Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Farewell to Powell

(Reprinted from the issue of November 25, 2004)

Colin Powell, once the most respected member of the Bush cabinet, has resigned as secretary of state. It was once widely rumored that of all high-level members of the administration, he was the most opposed to the war on Iraq; but he remained loyal to the team, and gave a powerful speech at the United Nations seeming to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear program.

It transpired that he was citing dubious sources of information, however, and his reputation has suffered ever since.

He might have retained his prestige if he had resigned in protest long ago. He could even have resigned without overt protest against Bush’s war policy; in the context of the war debate, the gesture would have been understood. That step might even have prevented the war.

The war rages on, in spite of Powell’s own doctrine that the United States should never make war unless three conditions are met: It can be clearly justified to the American public and gain its support; a quick and overwhelming victory can be achieved; and there is a clear exit strategy.

But only the original invasion enjoyed popular backing; the occupation seems more and more pointless and inconclusive; and far from having an exit strategy, President Bush has pledged not to leave until elections have been held and democracy established, which now seems very difficult, if not impossible.

U.S. forces seemed to have won the fierce battle for Fallujah, until NBC got raw footage of a Marine killing an unarmed captive in a mosque, which was promptly broadcast throughout the Arab world, creating the greatest furor since the Abu Ghraib revelations. Once again the administration has been caught flat-footed by the unforeseen.

Pro-war talk radio rang with defenses of the Marine, most to the effect that our brave men are handicapped by our scruples in dealing with these treacherous guerrillas, who don’t wear uniforms and despise the laws of civilized warfare.

But all such talk misses the point. The Bush strategy depends on winning popular support among Iraqis, and it just isn’t happening. The Arabs regard the resistance not as terrorism, but as heroism against a mighty invader. They are unimpressed when the invader, armed with immensely superior weaponry, complains that the resistance doesn’t fight fair, while committing (and excusing) his own atrocities.

“Somehow it’s our fault that people don’t like us,” Rush Limbaugh says sarcastically, as if decades of American intervention in the region couldn’t possibly be a factor. But surely one reason we are disliked, in fact bitterly hated, is that the Iraq war has discarded the principle of proportionality.

The administration won’t release numbers, not even estimates, of the deaths of Iraqi civilians. We have no idea of the cost of this war to the Iraqis themselves, the putative beneficiaries of U.S. intervention. How many have died? At what point would the human cost be morally unacceptable? Is there any limit at all?

Such questions aren’t even being discussed. Our official war propaganda treats the vaguely defined enemy as pure evil, to be destroyed at any cost. Only American casualties seem to matter. This is simply immoral.
 
Troubling Prospects

Bush’s Mideast policy has also been complicated by the death of Yasser Arafat. Bush has treated Arafat with contempt, naming his removal as a necessary condition of reaching his goal of a Palestinian state.

But it’s hard to say whether Arafat’s demise will actually advance that goal. None of his prospective successors commands anything like his popularity and authority among Palestinians. Anyone acceptable to them will be unacceptable to the Israelis, and vice-versa.

Powell understands all these problems better than either Bush or his own successor, Condoleezza Rice, seems to. The prospect is for more trouble, frustration, and bloodshed in the Mideast.
 
Kinsey’s Legacy

Hollywood, Mel Gibson notwithstanding, continues its hostility to Christian morality and specifically to Catholicism. In the works is a film version of The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks as the researcher who “discovers” that the Church has been concealing the truth about Christ for two millennia.

The book has been thoroughly debunked by real scholars, who point out, for example, that Copernicus wasn’t burned at the stake, as author Dan Brown might have learned from any children’s encyclopedia. But as the Kerry campaign has recently reminded us, even the grossest lies about the Church now pass uncorrected.

Another new film, Kinsey, glorifies the famous sex researcher Albert Kinsey, who has already been exposed as a revolting pervert as well as a scientific fraud, not just by hostile writers, but by a recent sympathetic biographer. Suffice it to say that ordinary sodomy was one of his more innocuous pastimes. In describing him it’s hard to resist using the word “diabolical.” He was a deadly enemy of conscience and innocence itself.

The movie, starring the excellent Liam Neeson, ignores these discrediting facts, since, after all, Kinsey is a founding father of the sexual revolution, which of course covers a multitude of sins, including even child molestation.

According to the reviews, mostly laudatory, he appears as a kindly professor, devoted family man, and conscientious scientist who just wants to help people get over their silly hang-ups about sex.

Using phony statistics, Kinsey “proved” that people engaged in weird sexual practices far more often than was generally supposed. From this bogus fact he drew the entirely illogical inference, unstated but clearly implied, that none of these practices can be judged immoral.

As John Leo observes, this allowed him to define his own weird habits as more or less normal. In short, if there was no such thing as sin, he wasn’t a sinner.

This kind of reasoning is now predominant in America. Allegedly educated people fall for it; only the uneducated seem to sense something wrong with it. The familiar Catholic version of this non sequitur holds that if most Catholic couples are practicing contraception, the Church must be wrong to condemn it.

This fallacy, the argument from sociology, is also used to promote abortion. “Polls show,” we are told, that Catholic girls get abortions at the same rate as the rest of the population. And so forth. A former religion editor of The Washington Post, whose name now escapes me, used to be very fond of this argument. No doubt you’ve often encountered it too.

The homosexual Catholic pundit Andrew Sullivan is only following Kinsey when he gloats, “We are all sodomites now.” He has a point. If Kinsey was right, it’s nonsense to speak of normality. This is now gospel — good news indeed — for countless people, not just homosexuals.


What’s wrong with contraception? Much more than most Catholics suspect, says SOBRAN’S, my monthly newsletter. If you have not seen it yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran