January 22, 2007
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Monday, January 22, 2007
- Grossman Puts Struggles Behind Him and Repays Coach’s Faith
Shaun Best/ReutersRex Grossman celebrating with Ruben Brown after throwing a touchdown pass, the first of three scores for the Bears in the fourth quarter. More Photos »
Bears 39, Saints 14Grossman Puts Struggles Behind Him and Repays Coach’s Faith
CHICAGO, Jan. 21 — With fog and doubt shrouding Soldier Field on Sunday, Bears Coach Lovie Smith kept unbending faith in his quarterback. A lead had shrunk. The Bears and quarterback Rex Grossman, backs to the end zone, faced another in a season’s worth of uh-oh moments.
Grossman, battered by skeptics who saw him as a detriment to the Bears’ championship hopes, not a reason for them, had completed only 5 of 20 passes for 64 yards, 30 of them with one throw, against the New Orleans Saints.
It was late in the third quarter and the lead was 4 points. The Bears were at their 15. The snow fell harder, and the Chicago skyline disappeared into low clouds and the looming dusk.
The Bears’ 39-14 victory against the Saints in the National Football Conference championship game threatens to dim the memory of the moment. The Bears were in trouble, and what everyone outside of their locker room saw as their most troublesome part, the quarterback, was having another difficult day.
“Nobody — nobody — has more mental toughness than Rex Grossman,” said Ron Turner, the Bears’ offensive coordinator.
Turner called the plays. Grossman threw again. And again. And again. And again. With four completions, he lifted the Bears to the Super Bowl and validated the unwavering faith that Smith and Grossman’s other coaches and teammates have had in him.
Smith quietly deflected detractors during the season by measuring Grossman on victories, not passing numbers.
The Bears will play Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4 in Miami against the Indianapolis Colts, who defeated the New England Patriots, 38-34. Smith and the Colts’ Tony Dungy are the first black coaches to reach a Super Bowl.
“I feel blessed to be in that position,” Smith said. “But I’ll feel even better to be the first black coach to hold up the world championship trophy.”
He was doused by a cold bucket of water at the two-minute warning, and he later embraced Grossman.
“I just kind of hugged him and told him that I loved him,” Smith said.
Grossman, at game’s end, happily heaved a football deep into the stands. Later, amid the celebratory buzz of the locker room, Grossman acknowledged that he might have thrown it to people who spent much of the season wishing he were not the Bears’ quarterback.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got believers in the locker room.”
The Bears scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns, none more important than the 33-yard completion from Grossman to Bernard Berrian, allowing 61,047 frosted fans to exhale in relief.
Before and after that series, it seemed that the Bears had pulled their game plan from somewhere deep in their history, perfectly suited for the weather conditions and the stakes: run the ball, stop the run, and turn the ball over less often than the opponent.
They did it to near perfection. The Bears had no turnovers, committed one penalty (for 5 yards), and outrushed the Saints, 196 yards to 56.
The Saints played right into Chicago’s plans. The opponents knew that in N.F.L. history, teams that played their home games indoors were 0-9 in conference championship games played outside. The Saints, removed from the climate-controlled Superdome and placed into subfreezing, blustery Soldier Field, had never won a playoff game away from home.
They tried to beat those odds while keeping alive the hopes of their broken city, still reeling from Hurricane Katrina nearly 17 months ago and clinging to the Saints as a sign of progress and pride.
But the league’s top offense could not maneuver through the Bears, whose once-vaunted defense had frayed toward the end of the season. The Bears allowed an average of 12.5 points in the season’s first 12 games. But in the next five, including a 27-24 overtime victory against the Seattle Seahawks in the divisional playoff game, the Bears allowed 25.8 points a game.
Whether because of nerves, hard hits or cold fingers, the Saints fumbled three times in the first quarter. Two were recovered by the Bears, who converted the turnovers into field goals, then added another on a short drive that started at midfield.
The Saints committed four turnovers. Their dynamic top-ranked offense showed flashes only twice, on touchdown drives that sandwiched halftime and turned a 16-0 deficit into a temporarily taut 16-14 game. Quarterback Drew Brees threw eight times in leading the Saints 73 yards to their first touchdown, a 13-yard touchdown to Marques Colston.
On the Saints’ second play of the third quarter, Brees quickly flipped a pass down the left sideline for running back Reggie Bush, who had sprinted past safety Chris Harris. Bush caught the ball, then cut diagonally past safety Danieal Manning and past a herd of pursuers for an 88-yard touchdown.
