Month: April 2004

The battle for Sadr City appears to be over. If this report is to be believed, it was relatively easy. No one should mistake Sadr’s mobs of looters with a real army. But they sure have a lot of weapons. Blogger Zeyad also reports a new calm:

Sorry for the depressing note. It seems like everything is back under control, at least from what I can see in my neighbourhood. There is an eerie silence outside, only dogs barking. Until about an hour ago, it sounded like a battlefield, and we had flashbacks of last April. I don’t know what happened, but there were large plumes of smoke from the direction of Adhamiya and Kadhimiya. I wanted to take some pictures but my father and uncle both said they would shoot me on the spot if I tried, they were afraid the Apaches would mistake us for troublemakers and fire at us. I’m dreading tomorrow.

Of course, Sadr doesn’t represent all Shiites. Far from it. But the more mainstream Shiites are still obviously leery of siding openly with the CPA against him. We should expect – and actually demand – a very effective display of military power and authority from the coalition in response to this provocation. Arresting Sadr is a start – and certainly worth doing now rather than in four months’ time. The optimist in me hopes that this confrontation – threatening for months – can be resolved effectively before June 30. The pessimist in me worries about the propaganda value in this kind of unrest in deterring investment, polarizing ethnicities and sects, and making democracy even harder. If you want to see how the anti-war crowd will spin this, check out the headline in the Guardian today: “On the Brink of Anarchy.” They wish. I find no fault in the president’s strong response. But he must understand that the battle he is now fighting in Iraq is not a diversion from this election. It is what this election is and should be all about. No, this is not a quagmire. It’s the brightest opportunity for real change in the world since the end of the Cold War. We have to seize it.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation’s 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.” Senator Chris Dodd, hailing former Klan member and active anti-gay bigot, Robert Byrd, on the floor of the Senate. Byrd would have been perfect during the Civil War? Wrong side, Senator Dodd. Wrong side. How much do you bet that Dodd’s remarks will get one smidgen of the media attention Trent Lott’s hailing of Strom Thurmond did?

In all the poems of praise for the late and brilliant actor, writer and raconteur, his record of supporting any anti-Western dictator and his vast blind spot with regard to the Soviet Union have been ignored. No longer.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR: “The fit of ejaculatio praecox to which the commentariat abandoned itself when payroll job growth hit 308,000 last week was perhaps understandable, in view of the terrible frustrations it had suffered for so many, many months before.” – James K. Galbraith, Salon.

THE FUTURE: An openly gay soldier marries his male fiance in Canada. I think I just ruined John Derbyshire’s day.

KERRY WIMPS OUT: On education reform. Why doesn’t the president go on the offensive on “No Child Left Behind”? It makes a lot of sense to me. And Kerry’s cravenness toward the teachers’ unions is too soft a target for the Bush team to ignore. Or is it? (Hat tip: Tagorda.)

BLOGGING FOR PEACE: It’s working in Northern Ireland.

Noam Scheiber observes a worrying new development in the already-listless Kerry campaign.

This just in from the HealingIraq blogger, whose site is now down because Glenn just linked. I’m reposting Glenn’s excerpt, because it strikes me as a really big deal. We could be losing the ball-game right now, guys:

A coup d’etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu’la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi’ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi’ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.
No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47’s are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.

This sounds like civil war to me.

A WEDGE ON THE RIGHT: As I predicted, the marriage amendment issue is now deeply dividing not Democrats, but Republicans. Some Republicans insist on the most radical amendment, stripping states of the ability to decide on the matter and imposing one uniform definition of marriage on the entire country for the first time in history; others want a constitutional amendment that would be merely procedural rather than substantive, simply stripping courts from enforcing equal protection for gay couples; others oppose civil marriage rights for gays but don’t want to amend the constitution at all; others actually support civil marriage for gays and oppose the amendment. Among Democrats, barely no one supports any kind of amendment, and the main divide is between those who want to call civil marriage a civil union and those who simply want to call it what it obviously is. Here’s the latest in-fighting from Ramesh Ponnuru and Maggie Gallagher. It’s a carbon copy – if less acrimonious – of the debate between Orrin Hatch and Paul Weyrich. I predict even more splits to come. Way to go, Mr President.

THEOCON ALERT: They’re itching to excommunicate John Kerry from the Catholic church. As usual, Kathryn Lopez is leading the inquisition.

