Month: September 2004

Can we believe Bob Novak’s prediction of a quick exit from Iraq if Bush is re-elected? This is the paragraph that had my jaw dropping:

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

Et tu, Wolfie? Readers have been haranguing me for weeks because of my concern about what’s going on in Iraq. But if Novak is right, the administration itself has given up. What we must demand is an acknowledgment of this before November. If this is Bush’s plan, and I hope it isn’t, then we need to know now. No more spin, Mr president. Deal with reality. Publicly.

Here’s a telling quote from the best reporter in Iraq, John F. Burns:

Visiting Dr. Allawi at his sprawling residence is a short course in just how bad the situation has become for anybody associated with the American purpose in Iraq. To reach the house is to navigate a fantastical obstacle course of checkpoints, with Iraqi police cars and Humvees parked athwart a zigzag course through relays of concrete barriers. An hour or more is taken up with body searches and sniffing by dogs, while American soldiers man turreted machine guns. A boxlike infrared imaging device can detect the body heat of anybody approaching through a neighboring playground. The final security ring is manned by C.I.A.-trained guards from Iraqi Kurdistan. If Dr. Allawi were Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, no more elaborate defenses could be conceived.
This is the man who has been chosen to lead Iraq to the haven of a democratic future, but he is sealed off about as completely as he could be from ordinary Iraqis, in the virtual certainty that insurgents will kill him if they ever get a clear shot.

It’s hard to add anything to that. But here’s one point that I don’t think has been made enough. Who is ultimately responsible for the security of Iraqis? Surely the coalition. Yet, even while we try hard to train a new Iraqi army and police force, it is indisputable that we’ve failed to protect innocent Iraqis from grotesque and mounting violence. This is awful in itself – but also integral to our failure to move the political process forward fast enough. Was this unavoidable? That’s a question worth asking.

SOMETHING POSITIVE: I’m not saying this was ever going to be simple. But the reckoning is surely coming. We have to flush out at least Fallujah and Ramadi soon – or lose the ability to hold national elections in January (if we haven’t already). And the mayhem that maneuver will unleash is not one we can easily stabilize without more troops and resources or a miracle in the capabilities of the Iraqi police and military. Before too long, a draft may become a very big topic on Capitol Hill. Big increases in military spending – over and above what we are already planning – will become necessary. What I worry about is a country that re-elects a president on the basis of denial about Iraq, and then turns on him with a vengeance when things get far worse. So let’s get it all on the table now and see what we need to do. That’s in the president’s long-term interest as well as the world’s.

The media keeps describing the state constitutional amendment in Louisiana as an amendment that bans civil marriage for gays. They’re right. But it does so, so much more than that. Here’s the text:

Marriage in the state of Louisiana shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall construe this constitution or any state law to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any member of a union other than the union of one man and one woman. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall recognize any marriage contracted in any other jurisdiction which is not the union of one man and one woman.

This is a radical denial of any civil protections for gay couples at all – the most radical attack on an American minority since Jim Crow. Even the mildest protections for a gay couple that are integral to any meaningful bond – visitation rights in hospital, inheritance rights, the right not to testify against one another in court, and so on – will now be vulnerable to legal challenge or flat-out denied gay couples under the law. And the margin of victory is stunning: a full 80 percent want to keep gay people permanently without any protections for their relationships or any incentives to get together and settle down. It’s too depressing for words.

Oh, and Britney just got married again. Yes, it’s recognized in Louisiana. 1,049 legal protections are now automatically hers – 1,049 now barred for any committed gay couple.

THE FUTURE OF THE RIGHT: Profound shifts in political life often happen by accident, or because of the vagaries of an election campaign. This campaign may well be settled by John Kerry’s faults rather than by George W. Bush’s virtues. But the result could be a majority party bent on a radical redefinition of conservatism: the party of natural right fused with evangelical Christianity. John Coumarianos points to a new essay in the Public Interest that suggests the coming election may be a profound one. I suspect he’s right.

If you want a good laugh, go read Mark Steyn’s account of how most of Iraq is just as peaceful and, yes, “jolly” as Surrey and Sussex in my country of birth. Man, Steyn can be funny. But he can be such a partisan hack as well:

Do you remember that moment of Fallujah-like depravity in Ulster a few years ago? Two soldiers were yanked from a cab in the wrong part of town and torn apart by a Republican mob. A terrible, shaming episode in the wretched annals of Northern Irish nationalists. But in the rest of the United Kingdom – in Bristol, in Coventry, Newcastle, Aberdeen – life went on, very pleasantly. That’s the way it is in Iraq. In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory.

