevitably, to societies irrevocably divided into immovable blocs of ethnicity and creed, carving up the spoils, waiting to take offense and thirsting for the fight, which will one day come.

Despite some of the stirring statements in favor of free speech that have been made over the last week the best bet is that Europe will continue to slide into that second, dismal, alternative. The warning signs are already there to see. Tony Blair's Labour government (again, due partly to the presence of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but, doubtless, due also to the presence of Muslim voters in many key parliamentary constituencies) has been at pains to condemn the cartoons, and Norway's governing left-wing coalition wasted no time in distancing itself from Magazinet. Even Magazinet's editor has now stumbled down the same sad route: "If I had dreamt of something like this happening I would not have done it. It's out of control.'' Meanwhile, a number of the newspapers that have chosen not to run the cartoons have done so explicitly on grounds of self-censorship, or, rather, they claim, "restraint," or maybe "respect": Choose your own alibi.

Even more ominously, at the prompting of our old friend, the EU's commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice, Brussels bureaucrats are arranging a meeting for "experts" and "community leaders" (to be held no later than the end of April) that will discuss some of the issues arising out of this controversy. It is reported that, "proposals to counter race and religious hatred [may be] dusted off." We can guess where that might lead.

And as for where it all started, Jyllands-Posten has now announced that it regrets having published the cartoons: "If we had known that it would end with death threats and that the lives of Danish people could be put at risk, we would have naturally not have published the drawings." The paper apologized only for having underestimated the extent to which Muslims revere their prophet, but then it added this, "fundamentalist powers have prevailed over the freedom of speech...Danish media will now be careful about expressing attitudes that fundamentalists can misuse to create hate and bitterness."

Whip cracked. Lesson learned.

Incendiary Device

Chris Cleave: Incendiary

National Review Online, September 15, 2005

To British author Chris Cleave, it must have seemed like a dream come true. The rights to Incendiary, his first book, had been snapped up, an unusually large print-run had been prepared, and an extensive promotional campaign was in the works. In a sign of a best-seller to come, glossy posters advertising Incendiary were already up on the walls of London's subway system designed to entice commuters into buying what many thought would be the summer's big read.

And then, on the very day that Cleave's book was released, everything went horribly, tragically wrong. His dream, in a sense, became real, and, for some of those commuters, it became a nightmare, too. They were never to read that book. Their fate was to experience it. Incendiary, you see, is about a suicide-bomb attack on the British capital. The circumstances are different (the bombs are detonated at a soccer game) from what actually happened that terrible morning this July, but the results were very much the same. Read the way in which Cleave's heroine, a working-class woman from the East End of London (thus the ropey grammar), describes the survivors emerging from the massacre that has consumed her husband and her son: "Their eyes were wide and glassy and quite often they stumbled but they never blinked. There must of been hundreds of them shuffling out of the smoke. All of them with their eyes huge and wide like things pulled up from very deep in the sea."

It was pretty much that way in London on July 7, 2005, the day that Cleave's book came out.

In the wake of the Tube and bus bombings, the promotional campaign was largely abandoned, and the posters were taken down. They had shown smoke rising above the skyline and the question, "What if?" London now knew. Fifty-six were dead, hundreds more had been injured. When a few advertisements for Incendiary still appeared in the press (the publications in which they appeared had already gone to print) there were public apologies, and while the novel did not disappear from the shelves (I bought my copy in a shop on London's Victoria Street in early August), it tended to be tucked away in a discreet corner, perhaps with the latest installment of Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries or other embarrassments.

As for its author, judging by recent interviews, he remains appalled by the "sick coincidence" for which his book will always be remembered. "I wrote about something that could happen, and then it did happen," he told the Washington Post, and now I feel that I'm fundamentally tied, probably for the rest of my life, to those events." Even if Cleave occasionally sounds as if he has forgotten that there were others who have suffered far more because of those "events", he's probably right. Still, he should not complain too much. Incendiary was partially inspired by the Madrid bombings and the book's London editor has recalled how the editing process was rushed through before London itself fell victim to an attack.