But the Saints never got their running game going. Deuce McAllister gained 18 yards on six carries, and Bush added only 19 yards on four carries.
The Bears, by contrast, used bullish Cedric Benson early, then seemed to catch the Saints off guard by changing to the shiftier Thomas Jones when the score was 9-0.
Jones had two carries on the Bears’ first five drives but ran the ball on every play during an eight-play march late in the second quarter. He gained 14 yards, then 2, then 33. He gained 7, 2 and 2 to give the Bears a first-and-goal for the third time. But rather than being held to a field goal, as they were the first two times, the Bears handed off twice more to Jones. The first play gained 7 yards, the second only 2 because he pushed past the goal line.
“When we do that stuff, you know you’re beating the other team down,” said Benson, who had 12 second-half carries. “You’re wearing them down. You’re stamping that message in their heads.”
But as has been the case all season for the Bears, there was the Rex factor. For most of three quarters, all the worries about Grossman had proved to be worthy ones. He completed 3 of 12 passes in helping — or limiting — the Bears to a 16-0 second-quarter lead. When the Saints tightened the score, the doubts covered the stadium like the falling snow.
Late in the third quarter, after Brees was called for intentional grounding while standing in his end zone, resulting in a safety, the Bears held an 18-14 lead.
Grossman had endured a season’s worth of criticisms, his persona divided into Good Rex and Bad Rex so much that many Bears fans clamored for Smith to replace him with Brian Griese.
Smith never budged. On the way to a 13-3 regular-season record, Smith believed that there was only a loose correlation between Grossman’s statistics and the team’s success. And his trust was being put to the test.
For Grossman, the absence of interceptions against the Saints served as his only redeeming statistic. But Smith and Turner liked what they saw. “If he’s making the right decisions and he’s decisive and he’s seeing the field well, I don’t care what the situation is,” Turner said.
Grossman completed a 13-yard pass to Berrian. He lobbed a 20-yard pass to Muhsin Muhammad. The fourth quarter began, and Grossman, throwing into the wind, completed a 12-yarder to Berrian. Finally, he lobbed a ball toward the low clouds, and it fell like a snowflake into the arms of Berrian, who fell near the goal line as he caught it, then stood and raised his arms as an official did the same.
Grossman was 4 of 4 for 78 yards on the drive. The Bears, mired in comparisons to Coach Mike Ditka’s team that won the Super Bowl 21 years ago, created their own championship history.
“I told him numerous times, don’t worry about what’s being said on the outside,” Turner said of Grossman. “You know what you can do. I know what you can do. The people in that locker room know what you can do. I said: ‘Listen to the people in this locker room. Listen to us. Don’t listen to all that stuff. You’re a great player. You know it, we all know it, and you’re going to show it.’ “
He did. And a city cheered him like never before.
- Colts Overcome Brady and Patriots to Reach Super Bowl
Amy Sancetta/Associated PressPeyton Manning after Joseph Addai’s winning touchdown. Manning led five scoring drives in the second half. More Photos >
Multimedia
Slide Show A.F.C. Championship
Colts 38, Patriots 34Colts Overcome Brady and Patriots to Reach Super Bowl
INDIANAPOLIS, Jan. 21 — To reach the Super Bowl, to finally fill in the blanks on the glittering résumés that lacked postseason glory, even the Indianapolis Colts conceded it was only appropriate that they would have to vanquish their greatest tormentors.
The New England Patriots had used the Colts as doormats on two of their three Super Bowl runs, stepping over them on the way to constructing a dynasty. But Sunday night, like the kids who had had enough of being beaten up by the class bullies, the Colts fought back. They rallied from an 18-point deficit, then traded scores with the Patriots in a thrilling second half to win the American Football Conference title, 38-34, and advance to Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4 in Miami.
There, the Colts will play the Chicago Bears, who won the National Football Conference championship game earlier in the day, creating a meeting of great significance: Colts Coach Tony Dungy and Bears Coach Lovie Smith, Dungy’s close friend, will become the first black head coaches to lead teams at the Super Bowl.
The victory also sent quarterback Peyton Manning to the Super Bowl for the first time, and he and Dungy can leave behind some of their baggage — that their successful careers may never be capped by their sport’s greatest honor. This was an especially meaningful performance by Manning (27 of 47 for 349 yards and a touchdown), who was criticized for his previous postseason failures as much as he was praised for his statistical dominance.
