Year: 2005

More evidence from the field that the fundamental problem in Iraq is now and has been from the beginning insufficient troop levels to do the job. Here’s a quote from the NYT today that’s worth pondering:

“We have a finite number of troops,” said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. “But if you pull out of an area and don’t leave security forces in it, all you’re going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven’t been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we’ve cleared the insurgents out.”… “Resources are everything in combat, and when you don’t have enough manpower to move around, you have to pick the places,” said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.

The troops we have may be doing their level best to gain the advantage and may even have a strategy to do so. But you cannot pacify a country of 24 million with 130,000 troops. And the failure to restore order has only helped the insurgents, undermine public support for the war and make failure possible. Do we have sufficient troops to rectify our error? Apparently not. So we are stuck in a failure zone to which the administration’s response is always: we have never had more success.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “If a state court decides to take the life of someone, there should be a federal review.” – senator Rick Santorum, on the Schiavo case. So the feds now have jurisdiction over all death penalty cases, all end-of-life decisions under state law, and on and on? When someone as fanatical as Santorum is so dominant in the Republican party, you know that conservatism as we have known it is essentially over.

HE’S BACK: GayPatriot ends his anonymity and gets back to blogging.

AND, UNFORTUNATELY, THIS: My third area of sad agreement with John Derbyshire was a bad link yesterday. Here’s the right one.

What’s really going on in Massachusetts with the anti-gay right dropping support for the 2006 vote on the anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment in favor of a new 2008 referendum? A reader offers an explanation:

The decision of anti-marriage equality forces in Massachusetts to forego a compromise constitutional amendment (that would create civil unions) set to be voted on in 2006 and instead work for another amendment to be voted on in 2008 that would ban same sex marriage (and not create civil unions) should be seen in the light of Governor Mitt Romney’s Presidential ambitions (and his likely decision, I think, not to run for re-election at home). To appeal to the out-of state Republican right, Romny has moved far to the right in the past several months in terms of abortion and stem cell research. He has visted red states projecting an anti-Massachusetts Liberal image for himself. He seems now more opposed to civil unions. Not surprisingly, his local poll numbers have accordingly dropped. The proposed amendment in 2006 would be a political nightmare for Romney. If the 2006 amendment were to pass, Massachusetts would constitutionally create civil unions on his watch. If the 2006 amendment were to fail, which looks increasingly likely, Massachusetts would have voted for gay marriage on his watch. Either way, it would be a hard sell to the right wing Republican base. He would look weak or too liberal. Romney is far better off to back a clear cut ban without civil unions that couldn’t be voted on until 2008. That way he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of 2006 and he can maintain he was always opposed to both gay marriage and civil unions.

It makes more sense now.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Recently I had lunch with someone who at some point during his seminary studies was in a chaplaincy-training program in the Navy. He has been out of the country for some time and was unaware of the scandal at the Air Force Academy. His response was that from his experience there is a similar problem in the Navy and his comments about some of the chaplains candidates were less than reassuring. What he did say is that it is his impression that some in the Naval chaplaincy are aware of the problem and would like to try and rectify the situation. His memory of the reaction of some of the candidates to the workshops on pluralism, etc. was far from positive. His feeling was that some of them “just didn’t get it”.
Thinking about his comments later I realized that the larger problem, one which is far more sensitive and problematic, is the nature of much of Evangelical Protestantism, at least here in the US. Many of them make no bones about their mission of aggressive evangelizing among Catholics, Jews, etc. Our conversation reminded me of the comments from another former chaplain-candidate, now a rabbi, who said that during his training (in the Air Force) one of the Protestant candidates said that he was upset that such a nice person would still be going to hell because he hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ as his savior (this is more or less what I remember him recalling). As if our Armed Forces don’t have their hands full with immediate issues of life and death.”

“I think conservatives need to discuss the rise of the Hannity right. I was drawn to the conservative side by Bill Buckley’s relentless and civilized dismantling of liberal orthodoxy and by Ronald Reagan’s sunny faith in individual effort, private enterprise and the goodness of America. I was cemented in the cause by the thought of lesser though still very bright lights such as Tom Sowell, Walter Williams, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich and just about the whole 1980s NR crowd.
Hannity is a significant departure from this serious tradition. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, whose genius is to approach familiar issues with unfamiliar arguments, Hannity approaches familiar issues with entirely familiar arguments. His points have been made a thousand times before, far more effectively and successfully. He is a bore, and a bully whose attempts to adopt a “nice guy” persona fall flat. Whereas I always sense Rush’s innate humility even when at his theatrically bombastic best, Hannity’s self regard is overwhelming even when assuring us that he owes all to his listeners. In fact, he owes all to his interesting line-up of guests, without whom his show would be entirely worthless.
His national tours, so far as I can tell from the radio, tend to attract the yobbo element — all shouting, cheering and hissing. Can you imagine such a thing from the audience at Firing Line? Was there even an audience?
Hannity is several steps backward for conservatives. We have been, are, and must remain, far better than this.”