But even if it's somewhat unseemly for Cleave to grumble about the London bombers' inconvenient timing, the wider accusation against his novel, that it was a crass exploitation of a tragedy that was bound to happen (and had indeed already done so elsewhere) is unfair. The struggle against Islamic extremism is likely to be one of the defining characteristics of this new century. Novelists should not be expected either to ignore it or to treat it only with the softest of kid gloves.

Judging by the response of some critics, it seems, however, that they are. Writing in the New York Times, the perpetually aggrieved Michiko Kakutani was outraged by Incendiary's very structure. The entire novel takes the form of an extended letter to Osama bin Laden from that shattered, grieving East End mother, and to Kakutani the fact it "begins with the words "Dear Osama" and ends with its heroine imploring the Qaeda leader to leave his cave and move in with her" is "simple tastelessness." But that's only true if we succumb to the mistaken desire to make a fetish out of bin Laden, a man who needs, very badly, to be cut down to size, both for our sanity and that of those lunatic enough to idolize him. Bin Laden is a man, nothing more, a murderous crackpot who richly deserves to be the subject of satire and the grim graveyard humor that is so much a feature of Incendiary. It's worth noting too that by the time of the invitation to bin Laden, Cleave's narrator is delusional, exhausted and broken. She just wants bin Laden to stop what he's doing and if that means he has to move in with her, so be it.

Others have faulted Incendiary for excessive bloodiness, but while it is true that the book does occasionally descend into Grand Guignol (and loses some force because of it), Cleave's determination to describe the details of the carnage is an essential corrective to our tendency to gloss over exactly what it is that our enemies want to do to us. In a society so unwilling to deal with reality that we limit the amount of times that images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center (let alone the dismaying, repulsive aftermath) are broadcast, Cleave's visions of horror are a useful antidote against complacency.

Unfortunately, Cleave himself sometimes seems tempted by a close relative of that complacency, the guilt-ridden and absurd idea that we in the West have brought the current troubles upon ourselves—perhaps, even, that we had it coming. There are suggestions of this throughout Incendiary, and they are exacerbated by the way in which Cleave imagines the official response to the suicide attacks in the soccer stadium. While some of his touches are deft (the return of barrage balloons, nauseatingly rechristened "shields of hope," to the London sky for the first time since the Blitz, each one, grotesquely, decorated with a picture of a bombing victim), others only demonstrate the belief in Western viciousness and ubiquitous, sinister conspiracy that is all too common among the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic. So, for example, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that when it comes to the suicide bombings, the British government has some dark secrets of its own to hide. Meanwhile the U.K. is shown lurching away from liberty and towards the persecution of its Muslim minority, a malevolent fantasy that has been shown up for the nonsense it is by Tony Blair's stumbling and hesitant response to the slaughter on July 7.

To write this way is to reveal intellectual frivolity in the face of real danger, something that is reinforced by the way in which Cleave allows the tired irrelevancies of Britain's dreary class warfare (the novel's bourgeois protagonists are uniformly venal, snobbish, and, well, you know the script) to share center stage with terrorist mass murder. It's a mark of how low matters have sunk in Britain that even in this respect Cleave is not, alas, alone. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks the leftist mayor of London, the oddball and unpleasant Ken Livingstone, noted that the terrorists had picked on "working-class" Londoners, a peculiar, and not particularly accurate, comment that made some jaundiced Brits wonder if the mayor would have been less upset if a prominent investment banker or two had been included amongst the dead.

Perhaps Cleave's problem was that, imagination exhausted, he simply had to fall back on the prejudices of contemporary "progressive" orthodoxy. Judging by Incendiary there's plenty of evidence to suggest that its author did indeed run out of ideas. The later part of the novel degenerates into soap opera and is really not worth reading. But this should not detract from the substantial achievement of the first 60 pages or so in which Cleave uses the (famously difficult) epistolatory format to give us a remarkable portrait both of his heroine and of the terrible events that so haunted her:

And the question that will haunt his readers is not "what if?" but "where next?"

