Stardate 20021211.1429

(On Screen): When someone holds an extreme position, and begins to realize that they are not influencing the political process, then they will try to make their message more emphatic, both by turning up the volume and by trying to add emphasis to their point of view. At a certain point, they will start to exaggerate and even to lie.

Of course, if they were intellectually honest they might well start to question their own position, and some of the left who originally opposed this war have come to change their minds. But for others, it has been instructive to watch them turn into raving madmen whose antics actually discredit their own points of view and (counterproductively) drive away those in the political center that they're trying to sway.

Phil sends me a pointer to an editorial written by Harold Pinter which has been published in the Telegraph (which is rather surprising; it seems more like what the Guardian would have liked) and it is an exercise in foaming at the mouth combined with throwing every conceivable claim at its target in hopes that at least something will stick to it. That target being, needless to say, the Bush administration and the people of America.

The first question I had was "Who the heck is Harold Pinter?" The name was vaguely familiar, and a quick googling turned up the fact that he's a playwright. He happens to be a successful one, and as such is pretty famous, and that gives him access to the large scale media to get his message out. But it doesn't indicate that he actually has any more expertise on these matters than anyone else does, and about the best that can be said about this is that it amounts to an extended letter-to-the-editor from someone with name recognition.

The worst that can be said is that it's a pack of lies which reveals more about its speaker than it does about those whom he hates. I will, at least, give him credit; he doesn't "bury the lede", but states it clearly in his second paragraph.

However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world.

What he's saying here, more clearly than ever before, is the unspoken basis of most of the leftist political position: America is the real enemy, and everyone else in the world must band together to oppose America. In the immediate aftermath of the September attack, the left attempted to take a neutral position where it both condemned the attacks and those who planned them, but also tried to do us a favor by pointing out the things we had also done which were bad. As time has gone on, most semblances of moral equivalence have fallen by the wayside and the leftist message (especially from Europe) has been that the US is the true danger. Pinter, in this article, abandons any pretense of condemnation of our enemies, and directly aligns with them in this war. He advocates that the entire world combine together to fight against those hysterical, ignorant, arrogant, stupid, belligerent and, unfortunately, extraordinarily well armed Americans.

Pinter sees al Qaeda as effectively an ally, on the basis of enemy-of-my-enemy.

"If you are not with us, you are against us," President George W. Bush has said. He has also said: "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders." Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. That's you.

America is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and is prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.

He starts by misquoting President Bush. What Bush actually said was "If you are not with us, then you are with the terrorists." He was trying to point out that any attempt by any nation to try to pretend to neutrality in practice aided the terrorists. If you refuse to admit that the war can come to your own nation, then you will refuse to do anything about the operations of terrorists in your territory, and that gives them free reign to do whatever they can there.

Which is what Indonesia found out in the Bali bombing: the terrorist will attack anywhere they think they can, and they'll operate where they're permitted to. The government of Indonesia spent most of a year in full denial, claiming that there was no chance of anything like that happening there, and that the warnings from the US ambassador and others were racist slander. Then a bomb went off, hundreds were killed, and the Indonesian tourist industry (one of their major sources of hard currency) is in deep trouble. What Bush tried to warn the leaders of the world is that in this war neutrality isn't possible. It isn't that the US will treat as enemies all nations who don't outright claim to support us, it's that the terrorists will take adva