Month: December 2006

"The [Baker-Hamilton] plan itself won’t work. As the BBC’s eloquent and curiously underrated Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, put it on the radio this week, "it is the tone" not the detail of Baker’s report that is important and new.

That‚Äôs true. The tone says: "We’ve lost." The tone says: "We should have seen this coming." The tone says: "All we can do now is play a losing hand." General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the General Staff, missed the point magnificently this week when he worried aloud that the trouble with a set deadline (of 2008) was that we might have to quit without having achieved our war aims. Poor, upright, soldierly Sir Mike has not realized that that is the whole idea.

But Mr Baker has, and furious neocons realize it too. The term realpolitik has become a clich√© in media treatment of the ISG report this week but the irony is this: Baker’s conclusions are anything but realistic: they represent unrealism of the most fanciful kind. His route map is to La-la Land. He knows it. His report is the sugar. The pill is Defeat." – Matthew Parris, in the Times of London.

A stirring indictment of this evil murderer and torturer. Jonah finds a way to sympathize with Pinochet. Hey, Pinochet only ever used "coercive interrogation techniques."

The most vibrant, crowded and magnificent display of American Catholicism is in full swing – and barely no one writes about it or covers it. Except for Rocco Palmo, of course.

The new head of the Intelligence Committee has no clue about the Middle East. Money quote:

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism‚Äôs major players. To me, it‚Äôs like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who‚Äôs on what side? 

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

And we wonder why we’re losing.

This parody of the PC vs Mac ads make its point. More here. It’s not quite my Christianist/Christian point, but there are some overlaps. My favorite rendition of this point about the Christianist right is one emailed me by a reader: they may believe in Jesus but they sure don’t seem to believe Jesus.

He’s a very accomplished liar, it would appear.

If they could ban it, they would. A reader writes:

In your "The Thing About Mary" post, you asked what the Christianist answer was to artificial insemination by single and/or lesbian women. Back in 2005, there was a bill proposed in the Indiana legislature that would "bar any doctor from assisting in a pregnancy through intrauterine insemination, donation of an egg, donation of an embryo, in vitro fertilization and transfer of an embryo, and sperm injection without making a number of ‘determinations’ about the ‘suitability of the candidate’." Women seeking artificial insemination would be required to be married to a man.

It was withdrawn from the committee fairly quickly, thankfully, but then in early 2006, a similar bill was proposed in Virginia.

The standards that the theocons apply to gays should apply to straights as well. The only reason they don’t is because they could never win majority support; but gays are such a tiny minority the Christianists can vent their anger at the general culture by beating up on them alone. Hence the apoplexy over gays getting married but relative indifference to divorce and single mothers. If a child needs a mother and a father, shouldn’t divorce be illegal for couples with kids?

Professor Ferguson sees a credible realist threat behind the ISG report. His column is well worth reading, although I fear Niall’s strategy is a little too sophisticated for this White House:

"A nation can and should engage its adversaries and enemies," declares the report in a sentence that Mr Baker must surely have written, and should offer them "incentives as well as disincentives". Note that word "disincentives". Mr Baker’s idea here is not to go cap in hand to Damascus and Teheran. Rather, as he explained to the press this week, it is to "flip the Syrians" by appealing to Sunni solidarity, and to isolate the Iranian regime by exposing its "rejectionist attitude".

In other words: get the leaders of all Iraq’s neighbours into the same room and play "spot the Shia". The calculation is that if Iranian aspirations to regional hegemony can be laid bare, then it will be much easier to get broad support for some serious "disincentives".

As I’ve suggested, Niall urges using the threat of regional anarchy as the lever to get a new settlement that actually brings the regional partners into the act. My worry is that our leverage is not strong enough yet. Niall thinks otherwise. Money quote:

Hats off, then, to Mr Baker and his team. This turns out to be a classic work of persuasion. Its target audiences have been well chosen. Its worst-case scenario is plausible. And its recommendations are so carefully phrased that they sound like disengagement, while actually signifying better engagement.

Not all works of persuasion are heeded. Keynes’s call for a cancellation of reparations and war debts went unheeded in the 1920s; when it finally happened during the Depression, it was too late.

That’s the question. Is it now too late for realism to work and the project to be salvaged? And are the risks of trying greater than the risks of giving up?

A reader writes:

Two more points on this subject.

First – the polled opinions of Iraqis about whether they want Americans to stay or leave does not matter for much. Each Iraqi who wants Americans to stay to prevent utter anarchy, but who also will look the other way when he sees an IED being planted because he fears for his life and is not willing to risk himself for an American simply does not count in any kind of moral calculus.

I have heard interviews with Iraqis who plainly state that they want Americans to stay but who also consider armed attacks on Americans to be justified. As long as most Iraqis are willing to stay on the sidelines, American troops cannot effectively quell the violence. International law and basic civility prevent us from engaging the enemy the way that other foreigners in the region – like Rome – did, by making the populace fatally responsible for violence occuring in their midst.

Secondly, it may well be true that Iraq’s neighbors – OK, Iran – can quell the violence. But we should be very concerned about the price Iran would demand for its participation. I would rather throw Iraq to its own wolves than agree to a hypothetical Iranian demand, for instance, that the US abandon Israel to the tender mercies of the region. Almost any price Iran would charge for a seemly withdrawal will be very high and come at no cost to the Iranian regime.

"There is no question that Dennis Prager is a bigot who ought to be repudiated even by his closest supporters. His statements are a disgrace … and I will be down there calling for the [United States Holocaust Memorial] council to condemn him, and, if we have the power, to remove him," – Ed Koch Friday.

I don’t think Prager is a bigot. I just think he doesn’t quite understand or believe in the concept of pluralism in America.