Wednesday’s New York Times included an op-ed piece by Jimmy Carter, entitled “Solving the Korean Stalemate, One Step at a Time.” Needless to say, the piece talks about the successful role Carter claims to have himself played in 1994, as an agent of the Clinton administration, in defusing an earlier Korean nuclear crisis, and it also blames the current confrontation with North Korea on the aggressive stance adopted by the Bush administration. No surprises here. Party politics as usual, with a somewhat higher than normal level of self-congratulation.

Of greater interest is the underlying assumption in the essay: according to Carter, the primary problem to be solved one step at a time is the Korean stalemate, i.e., the foreign policy showdown over the nuclear arms—no doubt an important goal, but Carter writes as if North Korea were otherwise a thoroughly normal state, with no significant problems except its misguided foray into the development of weapons of mass destruction. It is true that Carter does mention, twice in fact, the domestic situation in North Korea, but only in order to argue against sanctions. He writes of the “already starving people” and of “its people suffering horrible deprivation”—as if the problem with North Korea were simply some agricultural crisis. There is no mention of prison camps, the sadistic police state and the rampant denial of basic human rights. Indeed to mention these aspects would have undermined Carter’s political agenda of advocating negotiations with North Korea—as if it were a normal state.

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A lecture by Tony Judt on “Israel Lobby,” scheduled to take place at the Polish consulate in New York, was cancelled. The report in the New York Sun attributes the decision to the incompatibility of Judt’s increasingly bitter critique of Israel and the growing rapprochement between the Polish and Israeli governments:

“It is a diplomatic post. Whatever is organized here should be in compliance with Poland’s foreign policy,” the deputy consul general of Poland in New York, Marek Skulimowski, said. “The consulate is not a Hyde Park, it’s not a discussion club, it’s a consulate.” Mr. Skulimowski said that Mr. Judt had been “very critical” of Israel, while the president of Poland had just made a warm visit to Israel a few weeks ago.

In contrast, Judt, who was to speak on the thesis of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that an Israeli Lobby directs US foreign policy, evidently also believes that a similar lobby controls the scheduling decisions of the Polish consulate:

Judt . . . blamed the Anti-Defamation League and [the ADL National Director] Mr. [Abraham] Foxman for the cancellation. “The pressure was brought by the ADL,” Mr. Judt said. “They had no choice. Foxman had been leaning on the consulate all afternoon.”

In fact, Judt has only recently had a high-profile opportunity to debate his points not far away in Cooper Union. The arguments of Mearsheimer, Walt and Judt reportedly did not fare very well.

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The war in which we are currently engaged confuses us, in part because many will not admit it is a war. We do not know what to call it. Nor do we know what to call the self-declared enemy who has been attacking us in one form or another for some twenty-five years, ever more visibly and dangerously since September 11, 2001, with subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Spain, London, Bombay, Bali, Paris, Lebanon, and Israel. Those there are who insist that it is not a “war” at all but perhaps, at best, a police issue, no big problem. Others contend that it is a result of American or Western expansionism so that its cure is simply for us to return to our frontiers and be content with what we have. If we do this withdrawal, every threat will immediately cease at this point. No, in another view, it is due to poverty and oppression, even though most of the perpetrators of the war are quite rich. Yet another interpretation is that this turmoil stems from a very small minority with no relation to national or religious origins, a kind of floating international brigade of bandits, like the Mafia, out for their own profit and glory. The variants on these themes are almost infinite.

What names should we use that will accurately define and designate the cause? Calling things by their right names is the first requirement of reality; refusing to do so, the first cause of confusion, if not defeat. At first, we were told that the war is against something called “terrorism.” Its perpetrators were logically called “terrorists.” It was considered “hate-language” to call them anything else. However, we find listed on no map a place called “Terroritoria,” where said “terrorists” otherwise dwell in peace plotting our demise. It has no capital, no military uniform for its mostly invisible troops, no rules of combat. In this designation, some difficult ensues when we try to identify or designate a group that just wants to “terrorize” others, as if that is an explanation. Some may like to travel or to fish for pleasure; they like “terror” for terror’s sake, just a question of taste.

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