But he recovered from a shaky start to produce scoring drive after scoring drive in a relentless second half that included a total of eight scores, four of them Colts touchdowns.
The comeback was the biggest in championship game history, and the brilliance of Manning’s regular-season play finally transferred to the postseason with a winning drive that may rival the one produced by John Elway against Cleveland 20 years ago. The seven-play, 80-yard drive, which included a pinpoint-perfect 32-yard pass to tight end Bryan Fletcher on the left sideline, ended with the winning touchdown — a 3-yard run by Joseph Addai with one minute left. It was the first time the Colts led in the game.
Celebration of Dungy’s historical milestone, he said, could wait for another day. He wanted the Colts, who had struggled with a leaky run defense all season and had lost three of their last five regular-season games, to enjoy their first trip to the Super Bowl since the Colts moved to Indianapolis in 1984.
“We had to do it the hard way,” Dungy said. “We had to go through a great champion. It’s fitting. Our team went the hard way the whole year.”
The Colts endured a remarkable early onslaught by the Patriots, who took a 21-3 lead in the second quarter when Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel returned an interception 39 yards for a touchdown. Manning said later that he had wanted to make up for that play, and he would get his chance much later. But the beginning of the comeback was nearly unnoticed by Colts fans, who were stunned into silence by the yawning deficit.
The Colts kicked a field goal just before the end of the first half, cutting their deficit to 21-6, and that, Dungy said, infused the locker room with energy during halftime. He spoke to his players about being just two scores down, and said that if they could get a good kickoff return and score on their opening drive, they would trail by just one score. Dungy’s calm permeates the Colts, and when Manning scored on a 1-yard sneak on the first Colts drive of the third quarter, a blowout was on its way to becoming an instant classic.
“You don’t envision getting down, 21-3, to the New England Patriots,” Manning said. “It didn’t feel like things were going that bad. It was my fault it was 21-3.”
It was the defense’s fault that the Colts had played so poorly at the end of the regular season, losing their bid to have home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. But the defense, with the fireplug safety Bob Sanders back from a knee injury, righted itself when the playoffs began, carrying the team to victories against the Chiefs and the Ravens even as Manning struggled. The Colts relied on the defense again to start the comeback.
When they held the Patriots to three downs and out on their first drive of the third quarter, Dungy’s halftime speech proved prophetic in the most improbable way. The Colts are laden with offensive talent, but Manning’s first touchdown pass of the game did not go to one of his high-profile receivers. It went instead to Dan Klecko, a backup defensive tackle who used to play for New England. Manning rolled to his right and hit Klecko for the 1-yard touchdown pass.
When Marvin Harrison, who was held to four receptions for 41 yards by the Patriots, spun around to catch a 2-point conversion, the score was suddenly — and very briefly — tied.
Patriots cornerback Ellis Hobbs had set up that touchdown when he bumped receiver Reggie Wayne in the end zone, giving the Colts first-and-goal on the 1. Redemption came quickly. Hobbs returned the ensuing kickoff 80 yards to put the Patriots at the Colts’ 21.
On third-and-goal from the 6, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady saw Jabar Gaffney in the back of the end zone. Gaffney leaped and caught the pass, coming down with his left foot inbounds. Officials ruled that he was pushed out, so the touchdown counted. But a replay on the RCA Dome’s video screen indicated that Gaffney might have stepped out of bounds before he leaped for the ball. The touchdown stood and the Patriots led again.
The scoring continued until the Colts finally halted the Patriots at the Colts’ 25. The Patriots rookie kicker Stephen Gostkowski kicked a 43-yard field goal to give the Patriots a 34-31 lead with 3:49 remaining.
“We let too many opportunities get away,” Brady said. “We had the ball in good field position at certain times. We should have got the ball in the end zone.”
In years past, a 3-point lead would have been enough for the Patriots to cling to. But they have been unusually erratic this season, and of all things, their defense failed them this time. They looked exhausted, and that was just enough of an opening for Manning, whose record-setting career had lacked a defining moment.
By hitting Fletcher on a play that Fletcher called for himself, the triumphs that had so often belonged to Brady and the Patriots in the past six years were finally snatched away by Manning. When Addai ran in untouched to put Indianapolis ahead, Manning worried that the Colts had left too much time on the clock. He got to the bench and bowed his head, praying, as the Patriots took over with only a minute left.