Yelling Stop

National Review, April 25, 2005

Holland was once known for its freedom, not its fanatics. It was seen as a kindly oasis in an unkind world, famous as a fair, broadminded country, a tolerant land where anyone could speak his mind without fear of retribution or the midnight knock on the door. Not now. Not after the assassination in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken opponent of Holland’s ruling multicultural orthodoxy. That wild, extravagant aristocrat was demonized by the political establishment, denied (some say) proper police protection, and, finally, gunned down in the street. Tolerant? Not after the slaughter in Amsterdam last November of another heretic, Theo van Gogh, filmmaker, gadfly, and controversialist, shot, stabbed, and butchered like a sacrificial animal for daring to attack Muslim fundamentalism. Free? No, not really. Not anymore.

In the days after van Gogh’s murder, the Dutch government at last began to act. To lose one public figure might have been unlucky; to have lost another looked like carelessness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, two members of parliament loathed by Holland’s Islamic extremists, were whisked off to heavily guarded safe houses. In February, the Somalian-born Hirsi Ali emerged to complain that the authorities appeared incapable of making permanent arrangements for Wilders’s and her security. It turned out that she had been camped out in a naval base. As for Wilders, a fortysomething MP from the southeast of the country, well, he had been housed in a location that could only have been picked by someone with no sense of irony or, perhaps, with too much. He’s been living in a prison: to be precise, the jail within a jail where the Lockerbie bombers once awaited their trial. Those who threaten him remain outside, free to do their worst.

Stoic Dutchman that he is, Wilders doesn’t like to grumble. “I have to make the best of it,” he told me in a recent interview. “I have a kind of living room, which is quite okay. On either side, there are the cells where the two Libyans were held. In one cell I have my clothing . . . In the other cell there is my bed.” The prison is, “of course, a terrible place,” but his hosts have done what they can. “They put some lamps in and a TV,” small consolation, I suspect, for a life under siege.

We were chatting, not in the prison, but over coffee in a small, cramped office tucked away at the end of a long corridor somewhere in the depths of the building that houses the Dutch parliament in The Hague. A number of bodyguards sat nearby. Outside, it was a bright, brisk early spring morning, freshened by a North Sea breeze, the slightly surprising quiet punctuated mainly by the cries of the occasional seagull. The Hague looked its best, the understated capital of the timeless, civilized Holland of popular imagination, souvenir shops crammed with its symbols, Delftware, windmills, tulips, clogs, and Sint-Niklaas. Inside, Wilders, symbol of Holland’s new, more uncomfortable reality, describes the way that he is now kept alive.

The death threats, which, needless to say, include that latest cliché of a resurgent barbarism, calls for his beheading, are relentless, increasing, and chilling. “I would be lying if I said I was never afraid.” In an age of freelance jihad, even those rants that consist, probably, of little more than Internet bravado have to be taken seriously as possible incitements for someone somewhere to reach for knife and gun. The result is a life under constant guard, a “crazy, tough” life, a life with little privacy and less spontaneity, a life punctuated by visits to the police “five or six times a week,” a life where Wilders, in short, no longer feels free. It is almost impossible to see friends. Dining out occasionally is “better than eating in prison every evening,” but with a number of guards in tow, it is, inevitably, a “circus,” something, he explains, smiling, that can remove the romance from an evening out with his wife. “You have to whisper, or everyone from security can hear.”

Somehow Wilders has retained his sense of humor. A wry, thoughtful, somewhat intense man, he can still manage a laugh at the absurdities of his predicament. It’s only the occasional nervous gesture or the fleeting traces of tension that sometimes cross his face that betray a hint of the appalling pressure with which he has to cope. At the same time he obviously relishes the remarkable challenge he faces in attempting to build up a new political organization (Wilders broke with his old party, the free-market VVD, in September 2004), a difficult enough task under any circumstances, let alone those under which he now has to operate. No matter: “I have a lot of adrenalin going through my veins.”

Wilders’s new political group has, he believes, “a lot of possibilities.” Like most politicians, he is ambitious, “I’m not there yet . . . but I’m on my way.” It’s clear that he has sensed that the unease now enveloping the Netherlands could be his route to the top. As we chat, he proudly prints out new poll findings showing that the “Wilders Group” could expect to win around 10 percent of seats in the Dutch parliament’s lower house.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Wilders as an opportunist cashing in on thecurrent turmoil: His opposition to Holland’s seemingly perpetual soft-left consensus, stifling corporatism, and multiculturalist muddle can be traced back at least a decade, to his time as a speechwriter for Frits Bolkestein, the then VVD leader, who was one of the first to sound the alarm over the country’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority, a minority that is now about a million strong (out of a total population of a little over 16 million). Wilders himself went on to flourish within the VVD, rising to become its foreign-affairs spokesman. His departure from the party — the catalyst was his opposition to any invitation to Turkey to join the EU — might indeed turn out to be a shrewd move, but equally it could be nothing more than a leap into the wilderness.

