The Salon Interview: Camille Paglia

salon $.05/share ^ | 2 7 2003 | David Talbot

[Mommyof3]

Do you all realize that i got here from clicking on a drudge link? Drudge has link to this thread instead of the salon site.
LOL!

[auggief]

Didn't answer the following question:
"But don't you think if Saddam were to succeed in his longtime goal of building an operational arsenal of doomsday weapons, that he would then provide an umbrella for this network of terrorists to carry out its plots against the West?"

[leadpenny]

I thought I had hit "Back" on my browser or something. Matt Drudge probably likes the "salon $.05/share" reference. If I remember right, he did a considerable amount of gloating when their stock bottomed out. That said, this is at least the second time in recent months that he has linked one of his posts directly to FR. Thanks Matt.

[Benrand]

I think that the Irai people have paid a HELLUVA lot already, they have no freedom.

I thought she was a bit smarter than this.

[dbrutus]

Actually, time is not on their side. Look at Iran, where the people who enthusiastically welcomed Khomenei in 1979 are in the streets again shouting for the mullahs to get out. Islam, medieval, brittle, harsh islam that is, cannot offer a convincing alternative to modernity. It is only thriving because the alternative in the arab world isn't modernity with 2.3 children, a house, and a car but grinding poverty in a corrupt authoritarian regime.

What needs to happen is for a safe zone to be created for islamic reformers to clean up that religion and make it something that can deal with modernity, cope with it, and provide answers instead of bile and rage.

[happygrl]

This is a long posturing rant in which Paglia tries to innoculate herself against the arguments of the leftists while putting distance between herself and them.

But at the end of the day she still ends up in their camp, trying to appear as though she has had "deep" thoughts about this, far surpassing those of the left.

She still uses the stereotypical barbs of the left, dismissing Bush and his advisors as bumpkins who know little of the world, politically and culturally.

She is the one who is out of touch, admittedly so as far as understanding the passion of religion as a motivator for both Islamics and for Americans, belittling Bush's piety, though many Americans see it as his strength.

She is way out of her league in understanding how to deal with the neighborhood bully; how the Arab world reacts to a show of strength, how compassionate our military can be in making its plans to precisely target weapons, not civilians.

She claims that she agrees with Fallaci, that we are in a clash of civilizations, but thinks that this kind of clash can be talked through, apparently, by finding the silent majority of moderate Muslims and working with them.

That is precisely the problem; the radicals have silenced any moderates by threat. We are in a clash with the radicals and can only talk with the moderates after the radicals threatening US have been dispatched. The moderate Muslims, with few exceptions, have not shown a willingness to take on the radicals themselves. Not in the killing fields of Africa (two million Sudanese dead without a word from moderate Muslims, Algeria with several hundred thousand dead), Indonesia where Muslims have murdered thousands of Christians, Iran where the Mullahs have executed thousands in their twenty year religious rampage.

Even in this country where there is freedom, the Muslims are first and foremost concerned with perceived slights, instead of criticism of those who besmirch their religion by far more grevious actions than newspaper cartoons or portrayals in movies.

Paglia refers us to the epochs of ancient history, citing the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. But she leaves out the martial and warrior aspects of their histories when they understood that they were under threat. We are under threat by a shadowy clique who take their allies where they can find them. Saddam Hussein is willing to be their ally and supply their terrorist weapons. Nothing in this essay convinces me that Paglia understands that threat and what is required of us in the times in which we live.

[LadyChurchill]

anyone who is truly interested in this subject should read Victor David Hanson's book Carnage and Culture and his articles in the National Review which are really based on a study of history rather than a study of omens...

[schwenkler]

Paglia states: >>"There's just no way that Saddam's threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don't need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations."<<

Paglia (whom I hold in the highest regard) is using hindsight to distinguish the justification for World War II and the prospective Gulf War II. What’s really more to the point is the reigning perception on the part of the incipient Allies at the time:

On what basis did France and Britain declare war on Germany in 1939? Did they think he was bent on *world* domination? Or that his military machine was *really* so massive? No. Realistically, they exasperatedly declared war after the failure of the Munich Pact to stem Hitler’s pan-Germanic turf-gobbling. They went to war to stem what was perceived as REGIONAL aggression into the east of Europe. They went to war with the knowledge that France had the largest and (so they believed) finest army in Europe and the Maginot Line to hide behind. They did not appreciate the revolution that Blitzkrieg represented until the Allied military was ablated in 1940.