When cornerback Marlin Jackson intercepted Brady’s pass at the Colts’ 35 with 16 seconds to play, the Patriots’ stranglehold on the Colts was over, and so was Manning’s postseason futility. The dynasty was put aside while the monkey was removed from Manning’s back.
“I don’t know if you’re supposed to pray for things like that,” Manning said. “I can remember the disappointment of three years ago, when we lost the A.F.C. championship in Foxborough. I don’t get into monkeys or vindication. I don’t play that card.”
But Manning had gotten those 7 points back. And he had, at long last, led the Colts to the Super Bowl. Prayers answered.
- Mr. and Mrs. Natural
- January 19, 2007
Aline & R. CrumbJanuary 21, 2007
Allen Salken/The New York Times
Robert and Aline Crumb in the kitchen of their partly 11th-century home in FranceMultimedia
Audio Slide Show Aline Crumb on ‘Need More Love’
Mr. and Mrs. Natural
VALLÉE DU Vidourle, France
SHORTLY after Robert and Aline Crumb moved from the United States to a small village in this valley in the South of France, they were asked to participate in a summer medieval festival. For the event local politicians don robes like those once worn by feudal lords, and most of the citizens wear peasant rags.
Mr. Crumb, timid, like the famous cartoon caricature of himself he draws in his comic strips, is not one for parades. The father of Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Devil Girl declined to participate.
Ms. Crumb, bold, like the red-haired cartoon version of herself she draws, agreed to join the procession and asked for the cotton rags. The festival organizers would not hear of it. “They told me, ‘No, you have to get a costume of a lady in waiting because your husband is an important person,’ ” Ms. Crumb, 59, recalled over breakfast at their 13-room house, parts of which date from the 11th century.
Although the brocaded costume was stiflingly hot — “I felt like a giant sweating chair,” Ms. Crumb said — it turns out the townsfolk were prescient. In a twist as unlikely as the plot of an R. Crumb comic, the couple, known to many from the 1994 documentary “Crumb,” which portrayed Mr. Crumb’s troubled early family life and adult predilection for riding piggyback on large women, have become something of a lord and lady in their village. They are surrounded by a bohemian court of artists, lovers, sycophants and jesters engaged in fits of intrigue.
“We live in Crumbland,” Ms. Crumb said.
They moved to France 16 years ago, sickened, they said, by the infiltration of their once sleepy California town, Winters, by newcomers who bulldozed hilltops for McMansions. The Crumbs also wanted to shield their daughter, Sophie, from a growing conservative and fundamentalist Christian influence while continuing to educate her in what they consider the classics. They reared her on “Little Lulu” comics from the 1940s and ’50s and Three Stooges videos.
It was Mr. Crumb’s absorption of such popular culture that led to his signature style. He applied a lowbrow, all but forgotten crosshatched technique to a kaleidoscope of sexual fantasies, controversial racial topics and images of the hippy counterculture. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for adult-theme graphic novels, influencing everyone from Daniel Clowes, the creator of “Ghost World,” to Art Spiegelman, the author of “Maus.”
“He’s a monolithic presence, who rewrote the rules of what comics are,” Mr. Spiegelman said.
Much of Crumbland’s energy is devoted to preserving space for Mr. Crumb, 63, to continue his work and for everyone to feed off it.
When the Crumbs moved to their village west of Nîmes — which they asked not be named, fearful of attracting streams of fans — many old houses were empty. Villagers preferred modern homes with square rooms across the river, where streets are wide enough for two cars to pass.
But since the Crumbs’ arrival, many of the achingly quaint, empty stone houses have attracted other newcomers. One of the first was Ms. Crumb’s brother, Alex Goldsmith, who lives in the lower ramparts of the Crumb home. Mr. Goldsmith, 54, said he had fought drug addiction, and if his sister had not welcomed him to France, “I’d probably be in prison, if I was alive.”
He earns money buying used R. Crumb comics on eBay, taking them upstairs for Mr. Crumb to sign and reselling them “for quadruple” on the Internet, Mr. Goldsmith said, smiling.
For years, Mr. Crumb would occupy his time waiting to be served at village restaurants by doodling on place mats. When his New York agent, Paul Morris, said that he had a market for the drawings, Ms. Crumb offered to help one restaurateur sell his collection. They fetched $25,000. A pizzeria sold its R. Crumb doodles to Mr. Morris for $2,500 each.