His background in mainstream politics means, however, that Wilders is no outsider, and thus, unlike Fortuyn or van Gogh, he is not easy to caricature as a crank, a fascist, a racist, or a joker. He’s a pro, one of the grownups, respected (if not exactly universally loved) in parliament. Yes, it’s true that, despite his extraordinary hairdo, a pompadour in Billy Idol peroxide, Wilders doesn’t have the eccentric charisma of his two murdered predecessors: He has neither the extraordinary camp élan of Fortuyn nor the bad-boy charm of van Gogh (who never stood for elective office), but he more than makes up for this with a résumé that means that he has to be taken seriously.

And that’s exactly what he wants. During the course of the interview, Wilders is at pains to distinguish himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and others on the darker side of the European “Right.” He is, he says, simply a “Tocquevillian conservative,” but a glance at his recent manifesto (the somewhat bombastically named “Declaration of Independence”) reveals a more complex mix, an eclectic blend of small-government conservatism, Atlanticism, free-market liberalism, Euroskepticism, and populism. But, above all, Wilders will be judged by his response to Holland’s failed and feckless experiment in multiculturalism. Sometimes this is subtle: He likes to connect the dots between the increasingly intrusive federalism of the EU and the dangerous consequences of the enfeebled sense of national identity within its member states. Sometimes it is not. Wilders is unapologetic in proclaiming the superiority of Western values. He is not, as he puts it, a “cultural relativist.” In an era of PC platitudes, Wilders can be bracingly blunt: “I don’t believe in a European Islam, in a moderate Islam . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible.” He is careful, however, to draw “a distinction between the religion and the people . . . Islam and democracy are incompatible, but Muslims and democracy are compatible.” Trying to change Islam is, in his view, a hopeless task; trying to win over its followers in the Netherlands is not.

To achieve this, he is recommending a program that features carrots and, unusually for Holland, sticks. It includes a five-year moratorium on immigration from “non-Western” countries, deportation of dual nationals convicted of criminal offenses, extra public spending to aid in the assimilation process, the closing down of extremist mosques, and preventive detention of some of those in the small hard core (“a few hundred”) reasonably believed to be planning terrorist attacks. Saving lives must, Wilders believes, come ahead of extending the full protection of Dutch law to those who would overthrow it. And no, he concedes, “this is not an easy concept.” Indeed, it isn’t.

Talking to Wilders, I was left with the impression of a work in progress, of a man still trying to think through the full ramifications both of the complex and threatening situation now facing his country and of the remedies he is proposing to resolve it. He does not have all the answers, and some of those he has may well be wrong, perhaps very wrong. But to his credit, Wilders is at least asking the right questions, something that few in Holland have been brave enough to attempt before. And, no, this stubborn, determined, man is not going to give up anytime soon. “That’s what the people who threaten me want me to do.”

Queen of The Desert

Christopher Buckley: Queen of the Desert

National Review, November 8, 2004

All it takes for evil to prevail, warned Burke, is “for enough good men to do nothing.” True; but that doesn’t mean that the good men cannot occasionally relax with a good laugh or two. It might even help them, especially in a situation of the kind the West faces today: a war with an ideology so dedicated to the destruction of happiness that, in the shape of the Taliban, it made laughing too loud in public a crime. (For women, anyway.)

In Florence of Arabia, his dark, disturbing, and very funny new satire, Christopher Buckley highlights the cruelty of radical Islamism and the contradictions of America’s response to it. He does this against a backdrop not of history at its grimmest or journalism at its most intense, but of jokes, mockery, bouts of wordplay (a State Department bureaucrat is a “desk-limpet,” an Arab potentate has lips that are “oyster-moist from a life- time’s contact with the greatest delicacies the world [has] to offer”), and puns that teeter on the edge of catastrophe: The repressive Arab kingdom that is—along, naturally, with France—the main villain of this book goes by the name of Wasabia.