So what if Iraqis are dealing with two 9/11s a month? Our Blessed Leader, who is responsible for the security of Iraqis, never makes mistakes, does he? And the last thing pro-war journalists should ever do is raise questions.

It’s the best account yet of the assisted suicide at Sixty Minutes. (Dobbs and GRimadli also reported.) I’m still struck by how better the Washngton Post’s coverage is of this story than the NYT’s. The NYT clearly doesn’t want this story to play out; their old media instincts are still in force; their commentary has been lazy and lame. Stunning quote: when the White House didn’t immediately question the veracity of the documents after a few hours, 60 Minutes exec, Josh Howard, who didn’t know the source before the piece went on the air, confessed, “we completely abandoned the process of authenticating the documents.” I repeat: Rather must go. He’s fast becoming the Richard Nixon of the media.

Tim Rutten piles on. We now all but know that Rather knew that Burkett was his source. To have known Burkett’s obvious bias and not to have listened to the document experts and still not to acknowledge error when the docs turn out to be fakes is, in Rutten’s words, inexplicable. Well, not quite. Here’s an explanation: Rather is arrogant, out of touch and biased beyond belief. He thinks he’s running a political campaign, when he is supposed to be a journalist. He’s a dead man walking. When will someone have the decency to pull the plug?

“It’s great to return to New Haven. My car was followed all the way from the airport by a long line of police cars with slowly rotating lights. It was just like being an undergraduate again.” – a joke removed from Bush’s 2001 Yale commencement speech, according to Kitty Kelley, as reported by Slate.

“The most glaring oversight of the neoconservatives and other backers of the war in Iraq was not the number of boots on the ground that would be required to secure the country, but rather that the Sunnis have little motivation to support Iraqi democracy. The Sunnis see themselves as the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, and in the collective Sunni mind they have been presiding over the territory that would become Iraq for almost a millenium. Whether this is an accurate interpretation of history is beside the point. What matters is what they actually believe. Add to the mix a noxious, incipient radical Islamism and one has the recipe for years of, if not permanent rejectionism. The Sunni are unlikely to accept Shiite rule of any kind, including hardline Islamist Shiite rule. And the fact that the Sunnis have virtually no oil under their little piece of heaven makes partition an unrealistic possibility as well. As we’ve all been hearing, coalition forces are likely to attempt to break the stranglehold of insurgent control in Al Anbar province after the November election, but what makes anyone think that a Chechen-like bombing and siege of these towns and cities (with near genocidal rates of killing) will do anything but further alienate the Sunni populace?”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Are you a military expert? I think you must be, as you have concluded that the way to fewer casualties is to increase the number of troops, that the way to fewer terrorist attacks is to increase construction investment, that more is less when it comes to the fighting.
I don’t play armchair general. I don’t know about such things and leave it to the experts. We have seen over and over again that those military experts in charge have NOT called for more. They have managed to keep the casualties to historic lows during the liberation of an entire nation the size of California. Moreover, the soldier’s eye view accounts we get, few as those that make it through the filtration process, almost invariably say journos are presenting an hysterical image of defeat that is at variance with their own observations. But the more the terrorists strike the more hysterical the western journalists screams become.
Maybe the answer is LESS. Less hysteria, less cries of defeat, less of the Greek chorus that hails every terrorist action, less … journalism. Or at least this kind of terrorist-amplifying journalism that covers every terrorist action as a great blow to the cause while pretending that the solution is a giant five-year-old child’s stamping foot accompanied by the word “More!” The other childish response, of course, is “No more!” (or Moore!) Either throw more of everything at it like a magical panacea, or pick up the marbles and go home. These are the positions of people who are doomed to watch from the sidelines and can’t stand the sight of blood. They are not responsible, knowledgable or particularly helpful observations.” If you want to read “less journalism” about Iraq, go check out the Weekly Standard and the National Review. They will barely mention the current situation at all, unless as a way to attack Kerry.

Dishing on Cheney; hailing the blogs (and the 527s). And Fox.