Another village newcomer is Christian Coudurès, a printmaker, who moved from Paris. When he was depressed after breaking up with a girlfriend, Ms. Crumb decided he was a project she wanted to take on.
“When I first met him, he was in bad shape, drinking a lot,” she said. “I decided I needed to save this worthy person.” Mr. Coudurès eventually became what Ms. Crumb calls her “second husband.”
The Crumbs have long had an open marriage, that brave (and largely discarded) institution of the 1960s. Mr. Crumb travels to Oregon once a year to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend.
Speaking of Mr. Coudurès, Mr. Crumb said, “Between the two of us, we kind of make an ideal husband, because he can do all the masculine things I can’t do.” He cited Mr. Coudurès’s talents for wiring, plumbing, engaging in shouting matches with the highly energetic Ms. Crumb and driving a car.
“If she ever started making comparisons about our lovemaking technique, I might get jealous,” Mr. Crumb added.
Their daughter, Sophie, is not so sure about the arrangement. She called the idea of her mother’s having a second husband “gross.”
Nonetheless, the strong-jawed Mr. Coudurès, 61, has become a part of the support system that frees Mr. Crumb to focus on work. The Frenchman, who has a thick mane of black hair, does handyman chores. His daughter Agathe McCamy, 35, helps Ms. Crumb color her comics.
“I am a Situationist,” Mr. Coudurès explained in French after sharing a dinner with the Crumbs next to a gently crackling fireplace in his kitchen. He was referring to a European avant-garde philosophy born in 1957 and championed by Guy Debord. “I am an adventurer of the present.”
Mr. Crumb’s current project has him spending a lot of time in the past. He is illustrating the opening book of the Bible, Genesis, and spends hours in his study deep in the Crumb house consulting translations of Sumerian legends, Hebrew and Christian scholarly interpretations of the Bible and reproductions of illuminated manuscripts.
The work contains biblical scenes populated with classic R. Crumb women, their legs and ankles hearty, their breasts straining through flimsy dresses. But the work is not sexually graphic. Nor has the artist altered a word of the Genesis text.
Mr. Crumb has calmed considerably since his early days, when he was so afraid of social interaction that he focused all of his energy on drawing. “I basically lived on paper,” he said, reclining on a small wicker couch in his study, where the shelves are packed with vintage 78 r.p.m. records, comic book figurines and back issues of Fate, a magazine of the paranormal.
In recent years he has taken to sitting in a chair every morning and meditating for 45 minutes, following the rising and falling of his breath. The resulting inner calm has changed his vibe. As a younger man he was a gerbil-like creature with a whiskery mustache and a twitchy demeanor. Now he seems more like a small Lincoln or van Gogh, a bearded, although still bony, thinker with a certain gravity.
“He’s less wimpy,” said Sophie Crumb, now 25, who lives in a village a half-hour drive from her parents with her American boyfriend.
She is still mentally processing her upbringing. “It’s weird, the mixture of the culture of California, France and underground comics, this random strange mixture of things that don’t add up at all,” she said, sitting with her dog, Poopsie, in a sidewalk cafe. Trying to learn a new language and to fit in at school with French children made her “really good at adapting,” she said.
Now a cartoonist herself, Sophie Crumb has work in Mome, a comics quarterly, and she is coloring “Genesis Illustrated.”
Comics have always bound the Crumbs. Aline and Robert met in 1971 after she heard about a large-rumped woman named Honeybunch Kaminski created by Mr. Crumb for his Snatch Comics series. Ms. Crumb, whose surname from her first marriage was Kominsky, bore a physical resemblance to Honeybunch, and she set out to meet the famous R. Crumb.
“She was the first woman I met whose emotions didn’t scare me,” Mr. Crumb said.
They began drawing comics together in 1974. Many readers of their occasional reportage-style comics in The New Yorker, where they have written about the Cannes Film Festival and New York Fashion Week, do not realize that Ms. Crumb draws herself in the panels and writes her own dialogue.
Wider recognition may come soon. A graphic memoir, “Need More Love,” including Ms. Crumb’s comic books, paintings and musings, is scheduled to arrive in stores next month. An exhibition of her drawings and other works is scheduled for the Adam Baumgold Gallery in Manhattan, Feb. 15 through March 17. On Feb. 14, Mr. Crumb is scheduled to interview Ms. Crumb at the New York Public Library. (Mr. Coudurès also plans to be present.)