Wasabia is a sand-swept nightmare marked by oil wealth, joylessness, corruption, and ritualized cruelty, a tyranny where “offenses that in other religions would earn you a lecture from the rabbi, five Hail Marys from a priest, and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn” are punished by “beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding, and having your tongue cut out . . . A Google search using the key phrases ‘Wasabia’ and ‘La Dolce Vita’ results in no matches.” Well, Prince Bandar, does that remind you of anywhere?

Gallows humor? Certainly. But insofar as the jihadists—with their car bombs, suicide bombs, and dreams of dirty bombs and worse—wish to shove you and me into mass graves at the earliest possible moment, a touch of Tyburn does not seem amiss. Of course, there are people who will find some of what Buckley has to say distinctly, you know, insensitive. The caliphs of multiculturalism will twitch a little, and this is not a book that will find many fans in Foggy Bottom (“the State Department’s reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet—along with a list of incompetent local lawyers—and say, ‘We told you so’”).

But satire should not make comfortable reading for the subscribers to any orthodoxy. Running through this book is the clear implication that the American approach to the Middle East has not worked out quite as well as might have been hoped. And what, exactly, is the role played in Buckley’s drama by the Waldorf Group, an investment company (named, hmmm, after a New York hotel) that has danced a little too long, a little too closely, and a little too profitably with the despots of Wasabia?

But about Buckley’s heroine Florence, at least, there are no doubts. Forced out of the State Department for her unwanted imagination and initiative, she now has a new assignment: using covert funds to set up a TV station to transmit to the Arab masses. This will not, of course, be another Al-Jazeera, glossily repackaging nationalist resentments and religious prejudice 24/7, but nor will it be a source of ticky-tacky U.S. propaganda, ineffectively boasting about multicultural contentment in midwestern suburbs. Instead it will be something altogether more revolutionary, directed at the most excluded and mistreated of all the Arab masses: women. This will be Lifetime for women who really have no lives, its purpose to promote female emancipation as a counterbalance to militant Islam.

Qatar, the home of Al-Jazeera, being presumably unavailable, Florence’s TV station is hosted by the venal but fairly relaxed emirate of Matar (“pronounced, for reasons unclear, Mutter”), a state let created by Churchill at one of those colonial conferences that have done so much to make the Middle East the cheery place that it is today. “One might suspect,” writes Buckley, “that its borders had been drawn so as to deprive . . . Wasabia of access to the sea. One would be right.” The result was to leave Matar rich, permanently grateful to old Winston (spotting Matar’s Churchillian place names is one of the book’s many pleasures), and under the control of a royal family that knows how to handle its mullahs: cash, cars, and “an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam’s holiest sites.”

This relatively tolerant country makes an ideal base for Florence and her offbeat and entertaining team: a delightfully cynical PR man, a State Department employee so camp that he could have been pitching tents with T. E. Lawrence, and a CIA Col. Kurtz lite (a seductive— ask Florence—and effective mix of Esquire and Soldier of Fortune).

Throughout, Buckley’s lightly ironic tone only accentuates the savagery that is his main target, making it somehow all the more terrible when, as in this extract, it comes into clear, brutal focus:

The package turned out to contain a videotape. It showed Fatima buried in sand up to her neck, being stoned to death with small rocks. The tape was twenty minutes long. Everyone who watched it wept. Florence brought the tape to Laila. She could not bring herself to view it again so she left the room while Laila viewed it. She waited outside on the terrace, looking out over the Gulf in the moonlight, her skin misted by salty droplets from the fountain that spouted out the royal crest. Laila emerged, pale and shaken. Neither woman spoke. The two of them stood by the balustrade overlooking the gardens, listening to the waves lap the shore and the onshore breeze rustle the fronds of the date palms.

And then, right at the end of this book, cruel, bleak, awful reality finally comes crashing in. There, in the closing acknowledgments, Buckley pays tribute to Fern Holland, “a real-life Florence of Arabia,” who was assassinated in Iraq on March 9, 2004.

She was trying to help, and that would not do.