John Derbyshire is, I think, right about this, and this, and, unfortunately, this.

The last major news organization, Reuters, has now departed Fleet Street in London. It was once the hub of an entire industry, a maze of pubs and offices where drunken hacks swapped stories, flattered sources and generally had a good time. I managed to see the very last gasp. I was an intern for two summers at the grand old Daily Telegraph building (Waugh’s “Scoop” features it prominently), and two decades ago, hammered out editorials on a manual type-writer, surrounded by a bevy of sloshed but brilliant mentors. I was ushered into the recesses of ancient pubs where columnists once gathered, and witnessed the delivery vans pouring out of the bowels of the old buildings at closing time. Now I blog at home – paper- and alcohol-free. Yes, those were the days …

In Massachusetts, the anti-marriage-equality forces seem to have given up on a state constitutional amendment to ban gays from marrying (while retaining civil unions) in favor of a 2008 referendum banning marriages for gays (while ignoring the civil union option). I’m not sure I understand their logic. I guess the compromise on civil unions doesn’t satisfy their base; and they’d rather lose outright than endorse civil unions in the state constitution. Meanwhile, marriages for gay couples are now part of the fabric of the state’s life, and no one seems to have noticed the slightest difference. In Washington state, the word is that a court ruling could come down very soon.

In her final days, Terri Schiavo was blind and her brain was about half its expected size. She wasn’t in a PVS? Please. Bill Frist needs to acknowledge his reckless political opportunism at the time. The attempts of the fringe, theocon right to allege that her husband abused her have also been exposed as malicious falsehoods. Remember the lies that were told, the junk science that the theocons came up with, the endless slanders and misrepresentations? It’s rare that we get an objective resolution of a fiercely disputed matter. We have now. And it ain’t pretty.

“Fuck Tom Friedman. Speaking of degenerate sacks of shit, this is what he thinks of liberals: ‘Liberals don’t want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don’t want the Bush team to succeed.’ Here we get to gaze deep inside the heart of Tom Friedman, Pundit extraordinaire, for whom being right is more important than the lives of thousands or millions of people. Deal with your own sick and twisted sociopathic existence. Don’t project it onto me.” – Atrios, darling blogger of the left. For my part, I think Friedman’s work has been a lonely beacon of pro-war reason for the past couple of years.

Some interesting comments here on how the community-based blogging sites like Daily Kos have begun to leave the right-of-center blogosphere in the dust, as far as traffic is concerned. My two cents: it’s inevitable and healthy that with national power now exclusively held by Republicans, the left will experience a revival in the popularity of its journalism. I’d also say that it may be helpful to think of community, activist blogs as a different species than querulous, individual blogs like this one. I have no interest in sustaining a political “movement” or becoming part of one. (A movement is different than a political or philosophical tradition.) Writers-who-blog are going to be different than online forums designed to forge new political alignments. There’s space for all of us. As to comment sections, I’ve pondered them from time to time and can’t make up my mind. They’d add traffic and thereby revenue, but they might well provide more heat than light, and as long as I acknowledge dissent and disagreement within the Dish, I don’t think I’m obliged to give flamers a platform. It can work on smaller blogs. But with around a quarter million visits a week, I’m nervous about starting an online mudfight that I don’t have the time to monitor.

THE BOTTOM LINE: If openly gay soldiers impair “unit cohesion” and destroy morale, why aren’t they kicked out in larger numbers during periods of conflict? I mean, that’s when they would logically pose the greatest threat, no? And yet, since 2000, the numbers of discharges have gone steadily down from over 1200 in 2001 to 653 last year. The reason is that gay soldiers pose absolutely no threat to any form of cohesion, and do amazing service for their country. When push comes to shove, the military recognizes this by what it doesn’t do. The rest is bigotry and irrational fear. I’m delighted that some stalwart conservatives in the Congress are now among the burgeoning numbers of people urging an end to the Clinton policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Pejman also has a great piece on this now posted. All our key allies have done away with this nonsense and seen absolutely no negative consequences. The positive consequences are more and better troops and saving a huge amount of money spent on training people we subsequently fire for no good reason.

One thing unites them: contempt for the people. Frank Furedi elaborates.