Three times a week Ms. Crumb leads an American-style Pilates-yoga-dance class in her village’s Napoleonic-era barracks. Regulars include Estelle Kohler, a legendary actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company; and a French marionette maker, married to a man who publishes a newsletter about flying kites.
The village seems to be thriving with such free spirits. An Israeli, Khaïm Seligman, set up shop making wooden flutes. Melinda Trucks, the wife of Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers Band drummer, has taken Ms. Crumb’s exercise class. The Truckses have bought a nearby estate.
A longtime friend of the Crumbs, Peter Poplaski, moved to the village in the ’90s, collaborated with Mr. Crumb on a 2005 collection, “The R. Crumb Handbook,” and continues to work on a pet project he describes as “the quintessential Zorro book of the 21st century.” Mr. Poplaski, a Wisconsin native, dresses as Zorro for festivals to entertain the village children.
Despite her dalliances, Ms. Crumb is fiercely loyal to Mr. Crumb. In addition to overseeing much of his business, she has transformed their labyrinthine home into a sort of Crumb archive and museum.
A narrow stone staircase leads unevenly from a room at the front door to a long hallway, whose ceiling reaches up three floors.
In the hallway hang two abstract oil paintings by Mr. Crumb’s younger brother, Maxon. Mr. Crumb said his brother is in better shape than when he appeared in the documentary, in which he is shown disheveled, meditating on a bed of nails and begging on the streets. Although Maxon still lives in the same room in a San Francisco skid row hotel where he has stayed for a quarter-century, his paintings are fetching healthy prices, and he is in a stable relationship.
Also on the wall is a portrait of Jesse Crumb, Mr. Crumb’s son by his first marriage. They are estranged because of a dispute over a business selling Crumb merchandise, Mr. Crumb said.
Controversy continues to find Mr. Crumb. A poster he drew to protest a proposal to build a large supermarket in the village drew controversy after a local politician whom the artist caricatured filed charges for “insult to a private person.”
But the legal action backfired when it drew the attention of a local newspaper, which ran a front-page article sympathetic to the opponents of the supermarket. This also profited Mr. Goldsmith, who sold a pair of autographed R. Crumb anti-supermarket posters for $385 to a Danish collector.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the dramas around him, Mr. Crumb continues to find the inspiration to produce art.
After dinner one night at Mr. Coudurès’s apartment, Mr. Crumb sat looking at a book his wife’s lover had brought to the table about the World War II escape of many European artists, Jewish and otherwise, via Marseille to New York.
There was a photo of a grandly smiling Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, in front of a painting. “He was a real self-promoter, that Dalí,” one dinner guest said.
Mr. Crumb pointed at the wife.
“She was behind most of that,” he said.
- Foreign Policy Incompetence in Middle East
Ignorance Abroad
Michael Oren’s new history of America in the Middle East.
By Shmuel Rosner
Posted Friday, Jan. 19, 2007, at 3:10 PM E.T.When the State Department created its division for Middle Eastern affairs back in 1909, none of the original staff “could speak a Middle Eastern language or produce a contemporary map of the area.” This anecdote, like many of the hundreds included in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, Michael Oren’s history of America in the Middle East, is all too familiar. A hundred years have passed, and America is still looking for Arabic speakers to serve as diplomats, analysts, and spies.
Last month, the Iraq Study Group reported that only 33 of 1,000 workers in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad speak Arabic, just six fluently. These workers and the other thousands who plan and implement America’s policy in the region will find Oren’s book painfully educational. The repeated mistakes, the misconceptions, the illusions, and the naiveté of the last 230 years are all here.
In 1878, former President Ulysses S. Grant visited the Middle East with his wife, Julia. “I have seen more to interest me in Egypt than in any of my travels,” Grant exclaimed enthusiastically. Julia was less impressed: “Egypt, the birthplace, the cradle of civilization—Egypt, the builder of temples, tombs and great pyramids—has nothing,” she declared. Traveling to Palestine, she found Jaffa to be “a poor place and very dirty.”
These two competing impressions keep cropping up throughout the book—and, more important, throughout history. Americans are fascinated by the Middle East but also alienated from it; they’re lured by its mystique and strangeness but also repulsed by its habits. They desire relationships and commerce with its inhabitants but also want to educate and save them—from their bad manners, from their poverty, but most of all from their religion.