Hitler wanted to re-add Poland (and then, ultimately, Russia—but that was unknown outside of Berlin) to the Reich. Western Europe and “the world” were never really on the agenda until the world took him (and the Axis) on. By all perceptions he was settling old scores in the east and undoing some of what France and Britain had done a Versailles. Once the Allies chose (rightly) to expand the war and Hitler foolishly declared war on the U.S. to garner Japanese intervention in Siberia, it became an all or nothing enterprise and all the stops came out. Rhetoric aside, the world understood in 1939 that they were waging what they *hoped* would be a quickly successful war that was necessary to stop Hitler from retaining his ill-gotten gains in the east and to honor, albeit only symbolically, their assurances to Poland that they would not be wiped off the map again a’la Frederick the Great.

The retrospective makes the war decision of September 1939 into something more absolute than it was. It was a complicated matter, but it was felt, after the diplomatic failure, that there was no other viable choice. Our current concern is also complicated and, if Paglia has one theme herein, it is that we must avoid the recent tendency to over-simplify this decision. She is right. However, while we do not share a boarder with Iraq as France did in 1939, our diplomacy has been made just as irrelevant as the Munich accord was by September ’39 and, I would suggest, our ‘viable choices’ have been likewise reduced.

[Radix]

Ping thing!

[Radix]

Just jump right in there.

[Pietro]

It seems Camile is asking for a more nuanced approach, however, its pointless to be nuanced when someone has a gun to your head.

Clearly taking out Saddam will be a great blow against OBL. Eliminating his safe havens will flush him and the rest of his vermin. Step by step they will be left w/ no where to hide. Waiting for the Islamists to come to their senses is absurd.

W's tough talk is a very cagey strategy it's kept this country focused and given our allies time to get their own political houses in order.

Paglia wants desperatly to be Fallaci but she lacks the gravitas and the passion, she just can't shake her Ivory Tower pretensions--she voted for Nader?? She puts together some beautiful sentences but when you get to the end it just doesn't add up to a cogent point.

[isthisnickcool]

Look, you can't just rip off the content of a pay-for-access site and post it here. It ain't right and it will get Free Republic in trouble (again).

Well, why don't you fish out all the change you have under the couch cushions and just use it to buy Salon? :)

If they did sue I wonder what their damages would be based on? Since they don't make money?

Actually, since this is being read by more than a few people FreeReoublic ought to bill Salon.....

[HartAttack]

Camille was always one of my favorite liberals. She thoughtfully considers issues before writing about them and isn’t a slave to the liberal mantra. However, in this article Camille sounds more like she’s trying to make sense of a hormone imbalance than geopolitics and matters of life and death.

I don’t remember reading Camille opining about Bill Clinton killing thousands of Christian civilians in Serbia when he bombed that country to get Monica Lewinski off the front pages of the newspapers. I don’t remember Camille wringing her hands about the Clinton Administration threatening to attack Iraq in 1998. Why now? Instead of being in the Middle East, if Iraq was located on our northern border like Canada, would Camille still be wringing her hands about stopping this guy?

[lonestar]

An influential public intellectual, with a popular following among liberals and conservatives, comes out against the war. This is not good news for the Bush administration.

I'm not "influenced." I think most of this is "nuts."

Omen? Palestine, TX? Duh! Been there; they don't wear burkas or tableclothes on their heads. They are mostly Protestant; have electricity and running water.

The part of Texas the debris fell in, is in the normal flight path of returning shuttles.

[lonestar]

I didn't vote for Gore but the idea that Bush was somehow more attuned to Foreign Policy (as some might have insisted) is a horrible joke.

The idea that Bush has assembled what might be the best foreign policy team in U.S. history, is more important than how "attuned" Bush is or Gore might have been.

I'm thankful everyday that Clinton's foreign policy team isn't involved in this mess they helped create! We have no reason to think Gore would have been any better at surrounding himself with competent people.

[Senator Goldwater]

"I'm thankful everyday that Clinton's foreign policy team isn't involved in this mess they helped create!"

I knew our national security would take an eight year holiday with Clinton, and that we'd spend the better part of the of the early millenium cleaning up after it. It didn't take long to unfortunately prove to be correct.

Camille has an acerbic sense of humor and a long view of world history. She is an enjoyable read, as is Chris Hitchens, but she is wrong that Bush has been brash on Iraq.

The simple truth is that for the War on Terrorism to be effective, it must include the re-order of pan-arabic governance, i.e. regimes like the Taliban and Saddam's Ba'ath party.

North Korea is another Clinton clusterfuck, and Bush has a balancing act on his hands. But if any team can multi-task on security issues, its this administration.

That seems to get lost on Paglia.