Prediction: Cocaine will lose its luster, thanks to anthrax. Who wants to go snorting powder from a stranger into your lungs?
An amazing piece of writing — though ultimately unconvincing, even troubling — by John le CarrÈ in the Sunday Times of London: “By the accepted rules of terrorist engagement, of course, the war is long lost. By us. What victory can we possibly achieve that matches the defeats we have already suffered, let alone the defeats that lie ahead? ‘Terror is theatre,’ a soft-spoken Palestinian firebrand told me in Beirut in 1982….” What le CarrÈ is really lamenting is that no one listened to him at the close of the cold war by tranforming the world with his rendition of the Marshall Plan: lots of food and friendliness. He regrets that he can’t whine about Kyoto or bad British health care without seeming like a crackpot liberal, disloyal to our loyal Mr. Blair. He is sad that he can’t still call Putin a war criminal. This man who understands strange alliances of necessity better than most any writer ever — this man who defined the cold war in literature — now oddly has a very hard time understanding the requirements of today’s alliances against evil. He sees too much gray, too little black and white. But this is not a world colored in cold-war, post-war Berlin gray. This is a world colored in black evil and white good. This is a Hitler world, not a Kruschev world. This is a war that requires victory, not a draw. This is not a war that le CarrÈ understands.
– Guardian: Some say the anthrax starts with Iraq.
– Instapundit via Ken Layne says anthrax is “total flop as a terrorist attack: a few people exposed and one death.” I disagree. If the point is to destabilize and generally freak our your enemy, it’s working quite well.
– Judith Miller’s first-person story on her NY Times anthrax scare.