Clearly, the clash of civilizations didn’t start in the last couple of decades but, rather, way back in the early days of the American enterprise. It was already at play in the telling meeting of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (an encounter that Christopher Hitchens referenced here last week). “Every Mussulman who should be slain in battle [against the nations who do not follow the laws of Quran] was sure to go to Paradise,” the envoy told the two future presidents.
It was also at play throughout the next decade, as generation upon generation of missionaries, pilgrims, and men of the cloth tried—and failed—to spread Christianity among the Arabs, or, for similar reasons and with similar results, to help the Jews re-inhabit Palestine. Last week, an Israeli official visiting Washington read this letter to his American counterpart; it was written in 1819 by Adams: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.” This is an American former president speaking more than half a century before Theodor Hertzl published Der Judenstaat, his groundbreaking book envisioning the founding of a future independent Jewish state.
The details that are the strength of Oren’s book are in the stories of Americans who traveled, fought, lived, and died in the Middle East. It is a transition from the evangelism of Christianity in the 19th century to the evangelism of Americanism in the 20th century and beyond. In both cases, Americans wanted to give more than the Arabs wanted to receive. In both cases, there was more failure than success.
In the late 1860s, a group of Civil War veterans who had gone to Egypt to help modernize the army ended up building a school system, intended to teach literacy and American ideals to the local youth. But Egypt today is still 40 percent illiterate, according to the U.S. State Department. Americans wanted to bring about change, but they hardly succeeded. “It will be years, perhaps generations,” Oren quotes former President Teddy Roosevelt, visiting Cairo in 1910, “before Egypt is ready to govern itself” in a proper, modern way. The hundreds of nationalists protesting outside Roosevelt’s hotel conducted “the first anti-American demonstration in the Middle East.”
Were Britain, then ruler of the country, to leave Egypt prematurely, Roosevelt predicted, “Women would be denied the most basic rights.” A century has passed, and “[a]lthough women in Egypt can now legally initiate a divorce without cause,” says Human Rights Watch, “they must agree not only to renounce all rights to the couple’s finances, but must also repay their dowries. Essentially, they have to buy their freedom.” Egypt today governs itself well enough, but it is not a democracy, and it still suffers from many of the flaws Roosevelt detected, America’s help notwithstanding.
But is it really up to America to save the Middle East—or is it just another region with which to keep commerce flowing and strategic interests defended? This was the question troubling Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson when they contemplated whether America should support the Greek (Christian) rebels against Ottoman (Muslim) rule back in the early 19th century—a dilemma that still looms large over American policy in the region. Is it really necessary for America to insist on democracy in Iraq, or can it make do with a friendly autocrat? Should it stand with the independent but rather shaky government of Lebanon or let the Syrians influence—and practically take over—the country, as long as it provides for stability?
Adams hesitated, because public opinion overwhelmingly favored Greece in its struggle for national and religious independence. Jackson, however, ruled that the national interest demanded that Washington favor the Ottomans, and he presented a treaty to Congress “to foster the intercourse between the countries.” These dichotomies—idealism vs. realism, evangelism vs. commerce, fascination vs. repulsion—are the story of two and a half centuries of American policy in the region. “The debate over the essential nature of the Middle East and its relations with the United States,” concludes Oren, “shows no signs of waning.”
The book he has produced is not going to educate Americans about the Middle East. It is about America and its motivations—both public and hidden—and the repetitive nature of missteps driven both by ignorance and good intentions. So, it is a book that can only provide the very first step—maybe the most essential of steps—as America struggles to reshape its policy in the Middle East. Before being educated about the region and the forces that shape it, Americans must re-examine the forces that motivate America.
Shmuel Rosner, chief U.S. correspondent for the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, writes daily at Rosner’s Domain- Today’s Papers
Deadly Pretenders
By Daniel Politi
Posted Monday, Jan. 22, 2007, at 5:05 AM E.T.The Washington Post leads with word that the deadly attack in the city of Karbala, Iraq, on Saturday was carried out by a group of men who traveled in a convoy and apparently disguised themselves as Americans using U.S. military uniforms and badges. Adding two Marines that were killed in Anbar province Sunday, at least 27 U.S. servicemembers died in Iraq over the weekend, including 12 as a result of a helicopter crash Saturday. USA Today leads an interview with President Bush where he said there are no guarantees that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of his presidency. “We don’t set timetables,” he emphasized. Continuing with a frequent theme, Bush said he’ll tell Americans in his State of the Union speech that “what happens in Iraq matters to your security here at home.” The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with Bush promoting tax deductions for those who buy health coverage outside of the workplace during his radio address Saturday. The plan also calls for workplace health care to be counted as income, which would be taxable.