With three months to go before sovereignty is handed over to a provisional government, there are some nightmarish portents. We knew that elements in the Sunni minority would resist the reconstruction of Iraq into a representative polity; now we have the extremists among the Shiites, under Moktada al Sadr, unleashing Shiite anger against the occupation. You have to ask yourself: if this is the state of affairs now, what will happen to civil order when the U.S. military takes an even more passive role after June 30? This report is chilling – and all the more so because it’s penned by John F Burns, our finest reporter in the country. More and more, it seems hard to avoid inferring that we made one huge mistake: not in liberating Iraq, but in attempting to occupy it with relatively few troops. You have to have unquestioned security before any sort of democracy can begin to function. But, under the Rumsfeld plan, we never had the numbers or resources to do precisely that. So the extraodinary gains that have been made since the invasion are constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by violence. The silver lining is that only a handful of factions have an interest in seeing Iraq go down the tubes in a civil war between rival militias. The Sadr uprising might, in fact, help Ayatollah Sistani realize that unless more cooperation is promised to the CPA, he could lose control of the Shiites to the extremist mobs represented by Sadr. From this distance, it’s not clear what our response to all this should be: a strong show of force; an attempt to broker a firmer deal for handover with the establishment Shiites; more troops; or all of the above. But it seems to me undeniable that events may be spinning out of control.

ON THE OTHER HAND: It’s hard not to be cheered by stories like this appearing last Thursday in the Guardian. The son of Gadhafi is urging more democratization in the Arab world. Money quote from Seif al-Islam Gadhafi: “Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries, and then there will be no need to fear America or your people. The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed on them from outside.” Amen. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that both this story and the Burns one represent something true. Events can go forward and backward at once. What we do know is that failure in Iraq is unthinkable. And that success – even if we define it as conservatively as a functioning, non-anarchic representative government in Baghdad within a year – could spawn phenomenal reprecussions elsewhere. Volatility is the one unifying theme right now. Which is why we should be more afraid of inaction than action.

One aspect of the battle over civil marriage rights for gays is its emotionality. I know I’ve found it hard to keep this issue from spilling into my private life, from feeling wounded and betrayed by straight friends and colleagues who turn out not to support my right to marry, while inviting me to their weddings and social occasions. But it’s even tougher when your own family disagrees. I’m not privy to the strain the Cheney family must be under, nor would I want to be, but this is an issue that is hard to seal off from one’s heart, because it is about the heart. And it’s certainly sad that figures like Phyllis Shlafly should also have gay offspring. Or that the leading psychiatrist supporting the notion that gays can be cured, Charles Socarides, also has a gay son. I remember reading the transcript of then-congressman Sonny Bono’s attempt to square his support for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 with the fact this his own daughter was lesbian. I included Bono’s congressional statement in my anthology of writing on same-sex marriage, pro and con. (Heads up: I’ve just finished updating a brand new edition of the collection and it should be published in a month.) I loved Bono’s sentiments not because they were particularly coherent, but because they were so honest:

And Barney [Frank]’s a good friend of mine. And I see his point of view, and I appreciate his fight. He’s fighting as hard as he can because he’s a human being; he has these feelings; he’s gay; my daughter’s gay. He has to live this way… So I think we go beyond the Constitution here. I think we go beyond these brilliant interpretations here, and I think we have hit feelings, and we’ve hit what people can handle and what they can’t handle, and it’s that simple… I don’t love my daughter any less because she’s gay, and I don’t dislike Barney any more because he’s gay… my response back to [Barney] is, you’re absolutely right, but the other side of it is this has taken people to as far as they can go, and then no justifiers – I don’t want to justify it because I can’t…

Bono voted to deny his own daughter any federal marital benefits, just as Dick Cheney is having to deny his own daughter basic civil rights because of his loyalty to his president. I mention all this because of this new story on a very similar theme. The son of the leading California campaigner against gay rights is gay – and in a relationship of ten years. When “pro-family” types talk about wedge issues, they don’t often concede that one of their wedges is to split families apart. And part of the point of civil marriage for gays is to bring families back together.

BBC ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS: Natan Sharansky has a good point here.

Bush or Kerry? That is the question. (Hat tip: Dan.)

“There is nothing that me and you or the British services or the Government can do about stopping an attack in this country. There is nothing Tony Blair, this liar, can do to stop al Qaeda. There is nothing that MI5 or MI6 can do to stop al Qaeda from bombing London. That is the reality and the only person to blame is Tony Blair himself. They warned him in Madrid – pull your troops out and we will not bomb you. They did not listen. They gave them bloodshed in Madrid. They warned them in New York – stop the terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did not listen. They gave them bloodshed in New York. Now Tony Blair has been warned.” – a British Muslim extremist. Radical Muslims burned the British flag in London yesterday and called to resist the notiont that mainstream Muslims should prevent or criticize terrorism.

On the jobless figures.

HOW APPEASEMENT WORKS: On Spain’s railway system.

“Despite the best efforts of war reporters to shape our view of the battlefield, it seems clear that leaders on both sides are motivated by the same set of beliefs. They apparently believe that if they kill enough of us, we’ll pack up and go home. Isn’t that what we believe, too? Like them, we believe force is the only way to accomplish anything in this battle, and that we need only kill enough people in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere to dissuade the terrorists from messing with us.” – Reggie Rivers, Denver Post.

HEADS UP: I’ll be on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend.