Month: July 2006

"What I’m trying to do with my time in the Senate during this whole debate we‚Äôre having is to remind the Senate that the rules we set up speak more about us than it does the enemy. The enemy has no rules. They don’t give people trials, they summarily execute them and they’re brutal, inhuman creatures. But when we capture one of them, what we do is about us, not about them. Do they deserve, the bad ones, all the rights that are afforded? No. But are we required to do it because of what we believe? Yes," – Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina.

Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, 11.45 pm.

You play Pacman. A chimp plays Pacman.

Virginia Postrel helpfully reminds us that many parts of red state America are affluent, highly educated, high-tech and completely secure in the knowledge that one day soon, the rapture will come. I think it misunderstands the nature of contemporary fundamentalism to think of it as a back-woods, rural, uneducated phenomenon. New ideologies – especially totalist ones that fuse politics, faith and culture – are often very popular among the well-off. (It doesn’t hurt that the new Christianity celebrates wealth and acquisitiveness, rather than condemning it as, er, the Gospels do.) The needs that this kind of ideology fulfills are psychological and spiritual, not economic. Mickey doesn’t seem to understand that any better than he understands how gay people in rural America in the 1960s and 1970s might have their heads kicked in.

A reader writes:

Something that drove me crazy in the last election cycle and looks like it will continue to drive me crazy in this cycle are fiscal and small government conservatives voting for Republicans for no other reason than they are not Democrats. The Republicans they vote for have shown that they have completely abandoned the principles of fiscal conservatism and limited government, yet they still get their votes.

Try having a discussion with this crowd and they start making comments about how a ‘tax and spend democrat’ will never get their vote. Then, they’ll go on and rant about how the Republicans are no better. By continuing to vote for Republicans for no other reason than they are not Democrats, fiscal and small government conservatives are shooting themselves in the foot. The Republican party will never respond to the concerns of fiscal and small government conservatives because they don‚Äôt have to. No matter what they do or how they betray their values, Republicans have the votes of the majority of this group.

The only thing worse than a tax and spend liberal is a borrow and spend Republican.  At least the democrat is being upfront and honest in his intentions.

Ixonia, Wisconsin, 3.30 pm.

"I don’t think we’re losing" – army chief of staff, Peter Schoomaker, on Iraq. Kudos for his honesty.

Then there’s this honorable mention to George Will:

"[The] magnificently misnamed neoconservatives are the most radical people in this town."

Ouch.

"Let me make it clear. I would shed my last drop of blood to defend their right to hold that biblical worldview. They are absolutely entitled to believe that Anne Frank is burning in hell along with Dr. Seuss, Gandhi and Einstein. But I will not accept my government telling me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God. That’s the difference. I will not defend — I will fight them tooth and nail, and lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds — if they engage the machinery of the state, which is what they’re doing," – Mike Weinstein, member of a very military family, about the Christianist attempt to coopt the U.S. military for their fundamentalist and political version of Christianity.

Weinstein is especially upset by an organization called

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, a private organization with 14,000 active-duty members on more than 200 U.S. military bases around the world. In its mission statement, the OCF says its goal is "a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit."

Vive la resistance.

A reader writes:

On your most recent posting quoting about how the USG is bankrupt, and cannot pay its "creditors". I think they have figured out one way to take care of it: charge their citizens for emergency services.

I am currently enrolled in an intensive summer arabic program at the American University in Beirut, and am holed up at the university, probably the safest place in the city right now. Basically my choices have been to make a run for the border with Syria and try to catch a flight out, or wait for the USG to carry out the evacuation plan. Because I heard reports about the dangers of the former (and based on a statement by the American embassy), I opted for the latter. They are finally getting everything together today, but they dropped a little surprise: they are going to be billing us for giving us emergency transport to Cyprus, and then basically dropping us off on our own to get commercial flights back to the US. Most other goverrnments evacuating people here are actually flying them back to their home country without cost. But not the USG. They are perfectly happy to fund the World Toilet Summit (in Ireland, if my memory is correct) to the tune of $13 million or something. But 25,000 or so Americans stranded in the middle of a (quite unexpected) war zone? They better be ready to pay up if they want out.

This blog’s favorite free-lance Middle East correspondent, Michael Totten, writes:

Obviously Hezbollah started this and Hezbollah is the main problem. Not only did they drag my second home into a war, the bastards also threatened me personally. So I hardly see the point in telling you what I think about them right about now. I’ll get to them later.

I sympathize one hundred percent with what Israel is trying to do here. But they aren’t going about it the right way, and they’re punishing far too many of the wrong people. Lord knows I could be wrong, and the situation is rapidly changing, but at this particular moment it looks bad for Israel, bad for Lebanon, bad for the United States, good for Syria, and good for Iran.

I’m not so sure. The news today that leading Arab states have actually condemned Hezbollah and that Iraq’s Sunni minority is now hoping that U.S. troops will stay longer adds to the changing dynamic in the Middle East. What we may be seeing is a nascent, wider regional war between Sunni and Shi’a, triggered by Iraq, fomented by an increasingly belligerent Iran, and portending what could be a far more explosive and long-lasting Muslim civil war. This is to over-simplify, of course. There are many nuances here. Syria and Iran are uncomfortable allies ideologically. But if the Syrian regime needs Islamism to cling temporarily to power, I guess they’ll use it. All of this is troubling and dangerous, but also clarifying and, as with all such developments, subject to improvisational and tactical exploitation. Maybe the new closeness between the Iraqi Sunnis and the U.S. could be the critical breakthrough for a national government that can restrain the Shiite militias. Maybe the growing power of Iran might prompt the Saudis to be more cooperative with the U.S. on critical intelligence matters. Maybe, as my colleague Joe Klein speculates, this is really about an internecine power struggle in Iran between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei:

If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue‚Äîand the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran’s oily economy.

I guess what I’m saying is that the situation is far too fluid to come to any quick decisions, or to prompt any hasty actions. But it may yield new openings we can exploit. This is when subtle statecraft can be most effective. Over to you, Zalmay.

(Gaza photo by Hatem Moussa/AP.)