The Los Angeles Times leads with word that situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the U.S. military to greatly reduce its efforts to detect and stop illegal drug shipments from entering the United States. For example, the Pentagon has decreased the amount of time it spends doing surveillance flights over some key drug routes by more than 62 percent. The New York Times leads with an unsurprising look at how intense the campaign for the White House has become even though there’s still “a full year before the first vote is cast.” Most of this stuff has been reported before: how it’s the first time in more than 50 years that there’s no presidential or vice presidential incumbent, the way candidates need more money than ever, how this all makes it harder for an unknown candidate to get any attention, etc. The paper mentions that all the talk of presidential campaigns so early in the game will make it more difficult for Democratic leaders to highlight their successes in Congress.
In addition to being disguised, the men who attacked the base in Karbala also drove vehicles generally used by foreigners. As the NYT notes inside, it’s not uncommon for insurgents to disguise themselves as Iraqi security forces, but this appears to be the first time they impersonated U.S. troops. Once inside, the attackers targeted Americans and were able to kill five before driving away. Military officials said they’re still investigating the attack in Karbala as well as the helicopter crash.
During the 27 minute interview with USAT, the president emphasized that problems in Iraq won’t prevent him from tackling “big domestic issues.” Besides health insurance, Bush will apparently talk about old favorites such as education. In addition, the president said he’ll (once again) talk about alternative energy and vowed to pressure for a “bold initiative that really encourages America to become less dependent on oil.” Bush also said he is willing to sit down with Democrats to discuss the future of Social Security with “no preconditions.”
The Department of Defense defended its decision to decrease its involvement in the war on drugs, saying it is “a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions.” The Coast Guard and various Homeland Security agencies have been trying to make up for this shortage, but officials recognize they don’t have the necessary resources.
Everybody notes New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is the latest Democrat to announce his plans to run for president. Richardson would be the first Hispanic president. The Post points out that Richardson joins other “second-tier candidates” like Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
The Post fronts, and the NYT reefers, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s first public event after declaring that she’s running for president, where she touted a piece of health-care legislation at a Manhattan health-care clinic. It was an understated affair, but the papers mention that it gave a glimpse of how Clinton will likely focus on her experiences as a lawmaker and a mother during her campaign.
The NYT off-leads a look at the way in which Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) is trying to lay claim to his more than 40,000 pages of writings to allow the public to read them in their original form. The government wants to sell “sanitized versions of the materials” on the Internet to raise money for four of the Unabomber’s victims. But Kaczynski has begun a legal battle where he cites the First Amendment to argue the government cannot take control of his writings and therefore cannot sell or change them.
USAT mentions inside that Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, who will deliver the Democratic response to the State of the Union, is in favor of cutting off funds to rebuild Iraq and, instead, use the money to pay for recovery related to Hurricane Katrina. According to Webb: “How can we keep sending billions of dollars over to Iraq and not fund a really energetic effort to help places like New Orleans?”
The LAT fronts a look at how, despite their initial fears, the new Democratic Congress hasn’t been so bad for businesses. Lobbyists from big businesses are having no trouble meeting with important lawmakers and getting their voices heard. And more significantly, it seems this lobbying is working because several businesses were able to get important concessions from Democrats as the lawmakers worked on their 100-hour plan.
The Post goes inside with word of growing tensions between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several of the Democratic members over her management style, which many characterize as overly aggressive. Among other complaints, some say she’s not being hard enough on Iraq, while others claim she made a mistake by not giving Republicans more say in legislation. The Post predicts this friction is likely to increase as House members move away from their popular legislation that had no problem passing and start dealing with more controversial issues.
Back to the interview … After Bush affirmed he had read about Lyndon Johnson’s experience in Vietnam, the USAT reporter, David Jackson, asked whether there were any important lessons from that time. “Yes, win. Win, when you’re in a battle for the security … if it has to do with the security of your country, you win.” After emphasizing that his legacy “will be wrtten long after I’m president,” Jackson asked whether Bush saw himself as a possible Truman. Bush replied: “I’ve got two years to be president. I guess people with idle time like yourself can think about this. I’ve got a job to do, and I’m going to do it.”
Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
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