One aspect of this trend has been particularly heartening: Some conservatives have backed off their rhetorical tirades against "nation-building." Sure, in late September Bush asserted that "nation-building" wasn't our goal in Afghanistan, and the White House flack-o-matic Ari Fleischer has been parroting this ever since. But Tony Blair put Bush to shame with the resounding internationalism of his October 2nd speech at the annual conference of the British Labor Party. Addressing himself to the Afghans, Blair said: "If the Taliban regime changes, we will work with you to make sure its successor is one that is broad-based, that unites all ethnic groups, and that offers some way out of the miserable poverty that is your present existence."
Following this speech the press began to claim Blair was transmogrifying into Churchill. It had something to do with the message, with staking out the moral high ground -- and it didn't go unnoticed. Right on cue, the Weekly Standard editor and sometime conservative conscience William Kristol recently suggested that:
Contempt for nation-building has become such a mindless Republican trope that the president even repeated it a couple weeks ago--though doing so tended to undercut his professed (and correct) attempt to distinguish the Taliban regime from the Afghan people and to rally the Afghan people against the Taliban one reason we're in the fix we're in is that our pseudo-realpolitik contempt for nation building led us to abandon Afghanistan in 1989 and to stop short of replacing Saddam in 1991. The fact is we're going to be engaged in nation building in Afghanistan--and one hopes in Iraq. Conservatives should stop complaining about it, move beyond indulging in cheap worldly cynicism, and help make it happen according to sound conservative principles.
Salon's Gary Kamiya has written recently that, "at this historical moment, doing what is right, and doing what is right for America, happen to coincide." It's quite a moment, then -- and so far, as a moral actor in international affairs, we appear to be getting better all the time. Agreeing in a bipartisan way that when we go to war against an oppressive regime we must also ensure the attacked country ends up on the right footing afterwards would take the U.S.'s newfound sanity one step further.
The Right to Offend
That said, have U.C. Berkeley students gone completely nuts? There's now a meltdown on campus because three student body senators have put together a bill that would call for the student newspaper, The Daily Californian, to apologize for printing a supposedly offensive cartoon. The bill almost seems like blackmail, because the senators have suggested raising the rent paid by the newspaper if it doesn't comply. And the offending cartoon? It depicts two men in apparent Muslim attire standing in the palm of the Devil while flames burn around them. The text bubble from the men reads: "We made it to paradise! Now we will meet Allah, and be fed grapes, and be serviced by 70 virgin women, and " A "flight manual" has just dropped from one man's hands as he realizes that -- oops -- he's gone to hell.
This is the same basic joke made after September 11 by The Onion, which printed an article titled, "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell," and subtitled "'We Expected Eternal Paradise for This,' Say Suicide Bombers."
Granted, the Daily Californian cartoon might be a tad more offensive than the Onion article because of the religious attire. Muslim students at Berkeley certainly thought so -- some even mobbed the campus newspaper chanting anti-racist slogans.
Yet the racism charge is absurd. The men in hell are clearly Islamic, but the vast majority of Arab Americans in this country are Christians (why can't people get this?). But perhaps the mocking of certain aspects of Islam is worth protesting? Certainly it's wrong for the government to harass or unfairly incarcerate Muslim Americans. But it's quite another thing for a student newspaper cartoonist to use parts of the Islamic religion as the conceit for a joke. Nun jokes abound in our culture, and some straight-laced Catholics and Catholic groups get offended. And everybody who's anybody makes fun of Scientology. But we don't censor the offenders -- or raise their rent. There's a freedom to offend in this country; it's implicit in our freedom of speech.
The behavior of these Berkeley students is the kind of thing that makes obnoxious, obsessive campus P.C. critics like David Horowitz drool -- and think they're spending their lives doing the right thing. If the U.C. Berkeley Senate keeps it up, maybe they are.