Lancers, Fusiliers, Rats...The ongoing glory of the British regiment

National Review, April 21, 2003

WHEN the British, over 40,000 strong, arrived in the Persian Gulf they brought more than troops, hardware, support staff, and supplies. There was history, too, in their baggage. One need look no further than the names of just some of the units now deployed in the war—storied regiments with lineages that stretch back through the centuries, from Kuwait to Normandy, the Somme, the Crimea, and often far past. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (the successors of a regiment that served in Afghanistan, but in 1879-80) are in the Gulf for the war against Saddam, and so to pick out but a few more, are the Black Watch (whose battle honors include, ahem, a "'successful action" in Brooklyn. N.Y.. against one George Washington), the Life Guards (who first saw action in 1685), and that enduring symbol of Churchill's defiance and determination, the Parachute Regiment.

Each British regiment usually specializes in a specific type of soldiering. There are, for example, artillery, infantry, armored, and engineering (the "sappers") regiments—but when they go to war they are joined together in larger formations, "much like," a brigadier explained to me, "the way in which the different sections. woodwind, strings, and so on, are combined to make up an orchestra." This orchestra is one that often reprises the past: Much of the move across the sands towards Basra has been led by formations grouped together into the 7th Armoured Brigade, a unit that still wears the insignia of the "Desert Rat," that strange scrawny rodent that became a symbol of strange scrawny Monty's World War II triumphs in North Africa.

British history, it seems, is not ready to end quite yet. Who would have thought it? When, more than 20 years ago, the "task force," Margaret Thatcher's marvelous makeshift armada, returned from its Falklands victory to cheers, tears, and Union Jacks on the quayside, Brits were told that it was. at last, goodbye to all that. The curtain had fallen, chaps, and there was no time for an encore. The rascally, glittering, wicked, and glorious age of empire was finally done, finished, buried, and anathematized—exchanged for the obligations of a grayer, more sober era.

And so, it seemed, was the British military. The downsized heirs of Kipling's rough-and-tumble conquistadors were destined now for the shrunken campaigns of a mid-sized European power, fighting budget cuts at home, terrorists in Belfast, and boredom in West Germany as they waited, and watched, and waited some more for the Red Army that never came.

After the Wall came down, so did the money that the U.K. was prepared to spend on its military. A defense "review," carrying the sort of bland. vaguely threatening name—"Options for Change"—that is more McKinsey & Co. than Sandhurst, saw the size of the army reduced by a little under one-third; to not much more than 100,000 men. Regiments were merged or disbanded, often with startlingly little sentiment. To take just one example, the 16th/5th Lancers, a regiment with roots that stretched back over 300 years, led the way into Iraq in February 1991, yet within two years found its proud name on the scrap pile, lost in a merger with little patience for the past.

Yet, somehow, the past has endured, taught in every recruit's basic training and nourished by a system that is the British army's greatest strength: the regiment. To borrow the words of Field Marshal Wavell, "The regiment is the foundation of everything." The concept of the regiment stems from the fact that recruitment was once organized on a local basis, but its survival as an institution owes a great deal to one crucial psychological insight: Men may enlist to serve their country, but they will fight hardest to protect their friends. Most British soldiers spend their entire career within the same regiment—over the years it becomes their principal source of friendship, their clan., their community, almost a surrogate family.

This sense of community is intensified still further by the British army's perception of itself as a caste set somewhat apart from the rest of society. Currently the army is, as it has been for much of British history, made up entirely of volunteers. The notion of the citizen soldier has been rejected in favor of the creation of a smallish force of highly trained professionals. This professionalism is a source of enormous pride to the troops, something Donald Rumsfeld may have discovered if he paid heed to Sgt. McMenamy of the Queen's Royal Lancers in early March. After hearing misinterpreted reports that the defense secretary was considering either leaving the Brits behind or giving them a secondary role in the coming conflict, the sergeant (described by the London Times as an "intimidating figure") was quoted as saying: "We are second to none, so it's a bit cheeky to suggest we can't be trusted to fight in the front line." ("A bit cheeky," let's be clear, is a classic example of British understatement.)

Like any community, the regiment has its own institutional memory that, added to the shared experience of highly intensive training and active duty, binds together the current generation and develops a sense of collective identity far more effectively than abstract notions of patriotism ever could. Visit the head- quarters of a British regiment, and there will almost certainly be a museum dedicated to its past campaigns; dine in its officers' mess and you will, in all probability, eat amid the portraits and the heirlooms of those who came before—silver from India, perhaps, or a tattered banner from one of Napoleon's lost legions.

Even the regiments that have been merged or amalgamated away into bureaucratic oblivion still manage to live on in the souls of their successors. Take the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is now with the Desert Rats in Iraq. Its men celebrate their regimental forebears—the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers, the City of London Regiment, and the Lancashire Fusiliers—on four separate days each year (for Gallipoli, Normandy, Albuhera, and Minden). These honored ancestors are the insistent ghosts of countless past glories, and it would not do to let them down.

Today's warriors, the latest in a long line of British expeditionary forces, as they march through a dusty landscape not so different from the battlefields of Victoria's old empire, are fighting for the honor of their clan, for its past, and for its totems. For some of the men, a former captain in the Irish Guards told me, it's a little "like playing for a famous football team." And would a little scrap of cloth bearing the caricature of a rat really mean something to those who wore it? "Oh yes," he said. Another officer agreed, particularly for those who fought together as Desert Rats in the last Gulf War, but stressed that much of the attention on that famous rodent has been a media creation. a hook to catch the attention of the wider British public, to whom the name of Monty's legendary army will mean much more than the history of any one regiment.

But to the soldiers themselves, it is their regiment that counts the most—not the Desert Rats. It should come as no surprise that Lt. Col. Tim Collins of the Royal Irish, when he spoke to his troops about the conduct that would be expected of them as they prepared to fight in Iraq, chose to emphasize the duty they owed their regiment: Cruelty or cowardice, he warned, could "harm the regiment or its history." And nothing could be worse than that.

It's early yet in this war, but somehow I don't think that Lt. Col. Collins will he disappointed.

Two Cities

National Review Online, September 15, 2001 

East 51st Street, September 15, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

There is a border now that divides Manhattan, somewhere to the south of Fourteenth Street. To those of us who have not crossed it since last Tuesday, it is “down there,” a once familiar territory where shops, schools, restaurants, and even some streets are closed. It is, they say, a shuttered dusty place, the gateway to the nightmare that we now call Ground Zero, the nightmare we never thought was possible. Not here. North of this line, we live in what is a very different city, a city with more of a resemblance to the Gotham that we once knew, that confident city that flourished here in the distant past, before September 11. We are the lucky ones and we know it. Even on Tuesday, life in this safer zone did not, quite, stop. Emerging from my Midtown office that grim, scarred, scared noon, Madison Avenue was quiet, too quiet, but there were still people in the street. They were talking not screaming, they were walking to the shops, not running for their lives. There were, of course, reminders of atrocity elsewhere, the scraps of overheard conversation, frantic and tense, the callers on their cellular phones, redial, redial, redial, and then, at last through, their shouted cries of reassurance audible to all, amplified by anxiety and the high volume etiquette of mobile communication, “No, no, I’m OK, don’t worry.”

And the smoke, not billowing, of course, on Madison and 50th (over Midtown the sky that terrible day remained untouched, a bright, brilliant, taunting blue), but three miles away, “down there.” It mocked us, a cruel cumulus to the south, death’s dark expanding banner, a bleak smudge on the heavens. It was, we already knew, a funeral pyre, and, in its height it was a perverse tribute to the immense size of those two oddly ungainly icons, the twin towers that now meant more to us than we ever could have imagined.

In this tranquil, still civilized part of Manhattan, our taste of smoke came later, with just a whiff on Wednesday when the wind turned north. It was a delayed, acrid belch from the beast that had consumed so many, so much, so quickly, so soon. Downtown’s butchery left other traces too in our zone of unnatural calm, the dust-covered fire engine, parked at 6 A.M. outside the station on a cordoned-off 51st Street, the cops chatting there quietly, tired (how long had they been up?), but still watchful, as a man who tried to bike past them was quick to find out.

There were the flags at half mast, a somber memorial fluttering from the police station, the firehouse and the office buildings. You could see other flags too, less funereal, more defiant, proudly on display in new, unexpected venues, at the entrance to a local bar, on the antenna of a delivery truck, behind the counter of a store. The Red, White and Blue flies “down there” too. We can see it on television, giving some dignity to that other, devastated New York, hanging from the ruins of what was once someone’s work place, put there by a rescue worker with a touch of poetry in his soul. We can only hope that he has survived.

Midtown Manhattan, September 15, 2011, © Andrew Stuttaford

At the deli, at lunchtime the second day, supplies have run a little low (the bridges were closed); the small depleted pile of sandwiches looks even careworn than usual. ”How old are these?," asks the customer, for an instant the voice of that aggressive, querulous Noo Yawk we all know so well. Then he realizes he doesn’t care. He buys his food with a rueful smile. There are more important things to worry about.

The bars in my neighborhood are open, not full, but not empty either, and in the Thai place where a friend (a refugee from an emptied Tribeca) and I ate on Wednesday night, the tables were busy. It will take more than murderers to persuade Manhattan to cook for itself. Only the buzz was different. There is anger now, as well as sadness, and more talk of international politics, probably, than would normally be heard in this restaurant in the course of a year. Osama Bin Laden, it is a name we all know now.

Thursday dawns, and with it, traffic, and some suggestion of a normal life, returns to much of Manhattan. But this is a flawed, illusory normality, undermined by unease and subverted by our sense of unearned survival. At the tip of the island, the firemen and the police still dig, stoic in their own tragedy (how many dead, two hundred, three hundred?) a line that held, a stolid link with the city’s fragile ordered past, the source, we dream, of miracles. Six firemen saved, the television tells us, sheltered in their SUV. They live! We celebrate, high fives in Hell. And then our joy is denied. There is, it turns out, another explanation, and then thoughts return “down there,” to the people we knew, and will know no more.

Night falls. I leave my office building. From the usually taciturn security guard, I hear an almost gentle “take care.” There is a curious smell in the air, pungent and harsh. Meanwhile, outside the hospitals, the relatives wait, photographs in their hands. Have we seen that brother, that wife, that cousin? They were last witnessed at their desk, glimpsed in an elevator, seen in a lobby, and now there is nothing, just silence. Later, past midnight, there is the sound of thunder, and the heavens light up. For an instant, we look up alarmed.

But this time the storm in the sky comes from nature, not man.

Speechless

National  Review Online, September 11, 2001

We are used, those of us who work in the financial markets, to watching the news as it breaks. The information snakes across our screens, impassive, unrelenting, flowing in the orange of a Bloomberg headline, or the boldface red of Reuters' breaking news. With luck, it is something quick, something timely, something to give a trader the edge, enough perhaps, to make that extra buck. There are televisions too, mounted, on the walls of our Midtown office, hanging , even, from the ceiling, relaying garrulous, greedy CNBC, and the nonstop chatter of a world going about its business. And then the chatter stopped. On the TV screens, we could see the smoke, billowing murderous and black, out of that first brutally wounded tower, a dismaying repeat, it seemed then, of an earlier tragedy. The messages went out to Downtown, to the people we knew were there. Some said that they might evacuate their building, others were not so sure. It looked as if, they hoped, everything would be OK.

There was still at that point a remnant, just, of normality, an impression, almost, of maneagable horror. What we were witnessing, it appeared, was another bloody chapter in the long terrorist war, cruel, spectacularly savage (could that really be true about a plane, we wondered) but not something so different from what New York City, and the world, had been through before.

So the routine news continued to flow, retail sales, CBOT December wheat, but there was no real return to work, just a few half-hearted glimpses at the dealing screen, with the gaze returning again and again to CNBC, to the images of that first tower, and then, suddenly, drawn by a fireball, to the other. More smoke, more flames, and fluttering down from the windows of the outraged building, scraps of paper, Hell's tickertape, the last trace of all those shattered offices.

Safe in Midtown, we watched the World Trade Center's end, we watched the destruction of the building we knew so well, the site, for us, of countless meetings, the workplace, we worried, of too many friends.

Later, we could see that the European stock markets had fallen, but, it was not something, really, that we wanted to discuss.